You just can’t get worse, ancient curse

When it comes to events that occur on a global scale, it seems to me that there are a lot of different general reactions that can ensue. There’s general apathy, for all the events that aren’t quite striking enough to really have a profound effect. Then there’s global sorrow, as there was with the Haitian earthquake earlier this year. There’s also amazement when something marvelous happens; a new discovery, a medical breakthrough, an amazing picture from the Hubble Space Telescope.

That’s not supposed to be an exhaustive list, but last week, I think the world was subjected to an event that, in being unusual, caused a response that no-one had ever really experienced before. It definitely wasn’t apathy; a lot of people were concerned because the nature of the issue meant that people from all over the world were directly affected.

I think what made this different was the fact that, when Eyjafjallajökull erupted, it was completely out of human control, similar to a tropical storm or an earthquake. What’s the difference, then? Those events cause global sorrow, due to the mass devastation they cause. This volcano wasn’t killing anyone or directly destroying anything. It just completely froze all air travel in most of Europe for about three or four days.

I should first start out by saying that, like most people, I really don’t know how to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull. In fact, every time it appears here it’s because I copied and pasted it. I watched this video here to get an idea, but it honestly just confused me more (is it just me or does the phonetic spelling not match his pronunciation at all?) I think the volcano’s crazy name gave the entire situation a humorous twist (or at least gave people in Iceland a thing to laugh at).

It was definitely the uncertainty, though, that made this a sort of scary situation for a lot of people. When would the volcano stop erupting? It wasn’t exactly clear, and the reports coming out of Iceland weren’t very promising. For example: the Toronto Star, on April 15th:

In a sobering comment, one scientist in Iceland said the ejection of volcanic ash — and therefore possible disruptions in air travel — could continue for days or even weeks.

It might not be scary for everyone, but I personally thought it was a little frightening. It was last year at this time that I was traveling around Europe, and I had issues near Easter with booking trains and lodging just because of the increased holiday crowds (apparently in France, they take their holidays very seriously). A situation like that might have been a total nightmare. Not only that, but on my way home, I patched two flights together with a few days in London between them. I really have no idea what I would have done if I wasn’t able to even get to London; it was the end of my trip and I was at the last bit of my money. How would I have gotten back? How long would I have had to wait?

Insight into the troubles travelers are facing are coming from Lonely Planet; their twitter feed is retweeting issues that people stranded all over the place are facing. One striking one, as an example, was “Cologne to London: 4 train, 2 taxis, 1 ferry, 16 hours, €500 and a hire car which has to be repatriated to France by tomorrow” by a user named bsmart. Lonely Planet even made their iPhone city guides free for a limited time to help people out; a gesture that was very kind, and apparently well received too since they claimed that they were downloaded 3 million times.

What do we have to learn from all this? I’m not totally sure. What I can say is that we probably depend on air transport more than we realize, and that we need to keep the alternatives well-maintained in case anything like this (or the same thing) happens again. At the same time, this event showed the world how important air transport is, and how simple it is for it to be disabled by nature. Kinda frightening, yes, but humans really can’t be in control of everything, can they?

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As I side note, I’m done school now for the summer so I’ll hopefully be able to update a lot more frequently. My last entry was right before I had three different essays due, so needless to say I didn’t really feel like writing for a little while. Then there was exams. Fortunately I have a fair amount of free time now and I’m planning on keeping this as a sort of hobby for the summer. Also, I’m working on Bloglog and I’m hoping to officially open it up soon, I just want to make sure I have enough entries in (I think I’ve written four so far, I forget). I’ll send word when it’s ready.

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