we're not flying, we're digging tunnels through the atmosphere

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

If you had told me, though, that a new science fiction novel had just come out featuring a planet on which vast turbulent structures of glass fly 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.

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.

[the bldgblog's completely original take on Iceland ash cloud]