Crater lake at Eyjafjallajökull

Too soon to start a spa operation in the crater, then?

@1: I think it is to soon to do that, even though the tremors and small quakes that comes now and then would give a good aqua massage.

@Jón: What do you think happened with the HAU? Someone dancing Fandango ontop of it, or a bluewhale named Hortensia fall ontop of it? What's your take?
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/stodvaplott.html

@All: Today I am fond of Bárðarbunga stratovolcano and volcano system. 8500 years ago it gave the largest known lavaflow in the world, one must give it to the Icelanders, they know how to think big:)
Today it has had a four nice deep quakes and two around 2M smack in the middle of the crater. Not enough to raise any alarm at all, just one of our friendly Icelandic Volcanos reminding us that it could blow up a sheep or two, if it just cared to do so.
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/vatnajokull/

I found some video footage on youtube which shows the crater lake. Obviously cut from the news on RÃV, the icelandic broadcasting station.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whdoGVNb1jc

A tiny one under Eyjaf, but deep.
Tuesday
15.06.201008:31:5263.626-19.61610.2 km0.947.548.8 km SW of Básar

POKING A MAGMA CHAMBER!

At the Krafla Volcano researchers from the Icelandic power industry tried to drill into a supercritical heat spot to be able to produce steam for powerproduction.
Instead they drilled down into the rhyolite layer around the magma chamber. The 30 metres thick cooling rhyolite interacted with the cooling water and produced volcanic glasses of various types around the drill. The magma chamber is probably from the 84 eruption.
Krafla is still showing some unrest, today it bopped a 2M quake just for good measure.

Bellow is the reference, look at the coooooooool clear rhyolite image!
http://www.iddp.is/news/29_June_2009.pdf

@Erik: I didn't know that you could even have a quake at +35 KM depth under Eyja. I thought the crust ended at 20+ something? Could a quake start with some kind of gaseous burp in the magma at that depth? Or is it some other process?
Quakes picking up a bit under Eyja, not back to the good old days, but perhaps some more activity on the way. Liked the alternating ultra surface-close and ultra-deep quakes. Guess the surface ones are interaction with the "Lake of the Lady E".

Monday
14.06.2010 14:58:52 63.706 -19.451 35.4 km 0.9 99.0 3.5 km NNE of Básar

If the tourists have a shred of safety awareness they should travel to Iceland and view the safely steaming crater instead of going to the Philippines.
To view a violently erupting volcano safely, you will have to stay at such a distance that you cannot see very much anyway.
The lava lakes of Hawaii are probably not "dynamic" enough for spoiled tourists who think nature should be a bigger version of Disney World. -Going off on a tangent;
TV programs have given people the expectation that every field trip should provide as much excitement as a program that was filmed over a period of several months. As they get disappointed with reality, they take idiotic risks climbing closer to active volcanic craters, walking up to polar bears or diving in caves.

Looks as though the THORO cam has been cleaned and set for a closer image - in relation to the crater lake?

Was just looking at the current swarm of EQ's near Baja and they just keep coming... A few months ago there was s swarm farther north in Nevada also quakes were almost constant

A big thank you to mila for the cleanup of the thorolfsfelli cam!

Hey-- I've dived in caves. Well, snorkeled. It can be safe. Except for when one is swimming in bat dung. ;-)

Hello to all !

Brilliant job by the folks at Mila;looks as if they have also changed the Thoro cams screen resolution.Theres a lot more finer detail now !

@9 Yeah, that swarm in Baja is interesting.

My heavens, just looked on the USGS site. Thats not a swarm,thats a deluge ! Varying Magnitudes and depths.

Here's some reporting on the quakes in SoCal:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jun/14/grsq-earthquake-shakes-s…

The Halemaʻumaʻu vent is fairly fluid today, the crust on the lava lake keeps breaking up and moving around. i also think that there's splatter going on.

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hvo/cams/HMcam/

Hiho, again the whole day our magnetosphere is not stable,
@google magnetosphere real-time@
it could be a that there is a connection.
We are facing the Coronal Hole today.

Yeah Yeah i know the majority dont want to hear @new theories@, but its a nice swarm Baja, where is all the energy coming from?

#16 - I'd say the energy comes from Sol III; there are currents that cause those formidable quakes. :|

In the center of this page is a nice video of a news report of the quake in San Diego (including people cheering during the quake at the baseball game--heh). Californians are crazy. (In the USA, people say that someone picked up the country on the east coast and all the nuts rolled west--)

It's got a really good discussion by a geologist:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jun/14/shaky-night-for-padres/

Good morning, evening, night to all.

OT, that swarm in S CA was started by a 5.7 quake that was at a depth of 4.3 miles and occurred last night at 9:28:58 PDT. I think it may be an aftershock from the Baja quake, but I am not sure. Sorry if this was reported in the last thread as I only glanced at it and I didn't see any mention of the quake. I bet that one woke up a lot of people! I will have to check the news and see what they say about it.

@Lurking, last thread, neat plots. Yeah, there are a lot of faults in S CA. Some of them are now classified as part of the San Andreas. On the eastern side of the Salton Sea, the fault seems to disappear, and then further south, you get the Imperial fault that heads into Mexico. The Imperial fault is actually part of the San Andreas. The San Andreas is a very powerful fault that runs up to Cape Mendocino and then it heads west and it called the Mendocino fault zone. Geologists are at odds as to whether the fault turns west or keeps moving north. South, the fault zig-zags down into the Gulf of California. The gulf is a fault feature and it is moving slowly up north. The gulf and the Salton Sea at one time were joined. I am not sure how they got separated, but probably a combination of uplifting and volcanic action. I am not very familiar with that part of CA. There is a legend of a Spanish ship that is supposed to be burried in the desert and it is true that they were able to sail up that far at the time. So it hasn't been all that long that the Salton and the gulf were connected.

John McPhee wrote a book called Assembling CAlifornia and it is a very good read and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get an idea of how the state came to be what it is today. He also has a book about the Spanish ship that is supposed to be buried in the desert. I have a feeling it is just one of those ledgends like the Lost Dutchman's mine (which is a true one to a point) and so-called bonanaza finds that were never found again. But you never know. If there really is a ship down there, for crying out loud, they probably could find it with all the ground penetrating equipment we have today. You would think.

@Diane N CA

IF you want oddities... off the coast of Monterey is the Monterey canyon. Very deep, very steep cuts. Note that this is a mature erosion pattern and that the x in the plot is at 4903 feet deep. I find it hard to believe that this whole area was at one time above water (touted by some web personas). Cooler dense water falling much like rain is more likely... coming from high mountain melt/glacial runoff.

Either way, the odd part is that this is supposed to have been the outflow for the Colorado river system at one time, until the region was pushed too far north and the drainage switched to the Gulf of California. The Salton Sea forming north of the alluvial fill that eventually blocked off direct access to the South.

http://i49.tinypic.com/30ccfi0.png

@Dennis I agree with you Spaceweather .com is always a point of reference when a big event occurs.

@19 Hi Diane, Brian Dunning about the "lost ships" in desert: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4209

The Southern California Seismic Network has more info on the aftershock sequence (including the M5.7) to the 7.2 El Mayor - Cucapah EQ:
http://www.scsn.org/

Re: the EQ deluge. I don't recall seeing this many happening all at once. Some are so shallow... a 0.1 and 0.3 for example. Any ideas on the significance of the depth of these quakes?

@Dennis: I too noticed the increased magnetosphere activity the last couple of weeks. It has been fairly active today as well and more solar storms predicted for the 16th and 17th of this month. I hope there is more study dedicated to the connections of solar activity and eq's.

For studying the connection between eq's/solar activity/magnetosphere I don't believe anyone has really plotted any connection. New project for Lurking maybe? Would make for a good thesis though wouldn't it?

There does seem to be much more geologic activity going on. If there is some sort of increased magma movement then maybe yellowstone is in for another good swarm this winter solstice. Only time will tell on that one.

@Carl (#2). There was a local earthquake in the area few days ago. It created a rather large spike on the plot it seems.

@Carl, Jón: somebody whacked the HAU sensor yesterday around 1920 hours, local. The reading is so anomalous that it must be an error: it's more than five times the initial spike of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, and no other sensors show anything.

@ Diane and all! Hi there! Evening here in Sweden and I´m getting my daily Eruptions fix. Thanks Eric for an excellent blog.

I have the last few days looked at old and new movies about volcanoes. So far these are viewed:

Crack in the World (1965) Pretty amusing B-action (C-action?)Fun to see all the "special effects". This could be something for Carl, @5, "poking the magma". Crazy scientist want to explore the ultimate enery source- magma. Sends a missile into the core.

Volcano (1997): Really an american action movie like them all, all glory and crying children and so forth. Like it though, and the female scientist. Fastflowing red lava in metro-tubes...cool!

Dante´s peak: In my humble opinion the best volcano movie. Impressive pyroclastic cloud and ash fall.

Supervolcano: A rather hysterical movie with the Yellowstone creating a supereruption. Believe it´s better science than most others of these movies. Before Christ BC changes to Before Yellowstone BY.

Mag 10.5 (2004) EQ movie when the american west coast finally splits apart. Again a female scientist, who fights for her place at the scientific top, has an unproved idea. Of course she predicts the whole thing. Has it all, lovestory, teenager, dad and grownup son with bad relation. Not so much science though,

BBC documentary: Lost land of the volcano
I didn´t know what to expect, but this was an amazing documentary about an research expedition in Papua New Guineas jungle. Mostly in the forest but worth seeing. And it has an active volcano-footage in one of the episodes.

And my cold is still not gone, despite the hot magma treatment :).

No plume; only the tiniest wisps of steam from the lava trench in Gigjökull. The crater lake is prolly filling up to overflow at the lower Gigjökull side, and then anything can happen - I suppose the wall to be loose tephra, which will be carried away pretty fast. Waiting is.

Snotra viking-- gotta watch "On the Volcanos of the World" Geologist Guy de Saint Cyr takes a handful of dumb amateur volcanologists to the most dangerous areas of volcanoes around the world. Really frightening ecotourism. I really feel for the videographers:

http://www.ovguide.com/tv/on_the_volcanoes_of_the_world.htm

@parclair, I´ll put it on the list...do you think it can cure my cold? ;)

Thank goodness for tele-lenses!!That must have saved a few photographers.

I just had a very philisophical thought.If Eyja has stopped erupting we will have been the only people to have watched her until she erupts again,in maybe 200 years time.

I just finished "Teach yourself Geology" by David A Rothery. I highly recommend this both for education, and then as a reference.

Diane, I just started reading Assembling California. Heh. No WONDER I've been so confused as I drive around the state, trying to figure out at what I'm looking. "You can't cope with this (the Sierra Nevada) in an organized way, because the rocks aren't organized."

@Adrian True we may have seen events that few other people have seen. 200 years from now people may re read this blog as we do historical reports of eruptions long past

@35 Renee,

Do you know, I feel sure that they will enjoy reading it and also get some great first-hand knowledge too !

Sakurajima is steaming happily from at least two vents.

