WaPo article
Civil aviation authorities say flights won't start departing or arriving in Britain until at least Friday morning because of a huge ash cloud spewed by an Icelandic volcano.
Flights from Heathrow have been suspended, ash clouds billow over the Atlantic. The volcano is in the southern part of Iceland, under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier (oh, great, more glaciers disappearing).
The Guardian has more:
Countries across northern Europe have now closed their airspace.
Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport says Dutch airspace will close at 6pm (BST). The airport says on its website that air traffic to and from the Netherlands will be scaled down in the coming hours and will be shut down entirely from 7pm (6pm BST).
"I can't say how long it will last. As long as necessary," Marjolein Wenting of the Netherlands' Air Traffic Control agency said on RTL television. "This is unique for the Netherlands."
Airspaces in Ireland, northern Sweden and Norway have all been closed since this morning (see 10.00am), and Denmark's airspace will be shut from 5pm BST.
On a positive note, there is evidence that ash eruptions help quiet global warming.
The dust can also help reduce global warming. The effect of the Iceland ash cloud will be small but larger eruptions help to cool the planet as they reflect sunlight back into space. The 1815 eruption of Mt Tambora in Indonesia produced so much volcanic ash that it triggered the "year without a summer" that brought widespread failure of harvests across Europe, famine and economic collapse.
Although, famine and economic collapse, not so positive...
An interactive graphic from the Guardian (I love the Guardian) shows when the various parts of northern Europe are expected to be impassable within the next day.
So why are they closing the airports? It's just ash, right?
From the WaPo link, above:
In 1982, a British Airways jumbo jet unknowingly flew through an ash cloud, causing all four engines to flame out. After plummeting thousands of feet, the engines were reignited and the passengers safely landed in Jakarta. In 1989, a KLM jet flew through an ash cloud from Alaska's Redoubt volcano, once again causing all of the jet engines to stop. After a five-minute descent, the engines were restarted and the plane landed safely; however, the plane was severely damaged.