It seems like there's so much going wrong on Earth right now, that we can't take another problem thrown our way. But apparently the Earth itself thinks otherwise, because there's danger of another volcano eruption in Iceland. That's not a danger for the people of Iceland - they're used to this sort of thing. But you'll remember that the last eruption in 2010 spewed a plume of ash that greatly reduced air travel in Europe.
That incident introduced one of humanity's more embarrassing tendencies: the belief that if nothing went wrong, then any steps to prevent anything from going wrong were unnecessary. Since there were no plane crashes due to the dust sent into the atmosphere, that means we didn't need to cancel all those flights. The added irony was that some of those inconvenienced travellers were business leaders who had campaigned to remove financial regulations since we hadn't had any depressions lately.
And sure enough, people are already looking for excuses to not cancel flights this time. If they can do that because of improved technology, great. I just hope they aren't going to cave to pressure from the impatient. Hopefully any stranded passengers will use their free time to read about what happens when a plane flies through volcanic ash.
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