Links to webcams here: http://www.dpri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/web_e/index_topics.htmlhttp://www.dpri.ky…

@Kultsi #30 On Múlakót cam a plume was visible stretching (~3km) all the way towards SE. Now it got mingled with the clouds above.
@Adrian @Renee #33 Yes! This blog wrote History and I'm very proud of having witnessed it too. Still, I'm not really sure it's over... yet... (an amateur feeling here).

Carl (@6): continental crust can go that deep or deeper; oceanic crust is much thinner.

@38 Renato,

Ha ha ha lol,looking at Thoro cam now,yes,big plume.Does that mean that telepathically transmitted reverse psychology can work on a Volcano ??? Hehe.

@Renato, Adrian (#38, #40)
The crater started gushing water sooner than I expected. The steaming extends quite far along the lava trench, and I think the amount of meltwater has increased some, judging by the wet area in the sluice pond.

The sun's just rising at Taal, at 1700 hours EDT - and as always down there, it happens in a hurry.

@Kultsi Thanks for the sakurajima cam references--cloudy now, but I'll watch now that I've got the links. ;-)

@Chris[25]

Well, I did a plot of the 30 day world wide quake energy back to 1974 verses the smoothed Monthly Sunspot Number and the Monthly average AP index. (the AP is a measure of the overall geomagnetic activity)

After crow-baring those three traces into the same plot and getting each one's scale correct... it looked like a confusing mess. I did a 3 month smoothing on it and it didn't look much better. So, instead, I made 3 separate scatter plots comparing the three measurements to see if there was any sort of correlation that might yield a clue. For the AP vs quake energy, no; SSN vs Quake energy, no; SSN vs AP - yes. (to be expected, the sun beats on our magnetosphere all the time)

Here are the plots:

SSN vs Quake: http://i49.tinypic.com/mv41tf.png

AP vs Quake: http://i50.tinypic.com/6ru3ih.png

Note: there might be something there, but your gonna need better math than I can provide to get at it.

SSN vs AP: http://i49.tinypic.com/syuzqc.png

My response to the Geomag vs Quakes is in the wait que. (I had three image links in there and accidentally activated the spam filters.)

Well,as always seemingly,the cloud draws a veil over the proceedings at Eyja. The curious thing is that tonights activity was very much like last Saturdays and yesterday evenings activity.
You are right Renato,this is still far from over.

interesting observation on the tremor graphs there seems to be a 2 day oscillation almost a sine wave

Birgir Johansson, in order to drive to work in complete safety you must go at 5-10 km/hr when no one else is on the road. If you do not do this, are you taking an idiotic risk? I suspect that the proportion of people who die on the road while driving to work greatly exceeds the proportion of volcanophiles who die viewing eruptions. Thousands of tourists flocked to view Eyaf's eruptions at close range and no one was killed by the volcano, but a few people died from driving accidents en route. I'm not saying volcanoes aren't dangerous, just that many spectacular eruptions can be viewed quite well from a reasonably safe distance, as we saw at Eyaf. Other volcanoes that often offer such opportunities include Krakatau, Yasur, Sakurajima and Stromboli. Tourists have been killed at each of these, yet the proportion is miniscule compared to the numbers that watched awesome eruptions and came away unscathed.

Iceland is way too expensive to visit just to see a quiet volcano.

Mike,
Sorry if my comment seemed grumpy. It is just that every vacation season there are articles about avoidable deaths, just this week a climber was killed when he fell from an ice-covered peak in Sweden. It is not that the risks are great, it is that people treat risks with disdain. In this regard, volcanoes are no different from other potential dangers.

Yes, some people treat risks with disdain. Some people even take up base jumping. But life itself entails a 100% chance of death for every one of us. I say let's enjoy it while we can!

@ posts 19, 20 and 22 - Diane, Lurking and Irna - The BBC showed a fascinating programme a few months ago about a great flood around 6,000 years ago, which it suggested formed the Black Sea and drowned much of the coast of Europe, including the North Sea and the Mediterranean. The origin of this flood was suggested to be an inland sea in the middle of North America and proof of its origins was to be found in channels on the sea bed, off the East Coast of the north of North America, which indicated a wall of ice had slowly lifted at the end of the last Ice Age causing this inland sea to flood into the North Atlantic. Is there any other evidence of such an inland sea to back up this version of history?

Um, does sakurajima always blow ash?

http://webcam-svo2.pr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/local/camera.html

Well, here is the follow up to my last... de-spamified

----

@Chris[25]

Well, I did a plot of the 30 day world wide quake energy back to 1974 verses the smoothed Monthly Sunspot Number and the Monthly average AP index. (the AP is a measure of the overall geomagnetic activity)

After crow-baring those three traces into the same plot and getting each one's scale correct... it looked like a confusing mess. I did a 3 month smoothing on it and it didn't look much better. So, instead, I made 3 separate scatter plots comparing the three measurements to see if there was any sort of correlation that might yield a clue. For the AP vs quake energy, no; SSN vs Quake energy, no; SSN vs AP - yes. (to be expected, the sun beats on our magnetosphere all the time)

Here are the plots:

SSN vs Quake: i49.tinypic.com/mv41tf.png

AP vs Quake: i50.tinypic.com/6ru3ih.png

Note: there might be something there, but your gonna need better math than I can provide to get at it.

SSN vs AP: i49.tinypic.com/syuzqc.png

Thanks for that link parclair, I had just started watching it when BOOM sakurajima erupts!

@Bev-- Do you think there were pyroclastic flows? I swear it looked like pyroclastic fountaining-downhill clouds, not just steam or clouds or fog---

I think it was Par, there was a definate ash eruption just before it happened, did you notice the whole side of the mountin steaming too? I half expected it to collapse mt st helens style.

@Bev. Well, that was something different-- ;-)

Irna #22 thanks for that link. I forgot about the Colorado River part of the equasion.

There are records of the Japanese sailing across the Pacific. There was a ship that was lost and never got home and there is an island off the coast of South America that was inhabited by some people that had been shipwrecked there. They became rather sucessful and intereacted with those on the mainland and this is thought to be where the oriental eyes that you can see in some of the carvings. The age of the time period of the carvings and when the ship sailed coincide. I learned this from a friend of mine who was born in Argentina. He had a lot of history stored in his brain. I wish he was still alive. I could have had the chance to learn more from him.

I would suppose if there is any kind of "ship" out there, it is most likely a row boat. LOL

There is a story about a prospector who supposedly found a lot of gold in the desert and carried it back to Los Angeles. When the next season came for him to go back out to the claim, he couldn't find it again. There are so many tales of lost bonanza mines all over the place in CA and also Nevada. Too bad they didn't have GPS then, eh?

@Lurking(52) Nice. Thanks for the pics. I'd need the underlying data if I wanted to do anything with it. I may gather something together in the future.

This is a little off volcano topic here but a few years ago I plotted the temperature per day for the last 40 years in excel. There is an apparent warming trend spreading into the colder months. If you take a bell curve (avg temp vs. days of the year), peaking around July or so, it's fairly narrow early on. But it's starting to widen, so to speak and more so quickly towards march/Feb than Oct/Nov.

Anyways, nice posts here.

planetary phase the term used to describe the appearance of the illuminated section of a planet like lunar phases.The planetary phase depends on the relative position of the Sun, the Planet,and the Observer year 2010/planetary/possible Earthquakes,volcanic activties and tsunami warning!!!!!!!!DESCRIPTION...2010 Jupiter and Saturn lining up amost the hole year for opposite positions and gets in conjunction around.....04.03.2011....Earth aligning twice during 2010 to Jupiter and Saturn position,and align regular to the inner planets of Mercery and Venus.Uranus also is in closed alignment to Jupiter and very slow moving.on the 12th of june there was alignment when katla also shown increase earthquakes before and on the 12th june and 7.7m in india same day 2010. anyway there is very dangerous PLANETARY ALIGNMENT starting the 21/22/23rd September 2010with a G-FACTOR HIGH+ so that were connection is all from ......EUISQP EUROPEAN INSTITUTE FOR SPACE QUANTUM RESEARCH or website Http://www.supernovae-energy.com/2010-haiti-earthquake.htm as haiti and chili earthquake was related to planetary alignment

*squint* Y'all clearly are not remembering a post here, of just one month ago.

Sakurajima's eruptions poised to break record. May 12, 2010.

KAGOSHIMA (Kyodo/Japan Times News service) The Sakurajima volcano in Kagoshima Prefecture erupted Tuesday for the 500th time this year, raising the possibility that the mountain will have its most active year on record, topping the 548 eruptions of 2009.

The Kagoshima Observatory confirmed the 500th eruption at 2:02 a.m. At this pace, it will have the largest number of eruptions since officials started keeping comparable records in 1956, it said.

All 500 have been minor eruptions at the Showa vent, which is at about the 800-meter level, and no eruptions have been observed so far this year at the relatively large Minamidake vent, at about 1,000 meters, the observatory said. The Showa vent has been active since June 2006.

"We see no precursor of a large eruption that would come with a lava spout, but the level of magma movement has been gradually rising," an observatory official said. "There is a big possibility that the volcano will have more than 1,000 eruptions this year."
~

Clearly, Sakurajima is providing quite the show this year to the locals and webcam voyeurs alike - when the weather permits, that is.

Passerby, thanks for remembering about Sakurajima-- heh, I've got problems in that area (my SO and I figure that between the two of us, we've a full brain). I need to remember to check archives. ;-)

Well, now that I've finally found some cams that are on the volcano, it's been added to my watch list. Now, if I can only find the data to go along with the pictures. (Will search tomorrow).

Sakurajima has been erupting almost daily since 1955. In terms of the energy of its regular explosions it might qualify as the world's most active volcano. I met the head of the Sakurajima Volcano Observatory last year and he said the eruptions were smaller on average but more frequent than during a previous peak of activity in the 1990s. It is my favorite volcano as the most spectacular night eruptions I've ever seen were there.

Two Large EQs in Papua, Indonesia!
MAP 7.0 2010/06/16 03:16:30 -2.141 136.460 28.8 NEAR THE NORTH COAST OF PAPUA, INDONESIA

MAP 6.4 2010/06/16 03:06:05 -2.450 136.497 25.1 NEAR THE NORTH COAST OF PAPUA, INDONESIA

Today's thread is full of various and rich information. I'll need a couple of more days to digest all discussions posed here: correlations of EQs and magnetic storms, Sakura-jima, current Eyjaf's eruption, Taal...
Thanks everyone to keep this blog alive and kicking.
BTW Another huge aftershock in Papua and to big 5s in Alsaka!
Solar activity? Lurking? Is there still time to include in your plots this UTC june 16 shaky beginning?
And yes, something very interesting seems to be happening on Ãórólfsfell cam.

@Birger: I see there was also a Magnitude 4.1 in SWEDEN
2010 June 15 20:30:48 UTC
Lurkingggg!

