November 6, 2009
Category: science journalism
It seems like I've been stepping on a lot of people's toes lately, so in an effort to foster more camaraderie and less belligerence between the "old media" (this is not derogatory, but rather refers to anything pre-internet news source or classic journalistic source) and "new media" (this includes internet-era news sources, bloggers and the like), I'd like to put down my thoughts on the state of science journalism on the internet today.
- I do not think all media is bad at science. There are a multitude of great science sources out there that handle the issues quite well, mostly associated with professional societies like AGU or APS or through more popular-slanted journals like Science or Nature.
- I do think that science journalism (not science writing) is vital in news media and bloggers cannot fully replace - heck, I don't have time to track down and talk to all the players regarding a specific issue and that is where science journalists earn their bucks.
- That being said, if you just look at an aggregator like Google News and look up a current interesting science topic, you'll find that a vast majority of sources are just not very good. Sure, there are the Live Sciences of the internet that handle the material well, but on the whole, there is a lot of misinformation being disseminated.
- In my opinion, the problem is that many of these news sources are second-, third- or more-handing the news rather than looking at the primary source. This is because (a) they might not have anyone that can understand it; (b) they don't have the time to do it or (c) they don't care.
- I also think that many media sources will look for the "hook" before looking for the real ramifications - this is the "eyes" problem with internet news: you need to get people's attention and fast. It started in TV news, with sensationalist coverage (Al Capone's vault anyone?) and the internet has embraced the format.
- I also think the rampant antiscience sentiment in a lot of the US, combined with a lack of proper science education has promoted a generation (or more) that either (a) doesn't care about science and/or (b) doesn't understand enough to question some of these questionable sources.
So, how do we solve this?
- We need to make science fascinating again. It has become so myopic in many fields - mostly thanks to the current academic structure to publish or perish. People are interested in science, just maybe not the Nd isotopes of minerals found in a specific hydrothermal pool in upper Mongolia.
- We need our new Carl Sagans, Arthur C. Clarkes or Stephen Goulds - people who understand science and can advocate for it. I have trouble thinking of anyone filling those roles anymore.
- We need to strength science education at all levels - and I'm not talking about standardized tests. I'm talking about teaching the scientific method and making people want to think about science and how it is done. That is what makes people interested, not memorizing the formulas for 100 minerals, but rather how they form and what that can tell us about the Earth. Science should be a hands-on event that fosters thinking rather than memorization - the current educational system in the US emphasizes the later thanks to the love of testing we now have.
- We need people who understand science and have been trained to become journalists. I hate to say it, but maybe we don't need another 1,000 science Ph.D.s trying to become professors, but rather they should try to bring their love of science to the public through journalism and writing.
I think that covers a lot of what I think about the state of science journalism on and off the internet. I think the real problem is likely the deeper, societal anti-science sentiment that doesn't foster scientific thought. I also think that we've taken a lot of the wonder out of science - that sort of Victorian mentality that anything is worth pursuing because it might be interesting. The business model that only science that will have a practical end result or that will have a successful outcome has neutered a lot of the ingenuity of science. Science is about looking at the universe and thinking "this is amazing, how does it work?" and somehow we need to get back to that both in science as a discipline and society as a whole.
Posted by Erik Klemetti at 10:44 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Piton de la Fournaise
Piton de la Fournaise erupting on November 5, 2009. Image by Julian Balboni in Clicanoo.
Eruptions reader Richard Oliver pointed out to me that Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island erupted (in french) on Thursday night. The volcano produced at least two lava flows that reached the ocean flowed downslope to ~1970 m above sea level, but by Friday morning, the seismicity and eruptive activity had waned considerably. Local residents of the island went out at night to see (in french) the lava flows, with the typical words of warning from local officials. The timeline for the eruption (in french) looks like this (all local time):
20:50 - An eruption begins in the south cliff inside the Dolomieu crater
21:05 - The crack extends and opens on the southern flank near the edge of the Dolomieu crater
21:20 - A second crack opened on the eastern slope of the cone summit of the Piton de la Fournaise (Marco crater).
By the middle of the night, two lava flows were visible on the flanks of the volcano. However, new reports say that by 9:00 on Friday morning, the harmonic tremors at Piton had returned to normal. Yesterday (Thursday) morning, the volcano did experience a M3 earthquake (in french), ~12 hours before it started to erupt, suggesting that this seismicity might have triggered the eruption (or the earthquake was a result of the eruption process - a bit of chicken and egg). However, the volcano had been inflating over the past few weeks, so it seems that an eruption was becoming more likely. This is the first eruption at Piton de la Fournaise since January of this year.
Posted by Erik Klemetti at 8:43 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 5, 2009
Category: Global Volcanism Program
The latest of volcano news from around the world, brought to you by the USGS and Smithsonian Institute Global Volcanism Program (and especially Sally Kuhn Sennert!)
Highlights this week include:
Category: Volcanoes in the media
Lava flows from the 2005 Mando Hararo eruption in Ethiopia.
Alright, I had been attempting to ignore this story because it was, well, a little uninteresting at first, but it apparently has legs so I will tackle it.
Slashdot has a post proclaiming:
'Volcanic activity may split the African continent in two, creating a new ocean, say experts. This is due to a recent geological crack which has appeared in northeastern Ethiopia.'
OK. Where do I start?
