FT263

The effects of the volcanic events of mid-April were felt beneath the Earth’s surface, even over 1,000 miles off. Audible relish tinged the voices of London Underground announcers, momentarily liberated from routine. No “person under a train” this time, no “signal failure”, nor even the ubiquitous “adverse weather conditions”, but “a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland”.

Above ground, too, announcements abounded. The airwaves hummed with the catastrophe’s keywords  – “Cloud!” “Ash!” “Ice!” – all repeated earnestly to mask the fact that the origin of it all was unutterable, a ghastly edifice of Nordic sounds bearing little phonetic relation to the 17 letters that constituted them. And just as the volcano’s name remained unspoken, its ashes remained unsighted. Clear blue skies with pristine white clouds, for once unmarked by vapour trails, hung disconcertingly over the empty airfields, teasing would-be travellers. Nary a whiff of sulphur, nor a dusting of ash seemed to materialise on Earth to prove the threat’s existence on high. If there can be no smoke without fire, it is also curiously difficult to believe in fire without smoke.

Print and screen media turned to archive footage, until live aerial videos could be obtained. But nobody could produce a picture of the ash cloud itself. The Met Office issued satellite photographs, false colour images and a diagram indicating the cloud’s extent with a loose, angular marquee shape. In the first case, we were encouraged to watch for sand-coloured streaks, indistinguishable from the static-like fuzz of ordinary cloud swirls over Europe. In the second, a gorgeous and painterly filter of atmospheric goings on, the ash was often hidden under red and pink ice clouds. The third was the most evocative, suggesting a body outline at a crime scene or an enemy vessel on a radar screen, the frame expanding and contracting over Europe according to the inaccessible logic of particle physics and predicted wind behaviour. Still the cloud itself remained invisible.

Was there something sublime in this bloodless catas(h)trophe? A failure of representation at the centre of an unprecedented measure, the closing of national airspace; the inability of all our visualisation software to give us an image we could recognise, an object to fear? Between dry bulletins from the men at the Met, the BBC turned to the Poet Laureate to render the phenomenon in familiar terms: “Five miles up, the hush and shoosh of ash…”.[1] Under other circumstances, might they have commissioned an artist’s impression of the cloud? If so, perhaps it would have looked like Sidney Hall’s engravings for Edward Quin’s Historical Atlas of 1830. The plates of this atlas are thick with dark grey clouds, literally clouds of unknowing, which recede in chronological sequence “as the limits of the known world gradually extend”. Here, the clouds clear over Europe somewhere between “The End of the Third Punic War” (plate 7) and “The Roman Empire in the Augustan Age” (plate 8); for our purposes, Europe would be blotted out, and the British returned to our island exile, stranded and pining for pineapples.

Strangely enough, Quin chooses the date of 1783 to free his world map from the wispy vestiges of ignorance. This is in fact the one year that Europe was covered in ash and gas blown south from another volcanic fissure on Laki, a neighbour of Eyjafjallajökull. The dreadful summer of 1783, “portentous, unexampled, unexplained” according to William Cowper, made a great impact on the founding fathers of British meteor-ology, schoolboys at the time.[2] One of them was Luke Howard, the Quaker chemist who classified the clouds, and founded the Meteorological Society with fellow enthusiasts in 1823. Though the science would not gather momentum until its mercant-ile utility was evident by the middle of the century, when the Met Office was set up by the Board of Trade, much groundwork was achieved by amateurs taking measurements with their own instruments and keeping weather diaries.

In some sense, this second Icelandic blast has returned meteorology to its founding practices. In the absence of a suffic-iently opaque cloud, the Met Office was forced to show its workings. A Google map of the British Isles studded with unverified sightings or sensings of ash in the atmosphere was posted on the website. These ranged from people claiming to have found ash on their car, through local airfield reports to LIDAR cloud base detector readings. This is effectively the opposite of remote sensing; rather than interpreting complex data feeds from its satellites, the Met Office was once more dependent on mass observation, on the wits of onlookers everywhere, a corps of parachutists, amateur flyers and airfield employees. Turning full circle, authority lay for a moment again in the naked eye, not the multi-spectral scanner.

A fortnight on, it’s all blown over. [Ed: or so we thought...] Having lurked somewhere between earthly and heavenly apprehension, visible only in the tiniest quantities from above or below, the mysterious ash cloud has dissipated. Was it ever there? Few planes were allowed to find out. Was it worth an aviation shutdown? Most definitely. Aside from issues of safety, it has served to rehearse our ‘imaginary’ for scenarios of “atmoterrorism”, or “black meteorology” that philosopher Peter Sloterdijk sees as the future of warfare.[3] Well may we envisage seething smoke, incandescent dust and broiling whorls of gas; the real threat will almost certainly be just as elusive to the eye – whether human or mechanical – as this was.

Notes
1 Carol Ann Duffy: “Silver Lining”, 2010.
2 Richard Hamblyn: The Invention of Clouds, Picador (2001) p. 47.
3 Peter Sloterdijk: Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoram, Semiotext(e), 2009, p51.