How do you say it, again?

The recent volcano in Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - that erupted and caused disruption in Europe is not just a tongue twister but a tongue breaker. You try to say this twice in a row and you will not know how to say your own last name. Forget twice, try to say it once and let's see how far you go.

This was the first natural disaster that caused so much of havoc in Europe in the history of Air Travel. Fortunately, there was no human loss but the economical situation of several countries took a big hit. Last time this volcano erupted about 180 years ago there was no Air Transportation. Unlike now, there was tremendous loss of human life back in the 18th Century due to the lack of speedy communication. Even after all the phenomenal scientific advancements, one thing becomes quite evident with such incidents - When Nature takes over, it is just a waiting game for humans and we are completely at its mercy. We often tend to forget this and Mother Nature dings us once in a while to remind us of these powerful facts.
From an economical standpoint, the volcanic ash has grounded tens of thousands of flights and shutdown scores of Airports across the continent stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers. This stand still has cost almost $2.6 billion for all the Airlines, causing unprecedented dislocation to all the families stuck during travel. I don't know if there is a way to calculate the extra costs that all travelers had to incur during this but the ripple effect was enormous. Outside of the direct effect felt in European countries, it has affected US as well. According to the US Travel Association, 78% of all the flights between Europe and US were grounded for six days which ended up costing $815 million to the US Travel Industry.

I would like to add a spin to this for all the science enthusiasts across the globe from hard-core science fanatics at CERN to science lovers including myself. Did LHC (Particle accelerator at CERN) in anyway contribute in stimulating this change? Again, this is a true speculation and I was surprised to see so much of this concern already published on the Internet in less than a week. As much as I do not understand the Purpose of the High-energy particle accelerator at CERN, I personally do not believe in a direct correlation between this experiment and the eruption. However, the geographic location and the Tectonic plate boundaries are not too far from the 27 Km LHC tunnel below Alps and who knows how much of energy is being generated and what the after-effects are. Granted that this 'scientific experiment' will for sure get us closer to some of the fundamental unanswered theories of Science, I don't know if its effects are known to even the best scientists on the planet. May be there are, I wanted to open up this discussion to a few of my own acquaintances and get some feedback.

As a closing note - Science helps us with a lot of theories but as time evolves, it rewrites the previous ones. There are certain things that are beyond human comprehension and we should accept the fact than to test Nature.