Redoubt from space

The NASA Earth Observatory website posted this great image of Redoubt taken from Landsat images in 2000.

You can see a few neat things. The main thing I notice is that the Drift River Oil Terminal is in about the worst place you could put an oil terminal near a volcano like Redoubt. All the material from recent eruptions at Redoubt get focused down into the Drift River, which then heads off into the Cook Inlet via the Drift River flood plain (upper right hand side of the image). When this image was taken, the Drift River is still grey with volcanigenic material even 10 years after the last activity, showing that most of the material is mobilized in that direction. It still amazes me that the oil terminal was ever allowed to be built in that location.

As for the current state of things at Redoubt, AVO reports that the seismicity is still going and things remain much the same as it has been for the past few weeks. Officials on the Kenai Peninsula are assuring residents that they're ready for an eruption. At this pace, they might have months to prepare!

More like this

Image courtesy of AVO/USGS AVO has posted a series of images taken around Redoubt and around the Cook Inlet since the new eruptions started the night of March 22nd. You can begin to see the extent of the ash fall, what the explosions have done to the Drift Glacier and the new deposits in the Drift…
Image courtesy of AVO/USGS by James Isaak. Photo taken 3/31/2009. No, this isn't Battlestar Galactica, but the same can be said for the Drift River Oil Terminal: this has all happened before and will all happen again. Coast Guard officials have (finally) decided to move ~6.3 million gallons of…
Redoubt from Ninilchik, AK. Image courtesy of Calvin Hall. It has been a few days since we've talked about Redoubt. Well, it might be because the volcano has settled down for the past week, to the point that AVO put the volcano back to Orange/Watch status last week and hasn't had to go back to Red…
The Anchorage Daily News has an excellent article today on the Drift River Oil Terminal, a depository for oil collected from the platforms in the Cook Inlet. This oil terminal stores at least 1,000,o00 barrels of oil (see article for why we're not sure) and sits, well, at the base of Redoubt (see…

It still amazes me that the oil terminal was ever allowed to be built in that location.

Humanity has a talent for building things in geologically unwise places (Instanbul, Naples, Wellington...); but in this case I'd rather cynically opine that either (a) no-one bothered to ask a volcanologist or (b) they ignored them when they gave an unpopular answer.

another grim scenario for the terminal would be if a north facing slope failure actually damed the drift river with a combination of the piedmont glacier bits overlain by lahar material. This would not be a stable situation and the lake formed behind this dam would represent a sizable threat to the terminal