@Renato I Silveira

I didn't find a correlation, I found something that might be interesting. I just don't have the skill to make much sense of it yet, and it might be nothing. I'm suspicious of what I'm seeing since the two numbers I am comparing are several orders of magnitude away from each other and I'm not sure that it's worth going after. When all the dots gather over on one side and leave one waaaay out on the other side... I start thinking "noise."

@Chris [59]

AP Index from here: www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/geomag/kp_ap.html
(in the FTP link there)

Monthly Smoothed SSN from here: sidc.be/sunspot-data/

Quake data from here: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/epic_global.php

Dunno how to point you at the binned quake data, I took the Joule energy conversion for each quake and summed them up in 30 day bins. I have a spreadsheet that I do this in and can change the increment to whatever time series I want to look at. 15 minutes is what I was using for the other Iceland quake charts I've done.

In those three sets of data, I arbitrarily threw out every thing before 1974 since the sets were not complete for the time before 1973. (I also tossed out 1973 by mistake)

@leon [60]

Then you will find this interesting. It's the quake incidence as compared to the Lunar phase over the 2004 to 2009 time frame. That's as far back as I ran the data since I ran into a patience issue and having Excel juggle in data from 5 different spreadsheets at the same time. I just haven't (still) gotten up the wherewithal to force feed this into a DB server. The last time I did that (Hurricane data) I never got back to actually looking at the data after I set it up. Sort of an exercise in functionality and a short attention span. In a nutshell, that means that there is a large amount of quake data that this chart does NOT cover. Also note that the dwell time of the Moon at each phase point has been factored out. If you don't do that, the number of quakes ramps up pretty high and skews the data at Full and New moon. At those two aspects, the relative angular motion of the moon is pretty low, so natch you catch more quakes then.

http://i45.tinypic.com/vytdub.png

I'm not too sure how excited I would get with respect to planetary alignments. When you account for the masses and the min/max distance to Earth, the amount of gravitational variation that you feel from the other planets is pretty puny when compared to the Sun's effect.

Max gravitational effect on Earth compared to the Sun

Venus -- 0.00008% to 0.00335%
Moon -- 0.48377% to 0.62862%
Mars -- 0.00022% to 0.000004%
Jupiter-- 0.00222% to 0.00588%
Saturn --0.00023% to 0.00042%

Though if you want to get really squirrelly there does seem to be a psuedo correlation on the Sun's spot cycle with respect to Jupiter's orbit, but I haven't really looked that closely at it.

There is considerable evidence that gravimetric forces, however apparently 'weak' can have effects on earthquakes and volcanic activity.

To support this statement I would direct you to the findings of the space probe re Jupiters moons, and in particular its volcanic moon.

It was thought that Jupiters moons would be cold, dead lumps of rock due to thier distance from the sun - not so. The orbital resonance of the moons, and the gravimetric forces exerted results in heating of the core of the moons, and subsequent volcanic activity, with one moon (cant quite remember which one) being highly volcanic and hot. Quite fascinating - visit the NASA site for more information. It boils down to the fact that gravimetric forces result in small degress of squashing and flexing of the moons crust and core during its orbital rotations, which generates internal heat through friction forces.

The point is, if gravimetric forces can produce such activity in the coldest reaches of our solar system, then logically speaking, small gravimetric forces on the warm earth via planetary alignments should be expected to produce effects here - so IMHO it is likely that factors you outline are likely to have effects on earthquakes and volcanic activity.

QUAKE IN SWEDEN

As Renato noticed we had a 4.1 in the northern parts of Sweden. I was mightily surprised of the strength of it while I was watching some Worldcup Football comentary on the TV.
It felt like a sharp tug of the entire house to the left and then a 30 second long rumble that slowly declined.
We have small quakes now and then, but something big like this is very uncommon. We normally have about one between 3 and 4 per year, but those are to the south of sweden. This one was smack in the middle of the Northern Scandians (one of the oldest mountain chains in the world). To put it into perspective for most of you, it is so unusual that for California it would be The Big One. When I was a kid we had one at 3.4, it was talked about for more than ten years. I suspect I will never feel one like this again here at home in my life.

Sorry for the OT Quake babble, but I was quite impressed:)

@Renato (#66) - Heh. That's such a rare thing that I did not even spot it on the USGS world map - besides, it sits right on the edge.

There is a reason for occasional quakes in our region, especially around the Gulf of Bothnia: the ground is rising after the last Ice Age; on our (East) side of the gulf it's about one cm/a. Over time that builds up stresses which need relief and a small EQ happens. 4.1 is top magnitude, though. Even I've felt an earthquake once, in 1970s; that one took place in Latvia, I think, and was around M5.

#49 Everyone has to die. You can live in your padded safety cell in your house and wait for an asteroid to strike you. But it's not how safe you live your life but what you achieve in life. I think watching volcanoes are worth the risk, and statistically it is more dangerous to drive a car then visit a volcano.

It's this whole thing of super safety that's stopped human progress. We should be moving on to Mars and beyond. Risks were acceptable in the 1600-1800s when new worlds were there to be discovered. Now nobody can die in spaceflight or any other exploration. But put the call out for people to volunteer for Mars even if you didn't come back and you'd have thousands of people I bet.

#68. I dont think you can the gravitational pull on Jupiters moon Io with any kind of gravitational pull on earth ( besides the sun and the moons influence). Io is Jupiters innermost moon. Due to a line up with two other gallileian moons Europa and Ganymede ( Resonances Io 1:1, Europa 2:1 and Ganymede 4:1 (with Ganymed beiing the biggest moon of our solar system even bigger than planet Mercury)) Io was forced into an highly elyptical orbit. And because Jupiter is so huge and Io spins around so fast (42 hours), gravity pulls on it heavily, streching it quite a bit. This caused a tidal heating and Io to be as volcanic as it appears to be, more or less one big lavalake all over its surface.
No planetary pull on earth could come even remotedly close to what Io has to go through. The planets are just too far distant. But if i go wrong here, please correct me.

Good morning,afternoon,evening to all,

IThe Icelandic Institute of Earth Sciences has a new update

Eruption in Eyjafjallajökull - Status Report: 17:00 GMT, 15 June 2010
Icelandic Meteorological Office and Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland

Compiled by: Bergthóra S. Thorbjarnardóttir, Magnús Tumi Guðumundsson, Sigrún Hreinsdóttir and Gunnar Sigurðsson.

Based on: IMO seismic monitoring; IES-IMO GPS monitoring; IMO hydrological data; web camera; lightning detection system and flights over the eruption site 11 and 14 June.

Steam clouds:
Height (a.s.l.): Have been observed at over a hundred meters.
Heading:
Colour: White.
Tephra fallout: None.
Lightning: None were measured on the UK Met Office's system.
Noises: No reports

Meltwater:
Low discharge from GÃgjökull.

Mudflood:
No mudfloods in the past few days.

Conditions at eruption site:
At the eastern, southern and western sides of the crater lake is a wall of ice. On the northern side a tephra wall rises 20 meters above the water. The ice walls at the southwestern corner of the crater are melting, i.e. at the site of the vent that was active 4 â 6 June. The rate of melting is assumed to be about one cuber meter per second.

Seismic tremor:
Low tremor level. Pulses are observed off and on.

Earthquakes:
A few small, shallow earthquakes have been recorded beneath the Eyjafjallajökull summit in the last weeks. Thirteen microearthquakes were recorded in the Mýrdalsjökull caldera from 11 to 14 June, most at a shallow depth.

GPS deformation:
The seismic activity beneath Mýrdalsjökull glacier does not appear to be related to inflation of the area. No significant vertical deformation has been observed at GPS stations at or around the glacier. However, a station at the northeastern caldera rim (AUST), moved about three centimeters towards the southwest from the 9th to the 13th of June, inward to the caldera.

Overall assessment:
The level of water in the crater lake only rose about 1 â 2 meters over the weekend. Several days or weeks are therefore likely to pass before the crater has filled with water, and up to months if the melting slows down. It is important that the water level be checked regularly. The water volume is now less than 0.5 million cubic meters. If the water level rises 20 meters, the volume will be 3 million cubic meters. The resulting flood would flow to the north, down the GÃgjökull valley glacier, and could reach a maximum of 1500-2000 cubic meters per second.

I found this very cool video display of eq's over time at Eyjafjoll
http://www.vizworld.com/2010/04/earthquakes-eruption-iceland-2010-vimeo/
hope you enjoy it.

Also, where can I find a database that holds data for the earthquakes on iceland. The one I have seems to have just lost it's longitude and latitude columns. Any help would be appreciated here.

Sakurajima is still blowing ash, Taal webcam site has been made much more user friendly since I last looked. It is now repositioned to show Volcano Island, with link to Google Earth and replay facilities.

@74 Chris,

Hi,try this link http://eyjafjallajokull.pbworks.com/ Its a live database of very useful stuff put together by the fine people here on Eruptions.

I noticed that one of the small quakes from last night was close to the Thoro cam ! We dont want that cam to fail.

Gordon, which Taal webcam do you refer to? Thanks

@ #77 (EMS) I assume this one: -

http://www.mycam-asia.tv/cams/philippines/luzon/batangas-taallake-yc/di…

#72

What I was trying to illustrate is rather more that the relatively weak force of gravity can produce marked effects, not that we have an Io like situation here.

Planetary alignments (and indeed alignments of solar systems and other galaxies on ours) can create a resonance (however tiny), and whilst the effects of that resonance may be orders of magnitude smaller than the effects exerted on Io in its orbit around jupiter, even a small gravimetric resonance would be likely to add to the earths internal energy. If the earth can be considered to be in a point of equilibrium where everything is relatively stable with only rare disturbances i.e eruptions, then any small increase in gravimetric forces exerted would be likely to add to the earths internal energy, and produce an increase in the incidence of both earthquakes and eruptions.

I tend to think of it in very simple terms. The earth at its surface (very approximately) acquires 50% of its energy from the sun, and 50% from the earths core. If the energy from the sun can be considered, for sake of argument, to be static, with a stable loss of heat from the core to the atmosphere, then gravimetric forces that occur only rarely through resonances arising from rare planetary alighnments will add to the internal energies of the earths core. Increased energy = increased motion and flow rates of both magma and thus movements of the earths plates (simple laws of brownian motion and thermodynamics).

Additionally we have a situation of global warming, and simple laws of thermodynamics suggest that this will affect the rate of global cooling i.e the warmer the enveloping atmosphere at the surface of the earth, the slower the rate of heat loss from the core = an increase in internal heat held within the planet. We are also entering a period of increased solar activity.

Thus, even though gravity is (in relative terms) a tiny force, even small changes will affect the overall equilibrium, especially when the equilibrium is already being disturbed by these factors - and I suspect that when we know enough to run proper statistical correlation analyses, we will see a direct linkage between the frequency and severity of both earthquakes and volcanoes with gravimetric forces/ solar activity/ global warming. In isolation individual effects may be small, but put them together and the effects are more marked and noticeable - I guess.

