Maybe it’s a consequence of too much information about the calamities that can befall this planet — comet and asteroid impacts, dramatic climate shifts, violent solar flares, volcanic winters and the like — that increasingly I view the rarity of extreme versions of such upheavals over the past several millennia to be a matter of luck. Not that I’m a pessimist, but I think some planning should be undertaken to mitigate those events where interventions can make a difference in their impact on humanity.
And so it follows that I conclude we need to pay attention to volcanoes. Clearly, we can’t stop volcanoes from erupting. We can, however, take steps to minimize the threats such events present to aviation. This is the clear take-away from last spring’s Icelandic eruption that snarled traffic within, to and from Europe. As stories in this issue of ASW relate, the amount of information we had about that situation was dwarfed by what we …
