APR 19, 2010 - Eyjafjallajökull is about the best single source of information I've found online concerning the volcano that has the world a-Twitter since last week. (Ironically, it was exactly 40 weeks ago that I featured a PBS page about Mt. Nyiragongo in this space, the volcano in the Congo which has been erupting on and off since January 2002.) The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland began on March 21, during one of the risk windows identified in my forecast for that month ("the 21st through the 23rd"). After a period of relative calm, this week’s blast occurred within a day of the April new moon (and the 6.9-magnitude Qinghai, China quake) during the "April 10-19" geocosmic shock window called out in my April forecast. "And since this occurs after the start of the Mercury Max cycle," my forecast added, "it behooves us all to make arrangements as best we can for disruptions that play havoc with airline schedules, highway traffic, shipping and infrastructure." (Think of the thousands of airline passengers stranded due to the Iceland volcano.) Incidentally, the connection between astrologers and Icelandic volcanoes goes back centuries. It was that good old astrologer Ben Franklin – he of Poor Richard’s Almanack renown – who connected the 1783 eruption of the Laki volcano there with the fact that "the winter of 1783-84 was more severe than any that had happened for many years." As I’ve said more than a few times in my decades of forecasting, "You can’t make this stuff up." Of course the news media love to panic over everything, and so they've made a HUGE deal out of this eruption so far. That aside, as I wrote in my 2010 World Forecast Highlights, "I’m not expecting a Katrina or Sumatra class year of hurricanes or seismic activity in 2010, but I do anticipate a more than usual level of major storms, quakes and volcanic eruptions." So at the very least, we may as well make a stab at learning how to pronounce this one's name: that's "AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl (-uh)," I'm told.