I dont know if I am making sense, and feel free to argue - Just my logic at work here, but based on some 'proven' or generally accepted scientific principles

Posts #66,#69,#70
There is a region in North America that has post-glacial uplift as strong as the Gulf of Bothnia, Sweden; it is in British Columbia, Canada.
This coastal region was also pushed 500m down into the lithosphere by the glaciers, but the minor quakes caused by present-day uplift are probably masked by the much more prominent quakes generated at the continental margin.
Maybe if you ask people in the harbors where they sell tours for orca watching they can show you evidence of the rapid rise.
Typically, you have to move a harbour once every 1-2 generations as it gets too shallow, but the powerful tides of the pacific would mask the land rise effects.
Without tides blurring the coastal line, you get a very distinct band of salt-tolerant vegetation near the beach, marking the sea floor most recently "converted".

@79: Been wondering about the pronounced and near-constant EQ pattern along the Alaskan coast and up into the Yukon. The former parallels the ridge, but the later is probably rebound related. I posted commentary on glacial rebound research and rate comparisons in Iceland, Alaska and BC a while ago (Mar-April).

Something is up at POPO again.
Very steamy.
http://www.cenapred.unam.mx/popo/UltimaImagenVolcanI.html

@81:
Looks like some nice warm moist air going up the mountain-side, and as it cools down it creates quite ordinary clouds, it is probably raining on the other side. Looks like a really good day for that, but even on a clear blue day it often happens. You see it around most mountaineous islands around the world.
I once saw it around Montserrat when sailing past on the most wonderfully sunny day, a huge billowing white cloud that extended far out over the sea from Soufriere Hills. A month later a huge billowing cloud once again hung out over the ocean, but that cloud was far far from pristine white. Rather grey, brown and black and no more where there nice Montserratian grogg to be had in port:(

ok let me explain more why PLANETARY PHASE is just as important warning as any other system: HAITI EARTHQUAKE in the very dangerous magnitude of 6.1 were impossible for the institute for space quantum physics{ISQP} to compute because on one single planet was a common line or axis with the SUN:VENUS.On jan 15th 2010,there was a ring shape solar eclipse over the Indian ocean and over Myanmar{BURMA}AND china.Even though VENUS has practically the same circumference a the EARTH,this CONSTELLATION appeared to us to pose 2 little danger,because none of the major planets were part of the CONSTELLATION On jan 11th 2010.The supernovae-planets-Earth crossing-lines all ran south of HAITI;only MARS tangent ran somewhat to the north of PORT AU PRINCE.COSMOLOGISTS,ASTROPHYSICIST AND SEISEMOLOGISTS throughout the world are being called upon to examine and take the recently discovered CONVERGENCE AND THE NEW GRAVITATIONAL PULL theory according to OLIVER CRANE AND HANS LEHNER SERIOUSLY in order to subsequently work with them.the earthquake warning from the ISQP ON SEPT16 2009,Was based on a very extreme planetary constellation on sept 17th 09 with SATURN-SUN-NEW MOON-EARTH-URANUS all along a common line or axis and the recorded consequences with the most severe earthquakes in the EQUATORIAL ZONE and the TSUNAMI;IN SAMOA show that recently discovered COSMIC GRAVITATION PRESSURE allows for projection of time and regional earthquake dangers,because the SUN,MOON AND THE PLANETS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM ALTER THE COSMIC GRAVITATION PRESSURE ON THE EARTHS SPATIALLY and temporally everyday,and the Earth crust is exposed to new,change cosmic pressure daily in visual terms,This mean the Earth crust is constantly being pressed and rolled like a foot on a soccer ball and in a extreme case compressed to the size of a baseball,which Subsequently can cause the release of the most SEVERE EARTHQUAKES IN THE EARTHS CRUST.............All of the 20 strong Earthquakes lisited below,with magnitude between 6.0 and 8.8, accured within 1week after the TSUNAMI of 27/02/10ie. between 27/02/10 and05/03/10 in the EQUATORIAL region of ASIA AND THE PACIFIC .Obviously its high time for the SEISMOLOGIST at state institutions to include the newly discovered SUPERNOVA ENERGY in their calculations as the most Signifant trigger of EARTHQUAKES so as to provide early time and area predictive warning of PLANETARY CONSTELLATIONS...................WORLDWIDE..................DATE:TOTAL EQ PER DAY above m6.0,/TOTAL EQ PER DAY
22.02.10......1........................8....................23.02.........0........................7....................24.02.........0........................1....................25.02.........0........................4....................26.02*......1=2DAYS BE4 DANGEROUS PLANETARY.6
27.02*......9=1DAY BE4 JUPITER,SUN,EARTH CON68* 28.02*......1=JUP,SUN,EARTH,FULLMOON,46*ON ONE LINE OR AXIS 01.03.10.....0..........................18..................02.03........0..........................18..................03.03........1..........................06..................04.03........4..........................07..................05.03........3..........................06..................TOTAL 20..........................195................ .THE NEXT AGLINIMENT IS TO START ON THE 21/22/23/SEPT10 VERY DANGEROUS ONE see how sept oct nov unfolds

From todays Icelandreview:
[...]

The latest members of Icelandâs highland family were named yesterday, Morgunbladid reports. The two new craters at Fimmvörduháls were named Magni and Módi. The new lava field will be called Godahraun.
Fimmvörduháls.

The proposals were made yesterday by the committee handling topographical naming and accepted by the Minister of Education and Culture.

The names stem from Norse mythology. Magni and Módi were the sons of Thor, the Norse god of thunder. It is an apt name because Thórsmörk is close to the craters.

Godahraun is named after Godaland, the location to where the lava streams. According to the committee, the idea was that the new names would coincide with the preexisting place names.

The committee took into consideration approximately 150 suggestions from all over Iceland.

Walking trails are currently being laid in the area and soon tourists will have the opportunity to walk around and examine the craters up close.
[...]

@leon: please, stop shouting. Also taking your medicine on time would be appreciated: you are not very coherent currently.

FYI: those alignments have happened before, even one of all planets in the solar system in my lifetime, and I'm still here to tell you that nothing, absolutely nothing, out of ordinary happened.

@Chris - are they going to name the volcano under Eyjafjallajökull?

The pull of the planets is not much compared to the moon and the sun. The potential is proportional to the mass of the object and inversly proportional to the square of the distance. I did a calculation on the planets many years ago and the potential Jupiter has on Earth is infinitessimely small as compared with the moon.

Although there is the tipping point, where only a small nudge can push an experiment either way. Take for example the supercooling of water in the freezer, not exactly sure of the particulars but you take it out of the freezer and it's still in liquid form and then a small tap and you can instantly watch it turn to ice ... it's pretty cool. So it is quite possible that there are some underlying planetary effects on the geologic activity.

@83:
With the risk of either sounding rather stupid, or angering a lot of religious people but here goes...

When did God shat a new moon???

I think this was a new record of things mixed together in one go, solar wind preasure, planetary gravitetic pull, solar coronas, non existant moons, super-novaii I have never heard of happening (and something tells me we all would have heard of them happening, even on a bad news day).

Cosmic Gravity Preasure new discovery??? Hm, I beg to differ. Please read up on physics, even though I have some problems myself with seeing the need of Higgs bosons and brane theory gravitometrics you still have the Feynman Quantum gravity theorem with the "push-pull"-effect of the graviton. And that has been around since the quantum-crono-dynamics hayday. I guess that you are refering here to the anti-graviton (never found particle) that instead of attracting masses, repells masses. Old news...
Sorry if I seem a bit non-exact above, I am trying my best to talk in laymans terms.
For those interested I can e-mail a paper on "Differential Partial Path-Integral Solutions to Torqued Quantum Gravitational States". Which of course quite simply is a very strange way of saying that it is a paper filled with un-digestional mathematics on unusual micro-gravity situations:)

Please Leon, if you want to use gravitational effects as a means of explaining quakes I suggest you just go with gravitational wave fronts, LIGO is the name of the research team looking for those. A GWF would probably be able to set off some quakes, problem is just that no one has ever found a GWF...
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/

Personally after doing extensive work with GWFs and other gravity-related phenomena I wouldn't even go close to trying to use any normal lining up of planets to explain anything, the forces are to small to even move an ice-cube in my afternoon drink.

But strange academic humour theories are fun, so I will invent a brand new one based on fact and sound theory for you Leon:)
In an N-set of supersymetric 11-dimensional space (for instance in something as mundane as a gravitetic Calabi-Yau room with 4 time-dimensions) you will need extreme powers for a string to vibrate. This quite extreme amount of energy will make odd things happen to the poor string, like collapses resulting in tunneling effects and singularities. Let's say that we take your everyday Higg's Boson (Yet to be seen, but it is The GOD particle) and have it existing in that 11-dimensional N-set, coupled super-symmetrically with a P-Brane, (standard theory really nowadays!) it will on and off collaps into your quite normal tunneling singularity. So what in the name of the Goat am I talking about? Micro-black holes of course! The fine thing with this is that instead of bringing energy from the usual universe into the time-lapsed supergravitational Hawking-space it will instead take energy from the 11-dimensional supersymetrical N-Set P-Brane coupling funtion and deliver it into our normal space. Neat hu?!
Well that would give energy enough to set off pretty much anything, we are talking about a kiloton of energy (I have found that people understands kiloton better than giga-joule:).
Perfect nifty theory that would make anyone happy, and it is totally within standard theory. Only problem is that no one has ever witnessed it happening. Ah... Wait a minute, we are after all inventing the all encompassing conspiration-theory, Tunguska fit's the description and we all of a sudden have an engine for the Roswell UFO!

@Kultsi, #86: I don't know. But actually this volcano has a name: Eyjafjallajökull. Its not the only case, where the name is the same, for glacier, mountain and volcano: Snaefellsjökull is another example.

Great! The iceland site I was using for eq data where lat/long data was missing is back up. Thanks for the other info sites too. Appreciate it.

And what's up with Katla? A week or so ago there were quite a few quakes there. Is it normal there? or is it residual activity from Eyjafjoll?

@Carl[88]

@leon

Like I said... the gravitational force exerted by the planets is extraordinarily small when compared to that of the Sun.

Since phase, and not distance figures heavily is your statements, lets look at that.

Here is a stack of three plots. In plot one, the earthquake energy in joules has been calculated for all quakes over 6.0, these were then grouped into 30 day increments and all of their energy has been summed. This is essentially the full amount of energy dissipated as an earthquake through out the entire world. Mag 6.0 was chosen as the lower limit since they are far less likely to go unnoticed and eliminates a lot of the increased detection numbers from technology improvements.

Plot two are the phases for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn... in percent. Natch, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are outside of Earths orbit and ever get below about 84% illumination.

Plot three is the average phase of all of those planets since plot 2 got pretty busy.

http://i46.tinypic.com/2mzkvt1.png

Now, here is my point. IF there is a correlation with planetary phase, you should see a regular repeating pattern in all of those plots... specifically appearing in the top plot. If you don't see it, then there is a pretty good chance that planetary phase doesn't play a significant role. I'm not saying that there is no effect, just that it's not something that can be noticed with all of the other forces going on.

