Just thought I'd take the opportunity to be a Chicken Little and say "...the sky is falling!", and be correct! :-)I also lived through St. Helens. No direct ash, but the most beautiful sunsets for about 12 to 18 months. (Louisville Ky.)Volcanic ash impacts aviation most directly. Everything else can go on but in many cases planes don't fly.Thank goodness it doesn

Just thought I'd take the opportunity to be a Chicken Little and say "...the sky is falling!", and be correct! :-)I also lived through St. Helens. No direct ash, but the most beautiful sunsets for about 12 to 18 months. (Louisville Ky.)Volcanic ash impacts aviation most directly. Everything else can go on but in many cases planes don't fly.Thank goodness it doesn

All we need is for the dead to walk and for shellsuits to make a comeback and it truly will be the end of the world

The funniest thing I have heard relating to this situation is a post from a Brit to one of the newspapers; "Iceland, we said SEND CASH NOT ASH"... Okay, now on to real-world... We had two of our UK team depart Dulles Thursday night for Madrid, arriving there around 0730 Friday morning. The rented a car and drove to Paris, where they overnighted, then on to Calais where they caught the ferry. They then drove to LHR to drop off the rental and pick up their cars. They finally got home on Saturday at 1700 London time.I was scheduled to fly out on UAL 918 Sunday to LHR, and had to cancel out. We'll be teleconferncing instead.Tom

Just thought I'd take the opportunity to be a Chicken Little and say "...the sky is falling!", and be correct! :-)I also lived through St. Helens. No direct ash, but the most beautiful sunsets for about 12 to 18 months. (Louisville Ky.)Volcanic ash impacts aviation most directly. Everything else can go on but in many cases planes don't fly.Thank goodness it doesn

Just thought I'd take the opportunity to be a Chicken Little and say "...the sky is falling!", and be correct! :-)I also lived through St. Helens. No direct ash, but the most beautiful sunsets for about 12 to 18 months. (Louisville Ky.)Volcanic ash impacts aviation most directly. Everything else can go on but in many cases planes don't fly.Thank goodness it doesn't happen often. But what if it did? What if the Earth decided to have a extended spell of flatulence? What would our world look like then?Something to ponder.Blue sky's...Braun

Take a look here at the information on the Lake Toba eruption:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_TobaI believe that's the most recent eruption of a supervolcano. Anything similar would have tremendous consequences on the earth. We would not be talking about global warming, that's for certain. Ash from such an eruption would have an impact on the sunlight reaching earth. The ash ejected from that eruption was something on the scale of 2500x the volume of the Mt. St. Helens eruption. In Yakima ash started to fall about an hour after the eruption. I remember the scenes on the news--it became dark as night--streetlights were on. People had to cart away ash for more than two months that had fallen in the city and on homes and other buildings. Even in my hometown in California, we had a fine coating of ash and we were more than a thousand miles south of Mt. St. Helens.Imagine 2500x that type of fallout, or even 500x? I suspect if the one Icelandic volcano and its nearby neighbor keep shooting ash into the atmosphere, weather in the Northern Hemisphere will see a discernible change. Who knows what effects aviation would continue to suffer. But any effect on passenger flights is also one felt by the cargo haulers--which would ripple throughout the global economy in terms of higher prices on good and services which have to transit through the area in the shadow of the ash cloud.-John

All we need is for the dead to walk and for shellsuits to make a comeback and it truly will be the end of the world

Graham...I think if we were to get a look at what kind of trash is actually on the books of most of the world's large banks we would discover that the dead are in fact already walking in our midst...

I suspect if the one Icelandic volcano and its nearby neighbor keep shooting ash into the atmosphere, weather in the Northern Hemisphere will see a discernible change. Who knows what effects aviation would continue to suffer. But any effect on passenger flights is also one felt by the cargo haulers--which would ripple throughout the global economy in terms of higher prices on good and services which have to transit through the area in the shadow of the ash cloud.-John

I tend to believe that if we shipped by fast seacraft and rail, once we get past our "gotta have it and gotta have it NOW" mentality, we might see lower prices rippling through the world economy.Our inability to wait for virtually anything drives an increased cost basis on many things.RegardsBob ScottColonel, USAF (ret)ATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VColorado Springs, CO

I tend to believe that if we shipped by fast seacraft and rail, once we get past our "gotta have it and gotta have it NOW" mentality, we might see lower prices rippling through the world economy.Our inability to wait for virtually anything drives an increased cost basis on many things.RegardsBob ScottColonel, USAF (ret)ATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VColorado Springs, CO

And that mentality change might also ensure banks wouldn't have to loan a bundle of money to people that can barely afford to pay the interest,but need the new car NOW because the neighbour's got a bigger one.