Dirty Thunderstorm and Geoengineering

I'm sure everyone has heard about Eyjafjallajokull blowing its top late last week. These are some pictures from MSNBC of the "dirty thunderstorm" coinciding with the eruption. Check out the pictures, they are incredible.


What's The Scream got to do with it..?

The timing of this event was interesting for the people on my campus, because there was a seminar just yesterday about purposely releasing aerosols in the stratosphere as a means of cooling the planet, a mimic of the natural cooling trend that tends to follow large volcanic events. Dr. Alan Robock, author of a recent article on his opinions of geoengineering solutions to climate change ("20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea") gave an excellent talk to our department. He covered these 20 ideas and brought up new ones, also citing "more beautiful red/orange sunsets" as a potential plus to intentionally increasing aerosols in the atmosphere. The veil of volcanic ash in the stratosphere can cause bright and colorful afterglows -- after the sun has sunk below the western horizon, its light reflects off the bottom of the ash cloud above your location, creating an afterglow you can see 15 minutes to an hour after sunset .

One factoid that Dr. Robock talked about was the influence on Edvard Munch of the 1882 volcanic eruption on Krakatoa: the bright red and orange sky of The Scream was painted about a decade after the event. The eruption affected sunset skies in Europe for a year.