If there is going to be an off Earth effect on Earth's quakes, it's going to be in the Sun-Moon relationship... not on Saturn. The Moon's phase actually shows the additive/subtractive relationship with the Sun's gravity. See, the Moon's gravity has a much greater effect than that of the other bodies... but it's still less than one percent of the Sun's pull.

@Carl

Sorry, but my comment to you was dropped in the edit process. It read "snicker".

The rest is directed to leon.

@Alyson, #51, there is evidence that there was an inland sea in the mid section of the US and it is, if I remember right, (LOL) partly responsible for the Kiabab (sp?) plateau which is sandstone. The Grand Canyon and Canyon Lands clearly shows the layers of the Kiabab formations. Now I am not sure of this as I am not a geologist. But I do believe there was an inland sea, probably caused by glacial melt. As for the flood at the Black Sea, I saw a program on that and they thought that it is what caused the break where Istanbul is. I know there will be somebody on here that can explain it better than I can.

On the tidal stuff, I remember back in the '60s, there was a planetary alignment and what it did was affect the tides. The sea along the European coastline was pulled back far enough to see some of the ships that were sunk during WWII. People started to go out there and they were warned not to because the tide would come back very quickly and no one would be able to out-run it. It was one of those situations that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. The tidal effect didn't last very long and it did come back in very fast. Several people drowned.

As far as I know, that is about the only effect the alignment has was on the tides. I suppose if a fault was ready to move anyway, it might, have an effect and set off a quake, though I don't think it would be very much. I am not an expert on any of this so I just don't know. I just know what I saw when the alignment happened and I don't remember anything about it affecting faults or volcanoes.

#77 Ems, Taal Lake Yacht Club at the following link
http://www.mycam-asia.tv/cams/philippines/luzon/batangas-taallake-yc/di…

Having said that, the screen went blank just after posting my comment @75, and still gives no image as of now.

Off-topic: -New insights into volcanic activity on the ocean floor
http://www.physorg.com/news195910700.html

Diane @ 93: The ultra-low tide was most likely a combination of ordinary tides plus exceptionally high air pressure*, even if someone claimed it was a case of planetary alignment. I can say this with confidence, since tidal forces are not forces apart, but the *difference* between the intensity of the force exerted at the surface of Earth, and the intensity of the force exerted at the mass center of the Earth. For the force exerted by planets hundreds of millions of miles away, that difference is so small that the total gravity excerted by individual mountains on the Earth's surface is bigger....in other words, apart from the sun and the moon, astronomical tidal forces disappear in the background "noise".

Another effect that can make the surface vary is "sieche", when a lake or partially detached piece of sea (the Baltic or the North sea) is subjected to a consistent strong wind in one direction that pushes the water to one side, until it pours back to the other side like water splashing around in a bucket. I am told the effect on lake Eire once made the surface vary several feet over a few hours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieche

sidestep ... It's still rumbling pretty good down at Baja.

Nice view of Eyjafjallajökull from Hvosvöllur cam. Is that an ash plume rising above the white clouds?

#97 Uh, uh! It's gone now.

Talking about correlations, could someone explain if there is any kind of relation between the 4.8 M occurred near Johannesburg
on Monday, June 14, 2010 at 11:51:56 UTC and yesterday's faint performance of Brazil against N. Corea? :)

Dispatching with misconceptions over the origin of the Western Interior Seaway at the end of the Cretaceous period:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway

Nope, not glacial in origin. Kaibab Plateau origin is the same period as the Western Interior Seaway, though.

Nice explanation of the Kaibab Plateau and Grand Canyon paleotopology.

www.durangobill.com/Kaibab.html

Pleasant reading on the very cool Kaibab Forest and animals
www.arizonahandbook.com/KaibabEast.htm

The Western Interior Seaway (also known as the Cretaceous Seaway) impact on Laramide orogeny of the West and other orogenies of Midwest is exceptionally important topic, and fascinating to study.

Theres a strange "ghost plume/cloud" showing above the cloud bank on Hvolsvelli cam at present ??

Hi Renato,

Yep,good steam plume coming from Eyja.

But sporadic....

Somebody tweaked the Thórólfsfell camera and for a while focused it into the glass cover of the cam. It's so dirty that it's a wonder the camera shows _anything_.

How perfectly clear is Ãórólfsfell cam now! Plume is gone.
That's it for today, fellows. I'll go to work!

Now would be a really good time to take a helo up to Eyjafjallajökull and shoot a video round there, most notably the lava trench to see if there are any obstructions and/or dams.

@104 Kultsi,

Im astonished at how good the picture is on the Thoro cam. That looked like two months worth of dirt on the lense (and possibly was.)

hi i was not shouting or meaning what written was true or not it was just a thought!i got above txt from hans lehner,president,ISQP/ISQR institute for space quantum physics and space quantum research Aatalstr switzerland of the website after iceland volcano erupted. i follow the weather/globle warming but kept hearing increases in earthquakes worldwide so i was researching the net 4 answers and came across the above address website and shown planetary phases graphs for 2010 it had shown me a dates of planetary phases for june july 10 and sept/oct/nov10 with sept being a alarge one the txt[Hans Lehner, who ever he is] he referred to was sept 21/23/30 2010 URANUS-JUPITER-FULLMOON-EARTH-SUN-SATURN-along one line or axis because a major planet[jupiter] will unfold more of its shielding effect and Earths crust will be quished to a baseball by a maxium gravitational forces displaced by 90degrees those were his word s leading me to think 2012 is that true or not event.

Anybody would be hard pressed to call that an alignment.

Top down view, centered on Earth Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune plotted.

Arcs are position of travel from 20 Sep 2010 to 30 Sep 2010.

http://i50.tinypic.com/33y6max.jpg

#108: As you do not appear to accept all the other scientific, rational comments made, please consider that an alignment is only an alignment according to your perspective.

I am sure that from Mars or Venus or any other planetary body alignments have been 'visible' over the last 5 billion years or so. They are still in orbit and do not appear to have had their crust 'quished to a baseball by a maximum gravitational force'. (sic)

Please don't worry so much.

Correction, I plotted the the neighbor of Neptune rather than Neptune. I can go back and redo it if it's of any significance to anyone. I'm not saying the name since I don't want to imply anything to or about anyone.

Meanwhile... back to the oil-cam-bot. The other day I got to see one of them cut the other one loose from some debris.

Severely OT, but it is an eruption of sorts, oil that is, Texas Tea. There has been some mention by the less than mainstream press about "fissures spewing oil from the seafloor." I have been watching these bots (ROVs) for a while, and have yet to see any fissures exuding oil. I don't discount the theory of a ruptured bore casing, the fluid hammer when the thing sank was pretty substantial. The largest chunk of evidence that the casing has a problem is BP itself... but no one seems to have noticed (in the news). If the casing is fine.. why is BP drilling to intersect the spewing borehole at 18,000 feet rather than a less time intensive shallower depth?

http://i45.tinypic.com/ht8dpz.jpg

There was a blow out in South Central Mississippi years ago that spewed saltwater and sour gas. If I remember correctly, they only went 500 to 1500 feet below the damaged section to back fill and cap it.

Makes ya wonder.

@Birger #95, I suppose that there could have been a lot of wind when that tidal outflow occurred. I am not sure about that. What I do remember is the scientists and media were saying it was due to the planetary line-up. At that time, and I don't remember the year, all of the planets were in line with the sun and I don't know the exact positions of that line-up. They were in a straight line for only a very short time. Probably seconds. I'm not sure.

It was all the rage in the news and when the sea pulled back, the line-up was said to have a part in it. We know much more now than we did in the '60s so what was reported sounds to me at this point that it was not correct.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened except that tide thing and I don't think anything out of the ordianry will happen in 2012 either. Just another day. Sorry. I just had to throw that in there. :-)

Thanks Birger.

~#111 - Hi Lurking, sorry I wasn't referring to your image (great image by the way) I was saying that alignments have always happened and as far as I know, the original perspective of the viewer of said alignment has not resulted in the 'quishing' of the planet the viewer was stood on.
If every time someone spotted an alignment the planet was 'quished' we would be very short of planets by now.

#112 Diane; I don't think anything out of the ordinary will happen either - it's the planetary millenium bug all over again.

@Lurking #111. Hehehe!

The quake swarm is going to town just north of the border in S CA. There is also one going on along the Coyote Creek and San Jacinto faults. That one is mostly on the Coyote Creek Fault.

The big swarm is along the Elsinore Fault. If you take a look at the entire map of CA and NV and where that mini swarm was in NV it is along the faults in that direction that John McPhee believed the Gulf of CA would eventually go. It has to do with the San Andreas, maybe the Elsinore and the Sierra faults along with the White Mt. fault and Owens Valley fault. This is the area I inquired about and I was told that the Gulf of CA is moving north at a very slow rate.

BTW, when I checked the maps of where that 5.7 occurred, they had a satillite map and I could see a mountainous outcrop to the west of where the quake was. I wonder what that is all about as I couldn't tell if it was a volcanic one or not. I thought it was an interesting feature.

Those looking for planetary alignment (other than sun/moon tidal effects, discussed here at Eruptions at some length earlier this year) as offering some sort of causal mechanism for earthquakes are seriously barking up the wrong tree.

Lurking, BP has already admitted to casing quality issues as one of five failure mechanisms at the Deep Horizons well.

Has anyone pointed out this very disturbing news item from Italy?

'No L'Aquila quake risk' experts probed
http://www.lagazzettadelmezzogiorno.it/GdM_english_NOTIZIA_01.php?IDNot…

Maybe our friend Boris might consider relocating, cuz one blown volcano prediction, and it's the slammer. I can hardly believe my eyes.

Totally OT: Ah stigger, ya pushed a button. The millenium bug was the real deal. (2012-- the Mayans just ran out of room on their disk ;-).

I just hate it when people say the bug was non-existent. Thousands and thousands of people worked looonnnnngggg hours just to make the human race safe. The effort just goes to show what a coordinated international effort could do for our future.

The bug was simple-- 99 percent of the computer coding (hard and soft) had 2 digits for year. There were bazillions of branching tests using "is year>99" Examples:
if year is > 99 then pull the rods out of the cooling tank (something is wrong) or
is the year of the credit card charge> 99 then reject the charge.

For the 50 years prior to 2000, this would be a valid test.

This was because computers were very expensive, and didn't have a whole lot of memory, so every bit of 'nonessential' code was dropped.

Everyone thought that no code would last for 10-50 years, and that it would be rewritten prior to the year 2000. Hah. No such luck.

I was in a place to be able to see just how large the problem was-- and it was everywhere: Banking, shipping, gps, flight navigation systems, nuclear plants, computers themselves: think of something capable of being dangerous, inconvenient, or totally wiping out assets, and the code was lurking there. Heck, we even found it in 1998/99 PC operating systems.

Some of this code was so old that only the compiled coding remained, the original program lost to the trash. No one was sure WHAT the code actually did-- was it important? not? I attended weekly meetings where very, normally calm managers looked wild-eyed because of what they had found (or not found). I attended conferences where people met to share findings and fixes. And wow, I didn't sleep the nights after those conferences.

