The Eyjafjallajökull eruption had bigger impact on the world’s aviation operation than the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.
Although, immediate impact of the 2001 attack was bigger as 200 airports were closed then but only 100 airports closed due to the eruption in 2010, scientists at Northwestern University in Illinois have calculated the overall impact of these two events, RÚV reports.
Yngvi Björnsson, teacher at the University in Reykjavík, told RÚV that the team of engineers and mathematicians had come to the conclusion that the disruption of the whole transport systems had been on a much larger scale in 2010, due to the Eyjafjallajökull eruption.
“That’s because such important connection airports in Western Europe had to be closed, which had a chain reaction all around the worl.”
The findings were recently published in science magazine PLOS ONE.
“What’s also interesting is the ability to use artificial intelligence this way,” Yngvi added. “As a computer scientist I find that interesting. This is yet another example of how we can delve deeper into data to find all kinds of causation, which we weren’t able to do before.”
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