are going and most of the news, unfortunately, is bad. yeah, hey, rick, are you at all concerned about a nearby dormant volcano erupting as well? yes, katla nearby has famously erupted in concert with this volcano and when it does it sort of often is the more energetic long lived kind of event. so that s kind of scary, too. but so far i don t think there s much evidence of that that i ve seen discussed anyway. it s always possible. sure. hey, rick, real quick, health hazards. what are the top concerns from your vantage point? the famous thing about icelandic eruptions is fluorine in the gases. it is not falling too much on local fields. but if people are around fluorine gas and farm animals, very bad. there s a kind of poisoning you can get and it s terrible. but the good thing is people know about it now.
that would be pretty nice. but it s very difficult to say. what about we ve heard about cloud seeding. that s the process where you attempt to stimulate precipitation, but i m wondering is there anything scientist cans do to alter the activity of volcano or the ash patterns in the skies? that s an interesting question. people talk about this occasionally but people are sort of afraid to approach the sleeping giants and sort of tamper with them. first of all, what if it did something unexpected and negative and you d sort of be blamed. the other side of it is it s a giant, powerful force. it came from probably ten kilometers below the surface of the earth and has come up in giant volumes and it s really difficult in our scale to sort of manage this thing. that said, i think we can do a lot more in two ways.
well, you say years and you re not exaggerating. in 1821 the same volcano managed to erupt for more than a year. were the conditions there that would lead to that? is there something you can look at internally? look at events around the world that might tell you anything about how long this will last? we do that at the smithsonian. we have a big database of eruptions. the average life of an eruption is about seven weeks. that s a huge average. some last only a few hours and some go on for centuries. so it s an average of a lot of numbers and i would say that year of eruption is probably worth looking at. it didn t erupt the entire year, the year of 1822 was sporadic eruptions. so if it was like that again, a year of sporadic eruptions, it might mean in a week or two it would stop for a while.
make this very relevant and not just a big mountain of information and i should say a lot of information that s kind of mundane on twitter like i m eating a bagel right now. i think that s cool. that kind of stuff. but all of that stuff is useful, light breast cancer of congress believes because it will give a snapshot in the future and currently of what people are thinking, what they re saying online, and all that information will be going to the library of congress in electronic form indefinitely. all right. cecilia king, i will tweet back my thanks and thank you right here as well. thank you for joining us. a live report on the ice lappedic volcano that continues to mess up air traffic. why it could be a matter of months and not days before the skies are clear. rong stuff. there were dead spots everywhere. this is the right stuff. ortho weed b gon max. it kills weeds down to the root. even the tough ones like dandelion and crabgrass. but unlike that other stuff,