Even
Carlos Franganillo
, presenter of the La 1 newscast, has to huddle around the microphone and run away when little pebbles start to rain on it and fly off the La Palma volcano, in the Canary Islands. What can happen to that
rain of ash
that falls from the sky? What
damage
can it cause and who can be its victims? The answer is everyone: both people and animals, crops and machines alike. Not only lava causes irreversible damage: beware of ash, which "is not mucus of turkey." One advance: it can even shoot down planes.
"For the human being can be a serious health problem because this
dust
people end up eating it
but do not realize, and they can cause throat problems and a very important toxicity ,
" explains
Role
volcanologist José Luis Barrera, professional head of the College of Geologists.
"This ash is made of
silicates, iron and magnesium
, it is actually magma from the volcano that becomes, in contact with cold air, what is called
volcanic glass
, which is not as if people ate breadcrumbs, but quite a dangerous thing, "the vulcanologist crudely explains.
"To protect yourself from that, you have to wear a
mask
, and also cover your eyes as much as possible, which can also suffer when these silicates enter, which are very toxic to the human body," he says.
"It is also a very sharp type of glass, in which there is no time for the chemical elements to crystallize, and that is why it has a greater toxicity", says Barrera, who extends to "animals and of course crops and trees "the damage that volcanic ash can cause:" Obviously, it also intoxicates animals, seriously, and
the damage to crops is total, it cancels it, everything has to be thrown away
. In areas where this type of ash and the population lived from the countryside, what has happened is that there have been great
famines
, with which the damage has been much greater, because there have been deaths. "
Another chapter in dramatic this scenario component damage to things. "All machinery, including cars, motorcycles, tractors, boats, whatever, suffer a
lot with this dust, because it gets into their engines and cripples
have been come to produce air accidents due to the ash from the volcanoes
, because it has gotten into the aircraft engines and has made their operation difficult. For example, in the last great volcano in Iceland, the one with an unpronounceable name [refers to al Eyjafjallajökull, which erupted in 2010],
all planes
had to be
diverted
because it was potentially very dangerous for them to have to cross that cloud. "
An example: On June 24, 1982, the captain of the Boeing 747
City of Edinburgh
announced to his passengers, with typically British laconism: "This is your captain speaking. We have a little problem.
All four engines have stopped
. We are doing what possible to get them under control. I trust you don't worry too much. " There were 263 people on board and the case is a study on the effects of volcano dust on aircraft engines.
Barrera believes that the cloud that the La Palma volcano is going to create "
will not go beyond three or four kilometers
", but in large volcanic eruptions "
ash clouds have been
produced
that have circled the Earth. even several times
. The one from Iceland who was commenting, without going any further, once turned the northern hemisphere around ".
Finally, an umpteenth effect of these ash clouds is that "the
temperature
of the place where they are located
tends to drop
, since for days or sometimes weeks they block the sunlight, with the consequent thermal effect", concludes the volcanologist José Luis Barrier.
And what happened to the
City of Edinburgh
?
Well, when he was already gliding just five kilometers from land, with the passengers praying all they knew and the pilot probably undaunted,
one of the engines started working again, and little by little the other three too
.
The aircraft made an emergency landing in Indonesia and only by analyzing the machine it was concluded that the episode had been caused by smoke from a not so close erupting volcano:
Galunggung
, on the island of Java.
The captain, upon being informed, probably scratched his head.
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