Maxwell vs. Mother Nature … and the Winner is Her Emissary, Mount Eyjafjalljökull

Last April, I was in Barcelona to attend EuCAP, which has become a premier antenna conference in Europe, and possibly the world. The 2010 conference, held during the week of April 12, was going great, and the program was very intensive, to say the least. You can find out more information about the meeting by visiting their Web site [http://www.eucap201O.org/], and I encourage you to do just that. However, I´m here to tell you about an experience of a lifetime that I went through toward the tail end of the conference, when the volcano in Iceland (Figure 1) erupted without warning on Thursday, April 15, and threw everyone´s travel plans into a tizzy. If you thought, my friends from the US, that April 15 was a “taxing” day for you, you should have been in Europe and seen the looks on the faces of millions of Europeans who were trying to cope with the sudden catastrophe that befell them with no warning whatsoever. Everyone´s travel plans were up in the air, although 70% of the planes were not. People were scrambling around to see if they could charter buses, catch a ride on the trains, rent-a-car, etc. A group from the Netherlands, which included primarily those who came from the European Space Agency (ESA), joined forces with another group from Sweden, and were able to finally charter buses to bring them home. Unfortunately, the majority of the delegates for EuCAP weren´t so lucky: they had to extend their stay in Barcelona, and scurry around for days to find a way home.