?PARIS — Iceland’s most active volcano began erupting over the weekend, sending billows of ash up to 11 miles into the air on Sunday, and prompting the island nation to close its main international airport to commercial air traffic as a precaution, aviation officials said.
The Icelandic authorities said that as of 8:30 a.m. local time, Reykjavík-Keflavik International Airport was closed to all inbound and outbound air traffic.
"The ash is covering up all of Iceland,” said Hjordís Gudmundsdottir, a spokeswoman for Isavia, Iceland’s air navigation services provider. "We are trying to identify some holes in it and to use them to allow some flights, but it’s not looking very good right now.”
Overnight, Iceland’s civil protection agency said it had imposed a no-fly zone of 120 nautical miles around the Grimsv?tn volcano in southeast Iceland.
Meteorologists said the prevailing winds were expected to blow the volcanic ash in a generally westward direction through the rest of this week — most likely avoiding a repeat of the widespread shutdowns of European airports that grounded more than 100,000 flights in April and May 2010.
Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based agency that coordinates air traffic management across the region, said it was monitoring the situation but it appeared there would be no wider threat to trans-Atlantic or European air travel at least for the next 24 hours.
Ms. Gudmundsdottir of Isavia said Iceland’s aviation authorities planned an update on the situation at around noon. For the time being, Iceland’s three other international airports remained open, she said.Iceland officials said roughly 30 flight arrivals and departures had originally been scheduled at Keflavik airport on Sunday.Iceland’s Met Office weather agency reported heavy ash fall near the volcano itself.
Grimsv?tn, a volcano of 1,725 meters, is located beneath an uninhabited icecap, Vatnajokull, in southeast Iceland.
Iceland’s civil protection agency said the volcano began erupting Saturday. The authorities have closed the main road to the eruption site and advised people living near the volcano to stay indoors or, if they must go outside, to wear protective masks and goggles.
Grimsv?tn is one of the most active volcanoes in Iceland, with at least 60 eruptions over the past 800 years. Past eruptions, most recently in 1983 and 1998, have been relatively small, however, and?have not posed a direct threat to the population.
Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, one of the island’s largest, erupted violently in April 2010 and sent numerous bursts of ash into the high into the atmosphere for several weeks, disrupting air traffic in Northern Europe, with ripple effects far beyond. The aviation authorities in dozens of European countries moved quickly to close their airspace and ground airplanes in order to prevent possible damage to jet engines.
But due to limited information about what levels of ash density were considered to be safe, the authorities were slow to re-open their airspace — resulting in the worst peacetime air travel disruption in history that cost airlines hundreds of millions of dollars.
European aviation regulators have since taken a series of steps to better coordinate their response to volcanic eruptions.
In April, Eurocontrol, the European Aviation Safety Agency and the International Civil Aviation Organization staged a two-day joint exercise with more than 70 airlines and more than a dozen air traffic control bodies to test their updated procedures.
The exercise, which in fact simulated a significant ash cloud event from the Grimsv?tn volcano, determined that more than 70 percent of scheduled European flights would have been able to take off as scheduled under the new procedures — three times more than during the Eyjafjallaj?kull eruption.
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