This is based on a recent study published in Geophysical Research Lettersthat found that the recent volcanism in Ethiopia is related to the active rifting up and down the east side of the continental - an area already known as the Ethiopian/East African Rift. The continent is known to be pulling apart, forming the valleys and deep lakes (like Lake Malawi and Victoria) that have active volcanoes like Oldoinyo Lengai in them. This is nothing new, we've known that Africa is splitting apart for decades - and the rifting has been going on for millions of years.
From what I can gather from the study, the real find is that the fissures formed during the 2005 eruptions at Mando Hararo in Ethiopia are actually part of that rifting - i.e., the crack is part of the "crack" that is splitting the continent. This is not to say that the rifting is starting NOW due to the crack - rather that the fissure is a new manifestation of the active rifting between Africa and the Arabian subcontinent. As with most fissures in actively rifting area, magma came up the cracks - always nice to have ready-made conduits - so this process of cracking and erupting is akin to what we might expect at a mid-ocean ridge (except, at this point, on a continent).
So yes, at some point in the future, water from likely the Red Sea (also an actively rifting and growing ocean) will spill into the East African Rift system and create a new "ocean." However, this process has been going on for millions of years and to come out and misconstrue the study by Ayele and others in GRL as saying that the activity in 2005 started the rifting or that the crack is the "start" of a new ocean just shows that the mainstream media (a) doesn't know how to read science beyond what other media are saying about it and (b) how quickly the real findings of a study can be lost in the murk of speculation.
Posted by Erik Klemetti at 9:16 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 4, 2009
Category: Mystery Volcano Photo
You know, we haven't had an MVP in a couple weeks. Let's remedy that!
Current standings:
volcanista - 1
Elizabeth - 1
Ralph - 1
gijs - 1
Anne - 1
Cam - 1
gg - 1
The Bobs - 1
Boris Behncke - 1
Don Crain - 1
Here's MVP #11 ... good luck!
Posted by Erik Klemetti at 11:00 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Class participation
Just a reminder ...
Etna erupting in November 2002.
If you have any questions for Dr. Boris Behncke, who runs Italy's Volcanoes along with the volcanology page for the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Catania, please send them in to me at 
. I've got some good question so far!
Posted by Erik Klemetti at 9:05 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2009
Category: Undersea volcanism
There have been a number of articles floating around the popular press for the last week that I thought I would touch on briefly ... always fun to decipher the real news from the hype.
Active fumaroles on Datun Mountain in Taipei.
- An article out of the Taipei Times suggests that the city of Taipei in Taiwan is in great peril from Datun Mountain/volcano. The volcano, which was previously thought to have erupted ~200,000 years ago is now thought to have erupted only 5,000 years ago. That 195,000 years really does make a difference in terms of worrying about potential future eruptions, but there are few details about what sort of eruption there might have been 5,000 years ago (beyond the TV reports that "NTU professors said that if Datun erupts, its impact would be even worse than the devastating 921 Earthquake." Nothing like some good fear mongering.) They also attribute any seismicity today to "cooling magma" for what its worth - however, with any volcano with active fumaroles (above), the idea that it could still be considered "active" is no surprise.
Another article makes it seem that the potential for a future eruption from the volcano is low, but the mayor of the city still plans to construct a contingency plan if the volcano reactivates (which is still a good idea). Meanwhile, the GVP page on the "Datun Volcanic Group" suggest that the volcanic region was active as recently as the Pleistocene (<20,000 years ago). Most of the group are andesite stratocones or domes.
- The New York Times has a report on the potential tsunami generated by the great Thera eruption between 1630 and 1570 B.C. The eruption likely generated a tsunami that swept across eastern Mediterranean Basin. These findings are based on sediments found at excavations on the shores of the Mediterranean in Israel. Although it is not shocking that an eruption the size of the Minoan eruption at Santorini/Thera would produce a tsunami, finding evidence of the wave is always nice to back up the theory.
- A deep sea expedition to the Casablancas seamount 300 km off Morocco in the Atlantic has turned up evidence for fresh eruptions from the seafloor volcano. What appears to be fresh lava flows and craters were discovered by the submersible HyBIS. Of course, the submersible was at the seamount in hopes that there was life - not fresh evidence of eruption - which shows you can never guess what you might find in explored regions at the seafloor.
- I stumbled across this excellent image of El Misti (the volcano) and Arequipa (the city) in southern Peru. It shows clearly how close to the active volcano the city of over 1 million people is creeping. El Misti last erupted in 1985, producing a small (VEI 1) explosive event, with the last known significant eruption in 1784.
- Finally, there has been a lot of discussion in the comments by readers about the study have claims that a mystery volcanic eruption might have played a significant role in climate during the early 1800s. It definitely is a quandary how such a prominent SO2 signal could be found both in ice from Antarctica and Greenland yet no obvious candidate for an eruption easily identified. However, remember that even in 1809-1810, great swathes of the world were unpopulated and unseen, so an eruption such as the Kasatochi eruption in the Aleutians, which released huge amounts of sulfur dioxide last year, might have never been recognized due to its remote location. The same might be said for eruptions along long stretches of the Andes in Chile. There are multiple, uncorrelated spikes in the sulfur dioxide record in the ice cores over the past few thousand years, which makes it all the more interesting to determine what volcanoes might be hiding significant eruptions in the relatively recent past.
Posted by Erik Klemetti at 10:40 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 2, 2009
Category: Galeras
All the news to start the week:
Galeras with a grey ash-and-steam plume behind Pasto, Colombia.
October 30, 2009
Category: Huila
There has been news over the last few days of a number of volcanoes in Colombia, so I thought I'd try to gather it up here:
The steaming summit of Nevado del Huila in Colombia
