by the Assyst team

The Eyjafjallajökull volcano that erupted in Iceland this April showed a major dependence of Europe on Air transportation. Suddenly it was like time went back 100 years. All travel had to be arranged by land or sea. Air companies stopped their planes on the safety concern that the ashes from the volcano could clog jet engines. How could our daily life be disrupted by something so far way?

Tanaka and Yamamoto1 used numerical simulations to predict the dispersal of the volcanic plume of Usu volcano in Japan in 2000. In Denmark, a team of the National Environmental Research Institute modelled the dispersion of the volcanic plume of the Iceland volcano 2. The results are shown in the New York Times infographics of the event 3. In Europe, the NEST Pathfinder Project E2-C2 4 went further in predicting extreme hazards, both natural and socio-economic, and examining their consequences under a framework of extreme events statistics.

Extreme events share a common characteristic: the bigger the event, the less likely it is to happen, but when it happens the social and economic costs are enormous. Future scientific research needs to include crisis observation, monitoring environmental change, financial crashes, shortages in supply, or epidemics. Analysis of massive data is key to the identification of interdependencies and causality chains that may lead to cascade spreading effects. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why “The FuturIcT Knowledge Accelerator” Flagship proposal, presented in this Newsletter, is essential for complex systems research.

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