I was about to embark on a year long study abroad program in Iceland. I was accepted, I had a host family, a school and I could not have been more excited. And then the volcano blew.
In the spring of 2010, Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted. While a relatively small volcano eruption, the ensueing ash caused widespread airport delays an flight cancellations across Western Europe, earning the volcano a spot of notoriety. Saturday Night Live did a skit on the eruption and a Sky News segment in Scotland went viral when a Scottish man screamed, “I hate Iceland!” at the newscaster.
The ash from Eyjafjallajökull fell within a few weeks and all hysteria surrounding the incident was eventually forgotton. However, I have always wondered the eruption impacted the climate. Did the impact cease when the ash fell?
The short answer to this question is: no. Volcanic gases can influence the climate for several years after an eruption. But how?
Volcanoes are components of the geosphere, one of the five spheres of Earth’s climate system. The geosphere includes all the geologic materials on Earth like rocks, soil, ocean basins, and volcanoes. The geosphere is intimately connected with the other four spheres of the climate system. A volcanic eruption impacts the climate through its interaction with the atmosphere. If a volcano eruption is powerful enough, it can blast aerosols into the stratosphere (a part of the Earth’s atmosphere) (Burch and Harris 47). In the atmosphere, aerosols, or sulfuric acid drops, can reflect solar energy and cool the earth. Aerosols can stay in the stratosphere for much longer than other parts of the atmosphere because the stratosphere contains little water vapor, and so the aerosols are not, “rained out,” (Burch and Harris 41). Therefore, when a volcano, such as Eyjafjallajokull erupts, the aerosols can cool the Earth for a few years after the eruption by around 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (Burch and Harris, 47). For us, this means that volcanoes are not just natural disasters, or the reason your cross-continental flight is delayed, but also a temporary cooling devices.
In a human lifespan, volcanoes cool for short periods of time. However, over millions of years, volcanoes can heat. Volcanic eruptions release CO2, though much less than human emissions. If Earth did have a high rate of eruptions over a million years, the CO2 from the eruptions would cause an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, causing temperatures to go up. This system is caused a feedback system: a deviation in a system that initiates a linked sequence of events that either counteracts or reinforces the original deviation (Burch and Harris 47). However, as I stated above, volcanic eruptions would have to occur regularly over a time span much longer than a human lifespan for this heating to happen.
To answer my original question, no, the affects of Eyjafjallajökull did not cease when the ash fell or when the hysteria ended and planes began to fly again. Instead, the Earth felt the ramifications of the eruption for several years after as a temporary cooling system.
Thanks for reading!
Stephanie
The Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010
References
Burch, Sarah L. & Sara E. Harris (2014). Understanding Climate Change: Science Policy and Practice. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press
Eyjafjallajökull (2010). Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull
Earth Too Hot 