I normally do not think about how a volcano will affect my travel plans. However, some of my friends are stuck in London right now since their flight was canceled last Thursday. it took them awhile to get their luggage released by the airlines. (Can you imagine being stuck in a foreign country without your luggage?) They are due to make it out today and fly home to Uganda, if the ash plume from the volcano does not cancel their flight, again.
Information Is Beautiful has posted an infographic comparing the emissions of CO2 from the European aviation industry versus that being released by the Icelandic volcano. My favorite part of the whole thing is how they calculated the CO2 emissions from the volcano:
Of course this graphic has special meaning to me since it directly affects my friends.
UPDATE 1: A few people have asked so here’s how we estimated the CO2 emissions of Eyjafjallajoekull.
We couldn’t find a direct CO2 emissions figure for the icelandic volcano but we did find an emissions figure for Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) – 3,000 tons a day (Source)
When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it emitted 42 million tons of CO2 (source) and 17 million tons of SO2 (source). That’s a CO2-to-SO2 ratio of 2.47:1
Applying that ratio to the 3,000 tons of SO2 emitted by Eyjafjallajoekull gives us the figure of 7,412 tons of CO2 per day.
Clearly, this is a ballpark figure and it’s likely to be more complex. If any vulcanologists are passing by and would like to enhance or correct our numbers, please help yourselves to the data!
UPDATE 2: We’ve been sent some new figures from the Nordic Volcanological Institute of the University of Iceland (thanks Nicole!). They’ve measured the CO2:SO2 ratio as 5:1 (source). So Eyjafjallajoekull is emitting an estimated 15,000 tons of CO2 a day – twice our original estimate. We’ve updated the diagram accordingly