Fortunately, the pols and business people all around the world got it and start funding the efforts in time to pay off.

I had a new year's party for the year 2000 attended by many people in the computer biz, and we watched the news as the time changed around the world (if there were any problems, they'd show up in New Zealand, Australia and Japan first, we in the US would have time to run to our businesses). It's the only time I've permitted cell phones to be on in my house.

By the time the clock turned to Europe, we were relaxing--

So, the next time you think of the millenium bug, think of all the people who didn't want to die who fixed all those dangerous systems so they worked on 20000101.

Rant done. ;-D

@Lurking (#111) - A newspaper headline stated, "There is a ring of debris around "

In another vein: Sakurajima is spewing debris - ash - quite friskly. A lot of it flows down the mountainside; I suspect if the ejecta were just a bit coarser, there would be full-bore PFs. That two-vent system apparently makes the air currents quite freaky: at the moment there is a normal-looking, rising plume, but right after sunrise it went out almost horizontal.

#118 Duh! count on blog software to remove the punch line. After "...around", there was "Neptune's neighbor" in brackets.

Yeah, Sakurakima is cooking today (before sunrise, I could see the (faint) light of explosions. I think that they zoomed the Taal cam in on the volcano--It looks closer today.

@parclair #117 - Amen to that!

I cooked some inventive algorithms to make things look like they always had been; in the end, no problems.

The Taal pic at least becomes a lot larger if you point the mouse to it...

Is it just me, or are there two vents blowing at Sakurajima?

@Passerby [115]

Yeah, I know about the quality it being contributory to the event, but no one seems to be cognizant of what a fluid hammer would or could have done at lower levels. In drilling, they vary the composition of the drilling mud when they encounter fluid loss into the surrounding strata so that it can fill the voids and stop the loss of lubricant (mud). Then once they reach the target depth they back the stringer out and form/set the casing with cement. (sometimes they do this several times as they go deeper) That's what they were finishing up when this thing went down.

If the casing is split at a strata midpoint in the bore, there may be additional crude/gas being injected above the pay area in strata that didn't ordinarily have oil in it. Since most of the Gulf Shelf is highly porous sand/silt at some point of forming into sandstone/shale, you have to wonder if the level of background seepage will increase even after this thing is capped. It also asks the question of can it be capped. I think BP is hedging their bets by going deep, or else they already know that this is or could be going on.

Anecdotally, the idea that there is a bulge of the seafloor around the site evident only from the GPS readings make me wonder if that may be the case. But comparing screen caps of the bots over time indicates differently (depth readings).

I'm hoping that the statements about the bulge are just an indication of people not knowing how to read their gear... or that the site was on a pre-existing dome in a dome prone area.

@parclair NoCal USA

Heh... yes Y2K was very real. The military went through a massive inventory of equipment trying to identify and fix potentially problem systems. Even at that some stuff was missed and I was perplexed when our ship started tracking backwards on a computer display. Turns out a single circuit card that relayed positional data to it had the Y2K bug. We were sent a replacement card and until it arrived we had to update the data manually. I think it was a one off since no one else seemed to have the problem.

htt://www.supernae-energy.com/press_release_from_16_september.htm

http: for the above i missed the p off

sorry that web site above that i posted is not found however this website is www.supernovae-energy.com i say no more

@Lurking 123. Yeah-- that was one of the myriad problems faced-- not all the components in a shipment of computers, say, are the same. As a result, testing one computer from a shipment didn't necessarily mean all the other computers in the shipment would test out equally well.

There was only one computer manufacturer whose equipment from one shipment would have all components made by the same manufacturers. (I *think* I remember the name, but since I'm not sure, they shall remain uncredited).

I'm sure the uncertainty rule applied to most of the components of most of the equipment that required reworking.

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/VAAC/BEZY/ELLR/ellrloop.html

Check out Sheveluch and Klyuchevskoy..... Both are bright and streaming ash/smoke to the SE.

@m kruger @129 I'm impressed that you could name the volcanoes. Definitely booming.

Hiya folks! Wow, it's been weeks and there's been so much to read!

But I just gotta say ... I'm certainly no science PhD and I'm struggling to remember my circumferences and diameters and stuff from grade school but I'm *pretttty sure* that all of us "small people" wouldn't fit on a planet quished into the size of a baseball. Ok maybe if BP knows for sure that we're, like, super microscopically small we would.

P.S. Leon, BP called. Your paycheque is ready.

Princess Frito-- welcome back. Did you have a good time messing around in boats?

Lots to see and talk about even tho' Eyjafjallajokull has calmed. Keep a watch on Taal for me-- I'm off for a few days.

http://www.mycam-asia.tv/cams/philippines/luzon/batangas-taallake-yc/di…

Parclair, thanks for the welcome back. No, no boats but I sure was spooked by the F2 tornado that blew through here just minutes after we last spoke. Made me re-prioritize a few things.

Thank you for the Taal cam link. I'll stay on Taal watch until your return. Enjoy your next few days!

@Leon[127]

You do realize that prediction is for Sept. 16, 2009?

"...That will briefly squeeze Earth into a baseball, with a potentially massive deformation of the earthâs crust in the EQUATORIAL REGIONS which could trigger most severe earthquakes on that same day or in the 1-14 days that follow. "

And... I'm having a problem coming to grips by what the site's author terms "axial alignment."

axial adj.

1. Relating to, characterized by, or forming an axis.
2. Located on, around, or in the direction of an axis.

axis n. pl.

1. A straight line about which a body or geometric object rotates or may be conceived to rotate.

I did find the term "axial alignment" when referenced to the torso and medical treatments.

"Tang et al. defined axial alignment with use of weight-bearing radiographs of the entire lower limb, including the hips and ankles. The mechanical axis"

So, that is probably not what was meant. All I can assume is that the author of that site is referring to the axis of the individual planets coming into alignment.

Slight problem with that.

Axial tilt:

Mercury 2.11' ± 0.1'
Venus 177.3°
Mars 25.19°
Jupiter 3.13°
Saturn26.73°
Neptune 28.32°
Uranus 97.77°

Now keep in mind that these do not change... or at least they change pretty slowly. The Earth takes about 25,771.5 years to do one full cycle in it's precession around a 23° tilt, and at that the tilt angle doesn't' change... at least on that time scale. The same thing applies to the other planets.

Given that, you are gonna be hard pressed to find a time when the axis of any of the two planets "come into alignment." With Mars, Saturn , and Neptune.. you might get close on occasion, but that is going to have nothing to do with any sort of "shielding" effect from a supernova. Physical straight line alignment where one body is in front of another, yeah, you might see something. But when a supernova goes off, and is close enough, it isn't really going to matter.

If you wish to fret over a supernova, you might pay attention to Wolf-Rayet star WR 104 at a distance of 8000 light years. Measurements of the axis show it to oriented within about 16° of Earth. Usually when a supernova goes off, the lions share of the energy comes squirting out the ends along the axis. Now, I don't know anything about the beamwidth of a detonating supernova, but if it happens to have a 16° beamwidth, we will get a pretty intense blast... see, the beamwidth is defined as the half power point. That's where you have a 3 dB drop in power when you measure the beam.

Re BP

When they tried topkill they couldnt get the drilling mud down the well past 1000 feet, and were losing a lot of mud (quite possibly into a rock fracture of formation) so there is something up there, possibly a blockage and/or a rupture. For anyone interested, there is a good blog where lot of oil people (and others so you have to skim to find the right posts and get people who know what they are talking about) have debated the problems and issues at The Oil Drum (not sure about protocol of linking to other blogs). They are having to go for what they term 'Bottom Kill' to bypass the damaged area of casing - there are lots of concern about leakage into geographical formations, leakage up the annulus, and sand wear on various key parts as flow rates appear to be increasing.

@JulesP ~ The Oil Drum has been mentioned here before, so I think many here are familiar with it. I agree that you have to skim to find entries from people who know what they're talking about. It's pretty sad, considering the seriousness of the situation.

@JulesP[135]

Well.. this evening I was seeing what appeared to be many white clods of what is probably natural gas mixed in with the oil. I don't know what that means. It had been solid crude for the longest time. I have always been told that the gas in a well usually resides above the oil. I do know that there are two shallower pays there, both natural gas. Are they feeding into it now or has another chamber/space opened up to the spill?

Hi all, just watched an excellent show on the cable station PlanetGreen (add a .com). It was called "Engineering Volcanoes" and was really informative. It matched different volcanoes with the tests used to predict eruptions and magma locations. It even explained high frequency vs low frequency vs tremors. It introduced a new theory of magma chamber development. Well worth searching out. :-)

Referring to mjkbk's comment (#116). The accusations against the members of the "Major Risks Commission" are indeed a haunting issue. The accusations are based on them failing to warn of the L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009 in Central Italy, which killed 300 people, in spite of an ongoing seismic swarm (nothing to do with volcanism, though) that had started three months earlier.

This is to be seen in the light of allegations by an Italian technician to have predicted the earthquake (he did publicly predict a major earthquake, within maximum 24 hours, in a location 80 km away from L'Aquila, and 6 days earlier, causing panic). Unfortunately this person was given much credit by the Italian public and news media, although his "method" had never been published or made available otherwise. Most essentially it's questionable how much sense a prediction with a time window of maximum 24 hours can have, especially if it's voiced for a megacity, like, say, Naples, and always considering the possibility of a false alarm.

Up to now there is international consensus that there is no way to predict earthquakes; all approaches thus far are based on statistical forecasting which does not say much about the timing of an earthquake. In recent time, dealing with earthquakes has seen a shift away from trying to predict (or forecast) earthquakes to prevention. Prevention means, creating public awareness and preparedness, enforcing earthquake-resistant construction (which is possible, look at the outcome of the February M 8.8 Chile earthquake in comparison with the January M 7.0 Haiti earthquake).

An open letter has been set up to the President of the Republic of Italy, which you can read at

www.mi.ingv.it/open_letter/

and if you like, you can sign it. This is a very important issue, in a very critical moment for research and education in Italy, which is suffering constant cuts in funding (in Berlusconiland what counts is basically "bread and games" - though the "bread" factor seems to become more difficult, the "games" are going full speed).

@parclair #117 Thanks. It pushes my buttons too. In the run up to the millenium I went through over a million lines of old FTN code fixing two digit year problems. It's pretty much all I did for 3 years and it annoys me when folk say it was a hoax. Nobody says thanks for fixing our old code.

@Leon:
Leon, you are probably a well-meaning person that just believe well about people thinking outside the box. And it is true that many great ideas comes from people thinking outside the box. That said I wish to strongly warn you of believing everybody thinking outside the box, especially if they are building strange things. Like equipment ment to capture strange energies. They are almost always after your money.

And after going through your Hans Lehners site I positively gagged. Even though I really try to keap my identity secure on the internet for good reasons, I will have to say a couple of things here that I hope that you will take at face value, if you choose not to believe me it is up to you, I am just trying to help you here.

