JAKARTA — Some 270,000 passengers have been left stranded across Indonesia after a volcanic eruption grounded more than 2,000 flights as seven of the country’s airports remained closed for a second day on Monday, officials said.Volcanic ash from eruptions at Mount Anak Krakatau, which sits halfway between Java and Sumatra islands, has blanketed Jakarta and several surrounding areas since it erupted late on Friday, leading to the closure of the airports for safety reasons.The transport ministry said on Monday more than 270,000 people have been affected by the delay, diversion, or cancellation of about 2,300 flights.The suspension at Jakarta’s main airport was extended on Monday, along with six other airports, the airport authority said. The airports include ones serving Jakarta’s nearby provinces of Lampung and West Java.Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport decided not to reopen at 18:00 (11:00 GMT) as planned due to the continued presence of volcanic ash near its airspace.“We cannot ascertain when this will end due to the dynamic weather,” Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi said.Dudy said on Sunday that authorities across the airports have been conducting tests every 30 minutes “to anticipate whether the ash spread is widening or subsiding”.A press release from the airport said flights would now resume at 23:59 on Monday.Halim Perdanakusuma, a smaller airport that caters to civil and military flights, will also remain closed until then.Anak Krakatau, located 150km from Jakarta, began erupting late on Friday, producing lava fountains and sending volcanic ash into the capital and the Lampung province. It stayed seismically active throughout the weekend.Snaking queues formed at the departure halls in Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Monday as stranded passengers sought refunds and tried to get updates on when they would be able to fly.Finna, who was supposed to fly home to Jakarta from Malang, a city in East Java, on Sunday morning, described the frezny at the airport as flights got repeatedly rescheduled.”It was very crowded because passengers from the morning flights had piled up, while those scheduled for later departures still didn’t know what would happen,” the 46-year-old told BBC Indonesian.”We were all glued to the flight information screens.”Not wanting to deal with the uncertainty, Finna eventually spent the night on two intercity trains before arriving in Jakarta at 03:00 on Monday.”Everyone seems to be racking their brains [figuring alternative transportation options]”, said Jo Shaw, who was visiting Indonesia with members of her conservation charity Save the Rhino International.Shaw’s team had axed their plans to camp out at Java’s Ujung Kulon National Park after authorities raised its alert level for the Anak Krakatau volcano.”Being stranded in an airport hotel is a relatively minor inconvenience to be resolved in a few days, hopefully,” Shaw said, adding that she was more concerned about the teams working on the ground with the rhinos under such environmental conditions.On Monday, Indonesia’s Geological Agency warned that “the probability of further eruptions in the coming periods remains high”.Volcanic ash reached as high as 6,000m on the Java side of the volcano and 15,000m on the Sumatra side and in some parts of Java’s westernmost province Banten, the meteorological agency BMKG said.The most recent eruption occurred at 20:23 on Sunday, according to the agency.Authorities have warned against approaching or engaging in activities within a 3km radius from the active crater, while ships passing through the Sunda Strait have also been prohibited from entering an exclusion zone of 3km radius from it.Authorities have also confirmed there is no tsunami warning linked to the recent activity of the volcano.The volcano collapsed in December 2018, triggering a huge tsunami which killed over 400 people, and displaced and injured thousands more on the nearby coastlines of Sumatra and Java.Scientists found that some of the chunks of rock that slid from the volcano when it collapsed were about 70-90m high.Anak Krakatau is one of about 130 active volcanoes in Indonesia, which straddles the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a highly seismically active zone where different plates on the earth’s crust meet to create a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.The Pacific Ring of Fire refers to a string of volcanoes, earthquake sites and tectonic plates around the Pacific. It spreads across 40,000km (25,000 miles) from the southern tip of South America all the way to New Zealand.Roughly 90% of all earthquakes occur along the area, and the ring is dotted with 75% of all active volcanoes on Earth, that’s 452 individual active volcanoes.Anak Krakatau, which means child of Krakatau, began emerging a century ago from the area previously occupied by Krakatau, then known as Krakatoa. The older volcano destroyed itself in mass eruptions in 1883, which killed more than 36,000 people in Indonesia after triggering a series of tsunamis.JAKARTA — Some 270,000 passengers have been left stranded across Indonesia after a volcanic eruption grounded more than 2,000 flights as seven of the country’s airports remained closed for a second day on Monday, officials said.Volcanic ash from eruptions at Mount Anak Krakatau, which sits halfway between Java and Sumatra islands, has blanketed Jakarta and several surrounding areas since it erupted late on Friday, leading to the closure of the airports for safety reasons.The transport ministry said on Monday more than 270,000 people have been affected by the delay, diversion, or cancellation of about 2,300 flights.The suspension at Jakarta’s main airport was extended on Monday, along with six other airports, the airport authority said. The airports include ones serving Jakarta’s nearby provinces of Lampung and West Java.Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport decided not to reopen at 18:00 (11:00 GMT) as planned due to the continued presence of volcanic ash near its airspace.“We cannot ascertain when this will end due to the dynamic weather,” Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi said.Dudy said on Sunday that authorities across the airports have been conducting tests every 30 minutes “to anticipate whether the ash spread is widening or subsiding”.A press release from the airport said flights would now resume at 23:59 on Monday.Halim Perdanakusuma, a smaller airport that caters to civil and military flights, will also remain closed until then.Anak Krakatau, located 150km from Jakarta, began erupting late on Friday, producing lava fountains and sending volcanic ash into the capital and the Lampung province. It stayed seismically active throughout the weekend.Snaking queues formed at the departure halls in Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Monday as stranded passengers sought refunds and tried to get updates on when they would be able to fly.Finna, who was supposed to fly home to Jakarta from Malang, a city in East Java, on Sunday morning, described the frezny at the airport as flights got repeatedly rescheduled.”It was very crowded because passengers from the morning flights had piled up, while those scheduled for later departures still didn’t know what would happen,” the 46-year-old told BBC Indonesian.”We were all glued to the flight information screens.”Not wanting to deal with the uncertainty, Finna eventually spent the night on two intercity trains before arriving in Jakarta at 03:00 on Monday.”Everyone seems to be racking their brains [figuring alternative transportation options]”, said Jo Shaw, who was visiting Indonesia with members of her conservation charity Save the Rhino International.Shaw’s team had axed their plans to camp out at Java’s Ujung Kulon National Park after authorities raised its alert level for the Anak Krakatau volcano.”Being stranded in an airport hotel is a relatively minor inconvenience to be resolved in a few days, hopefully,” Shaw said, adding that she was more concerned about the teams working on the ground with the rhinos under such environmental conditions.On Monday, Indonesia’s Geological Agency warned that “the probability of further eruptions in the coming periods remains high”.Volcanic ash reached as high as 6,000m on the Java side of the volcano and 15,000m on the Sumatra side and in some parts of Java’s westernmost province Banten, the meteorological agency BMKG said.The most recent eruption occurred at 20:23 on Sunday, according to the agency.Authorities have warned against approaching or engaging in activities within a 3km radius from the active crater, while ships passing through the Sunda Strait have also been prohibited from entering an exclusion zone of 3km radius from it.Authorities have also confirmed there is no tsunami warning linked to the recent activity of the volcano.The volcano collapsed in December 2018, triggering a huge tsunami which killed over 400 people, and displaced and injured thousands more on the nearby coastlines of Sumatra and Java.Scientists found that some of the chunks of rock that slid from the volcano when it collapsed were about 70-90m high.Anak Krakatau is one of about 130 active volcanoes in Indonesia, which straddles the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a highly seismically active zone where different plates on the earth’s crust meet to create a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.The Pacific Ring of Fire refers to a string of volcanoes, earthquake sites and tectonic plates around the Pacific. It spreads across 40,000km (25,000 miles) from the southern tip of South America all the way to New Zealand.Roughly 90% of all earthquakes occur along the area, and the ring is dotted with 75% of all active volcanoes on Earth, that’s 452 individual active volcanoes.Anak Krakatau, which means child of Krakatau, began emerging a century ago from the area previously occupied by Krakatau, then known as Krakatoa. The older volcano destroyed itself in mass eruptions in 1883, which killed more than 36,000 people in Indonesia after triggering a series of tsunamis.
