Also contributed earlier last year to help the earthquake victims in Japan and, in 2010, assisted tsunami victims in Indonesia, survivors of the Mayon Volcano eruption in the Philippines and flood victims in Pakistan.
The statement comes after years of hardship for Iceland, which suffered the collapse of its financial system in 2008 and a massive 2010 volcano eruption that shut down international travel in the region.
Some tools were sandwiched in ash from the eruption of the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that geologists can date very accurately to 74, 000 years ago.
In 1883, a massive eruption of a volcano on the island of Krakatoa in the Sundra Strait between Java and Sumatra began.
When the volcano last erupted in 1821, the eruption lasted on and off for two years, Gylfason said.
An eruption by the volcano in 1956 was "one of the three most significant volcanic events on the globe this century".
Natural disasters such as the eruption of the volcano in Iceland or the oil spill on the Gulf coast last year make us seriously consider the fragility of human strength against nature.
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The problem is being caused by a continuing eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in southern Iceland, which is pumping volcanic ash high into the atmosphere.
In 2008, the country declared a state of emergency at the site of the ancient Roman city buried by an eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in AD 79.
The scale of the volcano now is nothing like it was before the devastating eruption in 1980.
We saw the results of that in May last year following the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano.
In the end, of course, the real culprit is the volcano, the eruption of which forms the hardest sort of natural disaster to deal with, for neither its duration nor its ultimate magnitude can be predicted with certainty.
It allows scientists to study the fissures in the cone of the volcano -- if the fissures are getting hotter, it means an eruption is imminent.
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