[Image: Photo by Arni Saeberg/Bloomberg].

One of many things interesting to me about the ongoing volcanic eruption in Iceland is the fact that it has generated a new weather system made of glass: its own "maelstrom of microscopic volcanic glass shards" that liquify and go molten inside passing airplane engines, causing failure.

If you had told me that a new science fiction novel just come out featuring a planet on which vast turbulent structures of glass move through the global atmosphere, posing a dire threat to machinery and drifting across whole continents in a kind of low-intensity storm of aerosolized crystal, I would, naively, never have assumed that such a thing might also be possible here on earth. The speculative climatology of alien worlds.

[Image: Photo by AP Photo/Brynjar Gaudi].

But, perhaps, if airplane engines are built to fly through air—i.e. not through glass, dust, rocks, or geology—today's airplanes should be temporarily retrofitted with tunneling equipment under each wing, jury-rigged Herrenknecht machines to drill a new infrastructure of hovering tunnels through the glass-thundering skies of northern Europe.