This week ESS had to cancel the third Steering Committee Meeting in Bilbao, Spain, due to the ash cloud over Europe. I think it was a wise decision by the ESS management.
Staff at ESS were of course a bit disappointed seeing all their work and preparations for this meeting litterally going up in smoke. But luckily we stand quite prepared with a load of black humour for situations like this. Something which have actually helped us to cope every now and then in critical situations that sometimes occur in a complex project like the ESS.
There are of course many people who have got into serious trouble due to the ash cloud. Not the least people in Iceland who are already suffering from the financial collapse. I think about you and wish you all the best in your struggle to fix the Icelandic economy. A positive effect in all this could be though that Iceland have probably never got as much international publicity and PR before. So in the long run, an exotic volcano might help tourism and make it easier to open new doors to do business in the future.
For those who like to cheer things up a bit in all this mess, there is a lot of humour on the volcanic subject flourishing around the web:
United Kingdom: "Dear Iceland, we asked for cash, not ash!".
Iceland: "Sorry for the flight delays, Europe. We were aiming for London, but it's hard to be accurate when firing a volcano".
Or this one:
"The last wish of the Icelandic economy was to have its ashes scattered over Europe...".
Locally, here in my mailbox, the news just reached me that our friend, ProfESSor John Larese who gave a speech at the ESS / Lund University seminar series last week, is still in Sweden unable to get home because of the ash cloud. Live and direct from Uppsala (apparently there's a second university town in Sweden after Lund?) John sent me a short reflection on his current situation. He seems to be contemplating over geology stuff, perhaps trying to find some secret code to send as a morse signal to his science colleagues back home across the Atlantic:
"Im sitting in my hotel room in Uppsala, Sweden reflecting on the past few days and how premonitory my lecture at Lund University was. I opened my lecture about Spallation Neutron Souces and Nanomaterials with the Great Smokey Mountains as a backdrop on my title page but little did I think that this Chemistry profESSor from TennESSee, the VOLunteer University was going to fall victim to the Nano silica ash originating from the Smokey Icelandic VOLcano eruption. While some confusion still exists it appears that I still have a few days to ponder if the VOLcano will stop SPALLing out any more Nanosilica ash and this citizen of the VOLunteer state can return home. In the future I'll stick to VOLunteering to scatter neutrons closer to TennESSee and not dodging VOLcanic ash!"
Dear John, I hope you make it back to the US and Tennessee soon and don't suffer too much from “jet lash”. Otherwise you could always settle down in Lund and build a spectrometer or two. We will need them to analyse the huge (but so remarkably invisible) particle clouds that keeps the Europeans from levitating nowadays.
By the way, Johnny cASH was born in Kingsland, ArkanSAS - But he actually died in nASHville TennESSee.. ashESS to ashESS.. I think I need to cough..
End of story.
Oh, one more: "Waiter, there's volcanic ash in my soup. I know, it's a no-fly zone".
