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Eruption disrupts Iceland air travel
Experts and aviation authorities said however that the impact of the Grimsvotn eruption should not be as far-reaching.
Grimsvotn, Iceland's most active volcano located at the heart of its biggest glacier Vatnajokull, began erupting late Saturday, sending a plume of smoke and ash as high as 20 kilometers (12 miles) into the sky.
Ash soon covered nearby villages and farms and had by Sunday morning reached the capital, nearly 400 kilometers to the west.
“It's just black outside, and you can hardly tell it is supposed to be bright daylight,” Bjorgvin Hardarsson, a farmer at Hunbakkar Farm in the nearby village of Kirkjubaejarklaustur told AFP.
Sunday morning, Iceland's airport administration, Isavia, announced that the country's main airport Keflavik was shutting and that basically all of the country's airspace was closing due to the ash cloud.
The airspace closure “affects pretty much all of Iceland right now, at least for the next hours ... Flights to and from Iceland are shutting down,” Isavia spokeswoman Hjordis Gudmundsdottir told AFP, adding that flight routes to the north of the North Atlantic island nation might also be affected.
However, she stressed, the fact that winds were blowing the ash to the north was far better than last year's eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, when a massive cloud of ash was blown to the south and southeast over mainland Europe.
The Eyjafjallajokull eruption caused the planet's biggest airspace shutdown since World War II, lasting almost a month, amid fears the volcanic ash could wreak havoc on aircraft engines.
By late morning Sunday, no other European countries had decided to close their airspace, although aviation authorities in Britain and Scandinavia, among the hardest hit last year, said they were keeping a close eye on developments.
The European air safety organization EUROCONTROL said no impact was expected on European airspace outside Iceland or on transatlantic flights for at least 24 hours.
In The Netherlands, an aviation authority spokeswoman told AFP there were as yet no plans to cancel a flight planned from the Amsterdam-Schiphol airport to Keflavik at 1200 GMT.
With ash falling on villages in the surrounding area and as far away as Reykjavik on Sunday, geophysicists at Iceland's Meteorological Office told AFP they expected the Grimsvotn eruption to have far less impact on international flights than last year's blast.
“I don't expect this will have the same effect as Eyjafjallajokull volcano because the ash is not as fine,” Gunnar Gudmundsson told AFP.
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