First of all as you might have suspected I have a doctorate in physics, yepp, in quantum gravity states to be exact. I also have done some work in wave scattering patterns but that is beside the point. For the last ten years I have worked as a consultant regarding new energy concepts
for an investment company, and the last 3 years as an investment director. Believe me when I say that I have seen every concievably crack-pot idea on the planet regarding energy production. Before Lehner the worst i've seen was the guy who wanted to solve all the problems with wind-power by removing the wings from the pylons. He was sure that the wings was un-necessary on an ordinary plant...
Now I have a new record. The explanation would be long and windy, to long for this foraii.

Leon, I suggest that you study two things, one is the theory of science, read Karl Popper, he invented a magnificent set of bull-shit detecting mental equipment. After that study physics yourself, you seem to be interested in it.

And Leon, please, the moons phazes have nothing to do with the gravity pull really. It doesn't matter if it is full, new, waning, or waxing both on and off, nor if it is dusty or halloed. That is not the reason why you get different gravity pull on tides. It is as you probably have guessed the combined gravity from the sun and the moon, combined with those two bodies negative-lagrangian points.

Go out into the great blue yonder, arm thyself with tools of critical thinking, and do great things.

COLUMBO REEF

Back to large volcanos and quakes!

As you all know 3500 years ago a small Island in the egeian sea named Thera quite simply blew up, ending the minoan culture. In it's aftermath the remnants became the vacation island of Santorini, which are the rand islands of the caldera. It has a new nice volcano island with a couple of craters going on and off now then called Nea Kameni.

During the last decade it has had some uplifting in the northern parts of the caldera, believed to be due to fresh magma moving upwards. That indicates that a new volcanic went might open up in the future in another part of the caldera than Nea Kameni, I hope I am around in a boat when that happens:)

Interestingly enough the Thera Caldera is not the part that has the largest quake activity, that honour goes to yet another place, the under-water volcano of Columbo Reef.

For those of you planning a vacation I seriously suggest going here, it is a stunningly beautifull place, especially if you sail into the caldera as the sun goes up, the first lights hitting the white houses clinging to the cliff-sides is a quite simply a moment of perfect beauty. And to boot it also has this magnificent volcanic past, you really understand the power of volcanos when you visit.

Heres a nice link!
http://ismosav.santorini.net/index.php?id=381

Hey remember all the silly nonsense that global warming was causing the ice in Iceland to melt, causing the volcanic eruption.

If that's the case, then I think all that snow in South Africa (1st time in 20 years) must have then caused the Jo-berg earthquake.

Fair is fair, if the media and magazines like New Scientist are going to make silly stories like that, what about South Africa? It's gotta be linked just like Iceland?

http://fromtheold.com/news/43-magnitude-earthquake-hits-johannesburg-so…

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Winter-strikes-with-a-vengeance-…

Thought you would all like these :) - from the PhilVolcs site

a) their preparedness materials (which only tells tou how to trek to the volcano!) http://www.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph/images/PHIVOLCS_Fliers/Volcano_fliers/t…

And - to put you all out of jobs - how to predict a volcano eruption http://www.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph/images/PHIVOLCS_Fliers/Volcano_fliers/h…

In relation to Taal Lake - is it looking greener - from algae due to increased lake temp?

Thank you very much Lurking, for all this great jpgs.

fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar

here you got some script,
for all, that want to see some alignments and the one right now.

I think here is your problem,
i46.tinypic.com/2mzkvt1.png
the "phases", the data is too regular, just watch the alignment script and test lets say the last 20 years for 6/21, you will see thats never the same alignment (same gravity-force).
Simpel to understand when you think about the revelation time of the outer planets.
Next thing is gravity itself, someone mentioned it before, the "pull-push"-thing. (im sure about its a "weak.force", but while we dont fully understand it, there could be additional effects when they are in some alignment, i think you will find some magnetic-trick videos playing with 2 magnets)

Gravity like we get thought in school is just an attraction to the center of the mass, i think its alittle too easy, everything got a + -, action reaction, pull push.
So we have to think about gravity not just as pulling things to its center. Thing about it like a magnetic field.

nasa.gov/images/content/456076main_hst-2010-15.jpg
nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/planet-eater.html

Jeah i love this picture.
We know our gravity-law doesnt really fit for the planets, thats where dark matter comes into play. Watch this Jupiter-like planets, its really close to its star and getting absorb slow after time, hes still rotating around its star, but in such a small distance that its getting slowly absorbed, and a Jupiter-like-Ring has formed around the Star.
So yeah it could be that dark matter is compressed near a Star so its force is even more extensive, and can that way hold the planets in its orbit.

Not a good explanation for me, i think we have just not fully understand how gravity really works.
Did you know when you measure gravity, with a test for a long period of time, gravity changes.
blazelabs.com/f-u-massvariation.asp

So lets just say, everything is a little strange.
We will not find a way, that we can say hey in 2 day 5 h 24 min and 30 sec will hit a eq there. There are too much variables we will not be able to do that for many years, if even possible.

Did you know that Uranus is tilt 90° with its axis to its orbits? its always facing the same side to the sun.
(think about earth still with the axis at N/S-Pole, but lets say the N-Pole is facing the sun and its rolling an its orbit around the sun)
The science theory for that, and the only "good" one yet (just a computer model).
Saturn jumped above him! pulled him with its gravity so he got twisted for 90° and rotated since then that way,
This is the explanation for the "late bombardment", because the gravity change in our system let comets out of the Oort cloud enter the solar-system.

So we have to look at a big picture talking about such things, thats makes it so difficult to get trusted infos for such a long period of time, with all of its things its may effect, and which play game.

So sorry for the OffTopic again.
Thank you for the great blog, learning alot from all of you.

ps: here some pictures and the articles too it.

nasa.gov/images/content/449845main_voyager20100430-226.jpg
science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2008/09/23/23sep_solarwind_resources/bubble.jpg
science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/23sep_solarwind/
since this day of the news, the sun is gone even quieter, think for yourself.
interstellar.jpl.nasa.gov/interstellar/probe/introduction/images/04Cloud3_color_PCL_sm.gif
interstellar.jpl.nasa.gov/interstellar/probe/introduction/neighborhood.html
interstellar.jpl.nasa.gov/interstellar/probe/interaction/images/08SuessHelioCart3_lg.gif
This is interesting
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020210.html
science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2009/12/22/23dec_voyager_resources/localcloud_frisch_big.gif

Thank you very much Lurking, for all this great jpgs.

fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar

here you got some script,
for all, that want to see some alignments and the one right now.

I think here is your problem,
i46.tinypic.com/2mzkvt1.png
the "phases", the data is too regular, just watch the alignment script and test lets say the last 20 years for 6/21, you will see thats never the same alignment (same gravity-force).
Simpel to understand when you think about the revelation time of the outer planets.
Next thing is gravity itself, someone mentioned it before, the "pull-push"-thing. (im sure about its a "weak.force", but while we dont fully understand it, there could be additional effects when they are in some alignment, i think you will find some magnetic-trick videos playing with 2 magnets)

Gravity like we get thought in school is just an attraction to the center of the mass, i think its alittle too easy, everything got a + -, action reaction, pull push.
So we have to think about gravity not just as pulling things to its center. Thing about it like a magnetic field.

Not a good explanation for me, i think we have just not fully understand how gravity really works.
Did you know when you measure gravity, with a test for a long period of time, gravity changes.
blazelabs.com/f-u-massvariation.asp

So lets just say, everything is a little strange.
We will not find a way, that we can say hey in 2 day 5 h 24 min and 30 sec will hit a eq there. There are too much variables we will not be able to do that for many years, if even possible.

Did you know that Uranus is tilt 90° with its axis to its orbits? its always facing the same side to the sun.
(think about earth still with the axis at N/S-Pole, but lets say the N-Pole is facing the sun and its rolling an its orbit around the sun)
The science theory for that, and the only "good" one yet (just a computer model).
Saturn jumped above him! pulled him with its gravity so he got twisted for 90° and rotated since then that way,
This is the explanation for the "late bombardment", because the gravity change in our system let comets out of the Oort cloud enter the solar-system.

So we have to look at a big picture talking about such things, thats makes it so difficult to get trusted infos for such a long period of time, with all of its things its may effect, and which play game.

So sorry for the OffTopic again.
Thank you for the great blog, learning alot from all of you.

ps: here some pictures and the articles too it.

nasa.gov/images/content/449845main_voyager20100430-226.jpg
science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2008/09/23/23sep_solarwind_resources/bubble.jpg
science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/23sep_solarwind/
since this day of the news, the sun is gone even quieter, think for yourself.
interstellar.jpl.nasa.gov/interstellar/probe/introduction/images/04Cloud3_color_PCL_sm.gif
interstellar.jpl.nasa.gov/interstellar/probe/introduction/neighborhood.html
interstellar.jpl.nasa.gov/interstellar/probe/interaction/images/08SuessHelioCart3_lg.gif
This is interesting
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020210.html
science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2009/12/22/23dec_voyager_resources/localcloud_frisch_big.gif

sorry for the 4 times post,

and for this off Topic talking here.

Sorry Dr. Erik Klemetti!

@148

Will this also effect the volcanoes as well as making it colder?

http://journalofcosmology.com/ClimateChange111.html

What is "this"?

Just what i think there are alot of questions out there, and theories in the background of the groundbreaking science, that needs to be discussed.
Mh i think its getting "stranger", i will search for a link, that shows that the ice at the poles is getting thicker, but yeah the overall ice ice is getting smaller, so the "range of weather" is getting higher.

When just one vulcano of the 3-4? more called supervulcano will erupted in the next 20 years, mhh yeah i think its getting coolder.

Couple of questions maybe someone here can answer me.

Why sometimes is there a band of earthquakes that sit about 1km below a volcano? The icelandic meteorological service data shows depth, and that is relative to the surface height, right? It mentions (the distance from the hypocenter to the epicentre) and I think I should take that to mean the distance to the ground surface.

So if I have it right, am I correct in saying that the all earthquakes measured at 1km depths are actually at different depths relative to a 0 point sea level? So if you map an event you need to take into account the surface elevation and re-adjust for that?

Also how do you distiguish between fault slip tremors and magma injection tremors? If there's a volcano above the tremor then it's magma injection? If you map the tremors at Aardbeving you can see the slip line, so I'm guessing those are fault plane slips.

We have more "NOW"-effects on the world, "oil-spill", oil tankers, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc that needs to be take care of.
Im not saying we dont have to take an eye on your emission, an longterm effect.
But we see, we have TOO much effects on your species, in all places over the world, that we have to stop thinking somebody will take care of them.
We all just need to take care of world problems, we have the possibility to trade millions in seconds, too make a worldwide press conference in minutes, still the force that leads the human discussions, politics, is slow.

everybody could get a vote,
when there would be one
fair, legal, open-source, secured, not commercial site,
voted and promoted by enough people and not faked WEBSITE, Network (you know what i mean)
where the people are not afraid of registration because they get spied or get e-mails or so one!
So we could vote share think all together! but still we dont use it that way because we have no time to think about such things, because we need to work so we can life.

We have the Internet but still its is too complicated haha.
"It would just be too great! but we are afraid of sharing our ideas under our name!"

