Eyjafjallajokul! A volcano named Eyjafjallajokul indeed. Some give this jaw-breaker an extra 'l'. Eyjafjallajokull. Some go for the slipshod diminution — Eyjafjoell — milking a name splendidly unmanageable for English speakers of all its linguistic knots and labyrinths.
And there is one more embellishment important to sound and rhythm: the umlaut on the o. Eyjafjallajökull. That just about nails all the intricacies of this new cult name (pronounced ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) that has tangled our tongues and garbled our glottals in recent weeks while it has gone on spewing ash — a new cliché for our turbulent climatic times — all through the airways, creating alarm and confusion in airports like Frankfurt, Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle, where alarm and confusion are never very far away at the best of times and don't need unprecedented and spectacular terrestrial help to speed them along.
Not actually unprecedented, as a matter of fact. A bit of research reveals that Eyjafjallajökull has a long memory and an apparently unassuageable anger that broods along through the centuries and every now and then, well, erupts, spewing etc. This happened in 920, 1612 and frequently between 1821 and 1823. In the scramble to appear informed about dramatic geological phenomena, however, few have noticed that Eyjafjallajökull has a loyal and infinitely more pronounceable follower, a partner which dutifully echoes its (her? his?) more famous and ill-tempered mate.
Twenty-five kilometres from Eyjafjallajökull is another volcano named Katla. Katla specialises in subglacial eruptions that make the explosions of its consonant-heavy neighbour sound like genteel coughing. What's more, although it seems intrusively intimate to say so, Katla has a very large magma chamber. More intimate is their relationship. Every single time Eyjafjallajökull erupted between 920 and 1823, Katla followed a short time after with a more spectacular performance, as if to insist it was no mere footnote but actually the main text.
Icelandic President Ólafur Grímsson is in no doubt about Katla. 'The time for Katla to erupt is coming close,' he said, even as Eyjafjallajökull's black scowl was spreading over Europe's skies. 'Iceland', he said, 'was ready and it was high time for European governments and airline authorities all over the world to start planning for the eventual Katla eruption.'
Many Icelandic geologists and geophysicists agree. They fear that the Eyjafjallajökull eruption could trigger Katla, precipitating huge floods, as glacial ice melts, and building prodigious aerial escarpments of ash. The disruptions of last April would look