Iceland volcano eruption slows, ash plume drops

Activity at Iceland's erupting volcano has slowed significantly and its ash plume has dropped to a quarter of its peak of 20 kilometres, experts in Iceland said yesterday.
"There is less activity... A lot less of the ash is going into the atmosphere," Petur Matthiasson, a spokesman for Iceland's Civil Protection and Emergency Management Administration, told AFP.
The plume of ash from Grimsvoetn, located in the southeast of Iceland at the heart of its largest glacier, Vatnajoekull, had dropped from its peak of 20 kilometres in the hours after the eruption began to between three and five kilometres yesterday morning, according to official measurements.
"This is good news for aviation at least," Mattiasson said, pointing out while "there is still a lot of ash fall in the vicinity of the volcano in the south of Iceland," the lower column of ash meant "there is a lot less going into the atmosphere and going into the jetstream."
By yesterday, hundreds of flights, especially to and from Scotland, were cancelled as the ash blew over Britain, but experts said they did not expect to see the same level of air travel disruption as last year, when a cloud of ash from the nearby Eyjafjoell volcano grounded more than 100,000 flights and left eight million passengers stranded.
Olof Baldursdottir, a spokeswoman for the Icelandic Meteorological Office, said some of the decline in the height of the ash could probably be attributed to "strong winds that affect the plume."
Another explanation for the drop could be "that the ice is no longer melting into the crater," making the eruption less explosive, said Susan Stipp, a professor at the Nano-Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen who has headed a study published last month on the dangers posed by the Eyjafjoell ash cloud.
That, she explained, would mean "we're going to have more typical ash which is larger particles," she said, hinting the ash could become heavier and thus fall out quicker.