Huge unexpected ash eruptions such as exploded recently from the South American Andean Chaiten Volcano located in southern Chile can affect worldwide jet airline traffic and schedules - creating more headaches and delays for passengers and operators alike. The jet engines used by most commercial aircraft of major domestic and overseas airlines are particularly sensitive to the trillions-times-trillions of fine-grained ash particles that are belched out with thick clouds of hot volcanic gasses from a large explosive volcano that has been dormant for a long period of time - usually measured in millennia. Chaiten Volcano's last eruption had occurred approximately 9,400 years ago in 7,400 BC.

Microscopic volcanic ash particles are light enough in mass to create sufficient friction with air molecules as gravity pulls them back toward the surface - so that they remain suspended in the atmosphere at altitudes where airplanes fly. The tiny, sometimes molecular-sized particles can bring down a large plane flying through the stratosphere at hundreds of miles per hour, close to the speed of sound - by clogging the engines into which they are sucked and shutting them down. With a loss of forward motion, the plane begins to fall at an accelerating velocity and is in danger of crashing.

Of the many types of volcanoes that exist on Earth, those that create the most problems are the huge explosive ones located in the Pacific Ring of Fire. The Ring forms a gigantic 25,000 mile-long circle that surrounds the roughly 8,000 mile-diameter Pacific Ocean-whose area exceeds that of all the other oceans combined. Although many famous volcanoes whose past cataclysmic eruptions changed the course of history are known in the Mediterranean region where civilization first emerged, most of the world's dormant or erupting active volcanoes are present in the Ring of Fire.

Dangerous Ring volcanoes include the Indonesian ones such as Krakatoa (whose tremendous 1883 eruption generated a tsunami that killed an estimated 36,000 people), Mount Shasta, CA - Mount Hood, OR - Mount Saint Helens, WA - Mount Rainier, WA - plus other West Coast Cascade Mountain Range volcanoes - the Aleutian archipelago volcanoes - The Kamchatka volcanoes of eastern Siberia - the Japanese archipelago volcanoes - the Philippine ones and then some.

Seventy-five percent of the world's erupting volcanoes are in the Pacific; but it is the 452 dormant ones that present the greatest hazards because we do not know for sure when they might erupt. Moreover, volcanic zones are always located along earthquake zones, and 90 percent of world earthquakes occur along the Pacific Ring of Fire. Long Island, despite its occasional destructive nor'easters and hurricanes, is an infinitely safer place to live than the shores of the Pacific.