We dont need to work for our living, when all resources would be used smart! The Ideas are there all over! food, water a home for everybody!
lets work on real problems! and not whats the next car i will buy, we need to go to the politician they need to do the right dissensions NOW! and not in a half year! we have no time!

sorry but this is all crazy :(

Hello Greg!

Well, the sunspots are by now a fairly accepted theory based on observation. It is empirically proven that they under the period of observetion have had a cyclicity of 11-13 years from high, to low, and back again.
It also exists a high correlation between sunspots and smaller temperature variations and weather changes.

So where is the BUT..? And there is quite a few here...

For one, the sunspots give a much lower change in temperature than has been observed since 1950, this is empirically proven through data analyzis, anyone can recalculate this with pen and paper. So the sunspots are not the answer to the average temperature increase recorded since 1950.

The other thing is that if you look at the paper refered to, and turn your eyes to Figure 2 you will notice that you have roughly 250 years of green with nice periodic swings between highs and lows. Then before that you have everything in RED.
The red field is unsubstantiated guesswork based on no measurement or observation at all. There simply exist no data from these earlier times.
What does this imply? Well, to put it shortly, everything before that is unsubstantiated guesswork that has been deducted purely from insufficient temperature variation data from the few written records that exist and some ice-drill-cores.
The icecores are wonderfull in many ways, but the sampling rate is rather low, and will never be large enough to say anything about the average terran temperature. More about icecores below.

So in effect the so called "Maunder minimum" might not have taken place at all. There might have been any other thing producing the low temperatures during what is called "the little ice age", than sunspots.
For all we know the sunspots kept puttering at the same swingrate during that time. The likelihood is that they did, the sun is so massive that any changes to it's processes would probably be quite spectacular and someone would have written it down somewhere, and that is counting that we even survived it...

In the icecores you have a lot of interesting things trapped, there is a lot of sot and ash for instance during this period, which might suggest volcanos as a driving force, or perhap's a meteor-strike.
Another thing that has been suggested is that the warm-period before (when we grew grapes in Sweden during the Viking age) prevented the ice-salination pump off Greenland that drives the Gulf-stream, and that it set off the small ice age. Personally I believe more in this theory than in sunspotology.

So to answer your question Greg, nope, it will not in all likelihood be colder because of this other than the normal sunspot-cyclicity, and it will not in any likely way inflict any volcanos.

Scientific Criticism Tip of the Day!
If you find a "scientific" journal that charges it's authors money to publish, than the likelihood of them actually performing any great amount of critical peer-review is low to say the least. The serious journals do not charge money for publication.
This paper says it peer-reviews, but I do not get their numbers to work. Most scientific journals decline to publish around 80 percent in total and almost a 100 percent of the article-writers that are not declined will be put through a gruelling process of re-write before being published.
This of course goes for the really serious journals. Nature for instance turn down flat out about 95 percent and make everyone re-write time and again... Horrible experience to say the least:)

@Dennis
Are you the Dennis formerly known as Leon?
Slow down on all the conspiracy theories, there is enough real "crap" going on that we do not need any faked ones.
Problem is not that anybody listens in on things, problem is that no one listens really.

I am though a firm believer that the Stockholm 1958 worldcup in football never happened and that it was a staged hoax by the CIA, I have "The Proof!" hidden away in the form of a tattoo on the inside of a snake. While risking my life I will now go public with "The Proof!", sadly I had to kill the snake to retrieve the proof.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_58

@153 - Sunspots are only one component of the sun, now we see the sun in many wavelengths, but the main issue is the switching of the field and field strengths. It's interesting to note the volcanic activity during periods of minimums and maximums. The earth is in itself a big piece of iron really, and the sun is a big magnetic field generator...

1859 Carrington event, umm I think a few people noticed...

Support for the above conclusions about the immanence of a Grand Minimum is found in Makarov et al. (2010) who showed that the rest latitudes of the sunspot bands gradually tended to decrease during the past few decades (. That phenomenon was interpreted by the authors as an indication that a Grand Minimum could start around 2020 ~ 2030. The present situation may be compared with that around 1620, where the Maunder minimum was preceded by increasingly weaker Schwabe cycles

It's totally easy to agree Carl's #142 suggestion.

I saw a document on TV of eruption of Thera and I was so excited of it that decided to go there.
So I visited Santorini abt. 2 years ago. The place haf to see - Oias sunset and caldera views!

The caldera is 11 x 7.5 km and in center there is rising new volcano Nea Kameni.
I was standing on the top of volcano and you can see yellow sulphur rising and smell it.
It is now abot 130 m high and it's rising all the time...

"The world map might look differently had the Greek volcano Thera not erupted 3,500 years ago
in what geologists believe was the single-most powerful explosive event ever witnessed.
Thera didn't just blow a massive hole into the island of Santorini
â it set the entire ancient Mediterranean onto a different course,
like a train that switched tracks to head off in a brand new direction.
"

"Thera's eruption was four or five times more powerful than Krakatoa,
geologists believe, exploding with the energy of several hundred atomic bombs in a fraction of a second."

If anyone is interested, herre are few links:

http://www.livescience.com/history/080225-hs-thera.html

http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=0102-04=&volpage=photos

http://www.santonet.gr/santorinivolcano/

http://www.santorini.net/volcano.html

Greg: You missed the point I was making, before 1750 there exist no empirical data. No one surveyed the sunspots back then so there is no data for 1620... As I wrote it is all deductions from temperature variations so the entire theory is self-proving and impossible to refute.

Please note that I am not saying that the sun doesn't affect us, and it is true that we are a large magnet due to iron in abundance that revolves creating a large electro magnetic machine. The sun is comparatively bad as a magnetic generator due to very low iron concentration. The magnetic flux-lines from the sun is created through other rather intriguing processes when running a massive fusion-reaction:)

@156 So why did it get so cold during the Little Ice Age? Did the cows stop farting :P

That's not true, observations were made in the 1600s onwards, that's why we know it was so quiet.

I think a large underestimation on climate and volcanoes are the underwater volcanoes. We have a continuous ridge of voclanoes from one pole to the other along the mid atlantic ridge, with one island (Iceland) comprising 1/3 of the lava on the planet. We don't even know when most underwater volcanoes erupt.

It is interesting to note slight changes in ocean pH towards the acid direction (even though it is strongly basic), but this does not occur in lakes. Where are all the underwater volcanoes? Under the sea. About 3million of them in total!

I think these and the solar factors are the driving forces of the climate on earth, both extremely poorly understood and often ridiculed because it treads on people's feet who think they understand the climate on earth.

But they can't explain warm and cold periods on earth even when CO2 didn't change.

Greg,.

you are right with the underwater volcanoes, and yes the climate has changed dramaticly,over the time periods, we have had a global snowball,and hadnt it been for volcanoes earth would have been still frozen..
and the earth have had really warm and really cold periods, with ice ages and tropical climates where there should not be.
greenland have been icefree manytimes, and so has the poles.
the reason for these changes ,scientists argue about. since they realy dont know why it has been so.
I recon that because of volcanic eruptions,comet/asteroid impacts, landmass movement(continental drift) changing of sea currents, sun activity and other variables. has made the climate on this planet. remeber that also earth have had more Co2 in the air than it is today,during the dinosaur periods,and then the insects became much Larger than they are today.
The so called Global warming(now called climate change) is notting new on the planet and has occured since day one. but we can all agree that everytime the climate has change dramatic thing have happen, and it will probably be so this time around too..
even if all manmade co2 would have been removed,the climate changes will occur,sometimes slow,somtimes really fast.

Greg, you are missing my points:)

I do not in any way challenge the Little Ice Age, it is proven beyond any doubt you know. How is it proven? With solid empirical measurement and a bucket-load of historical written testimonies.

The difference between the temperature variation and the sunspots are that one was measured back then, the other was not measured. Greg, no one counted sunspots before 1750, even your own source shows it.

You missed that I wrote that there is ample samples of ash deposits in ice drillcores from that time, which suggests either volcanos or meteor-strike as a likely reason for the lowering of the temperatures. Problem is that we haven't found an impact crater from that time. So I would for the sake of expedient go with volcanos, and to be honest the chance is about 70 Percent that the volcano was underwater in nature. Greg, you are in error here, ocean water is not strongly basic. It is not even mildly basic. Another factoidal error here, there is not 3 million underwater volcanos in the oceans. Simple mathematical spreadpatterning says that it should be around 2,3X of them if X is the number of volcanos onland, ie. where are the 1,3 million volcanos that should be onland? Even if we guess that volcanos are twice as common underwater than onland we still would have 650K volcanos. Perhap's it is just me, but if we say that an average volcano covers 5 square kilometre of land (really small volcanos) we would have 3.45 million square kilometres covered by volcanos. Where did that go?

The thing in your reasoning that I do challenge is premierly the connection between sunspots and volcanos. To put forth a new scientific theory you need either empirical proof, or enough other things to substantiate your claim. After that you need to predict something and it must also be possible to prove you wrong.
My problem here is lack of substance, lack of prediction, and of course lack of something to refute.
Einstein for instance built his theories of relativity on sollid math and logical proof, a nice prediction that was tested (bending of light by bodies with mass) and it is very easy to refute, find one single body with mass that doeasn't bend light. That is the text-book example of a scientific theory, nowadays it is even believed to be "true" in the meaning that it will never be refuted or superseaded.

http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/sunspots.html Sunspots were not recorded in the 1600s????

Undersea volcanoes "Hillier & Watts (2007) surveyed 201,055 submarine volcanoes estimating that a total of 3,477,403 submarine volcanoes exist worldwide."

The crust is different in the ocean, it's thinner and has different characteristics to land, that's why there are so many of them. Just because you can't see the mid Atlantic ridge many people have ignorance towards it. Oceans are land producers. Making that land creates a lot of CO2! Do we know if this goes up or down? Last time I checked I couldn't find a webcam.

I'm not saying there is concrete proof, but to discount a theory for further testing in the future because you think you understand everything sounds like a religion.

@162

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VCS-48B5B0H-…

I know that Galilei, "Koppy" et al. had found them earlier, but the recording of them in the style that was done later on is another thing. Problem is that for a short while they where studied intensely, but after the galileian-papal controversy astronomical observations declined steeply. So the proof for Maunder minimums is shoddy at best.

Hm, reminds me of when the worlds most advanced undersea research ship looked for a suspected underwater volcano outside of Sicily. They searched like crazy for quite sometime, they even proved that a known underwater volcano didn't exist before they found one. Thing is that I have a problem with the notion of them being that many on pure statistics. But I am not qualified to say more than that. There might be that many, but I would guess at a much lower number. I would go with my earlier N times 2 of X as a likely offset of the thinner crust.

Would be nice if Erik or Boris commented on this!
Feels like a very relevant question:)

Now I have to get some few things done. Have a nice day.

@165 There are other records, such as Aurora records as well.

But this study might interest you. http://www.springerlink.com/content/f3g2k06k3hh801k5/

@Carl,

Carl, Iâm really enjoying watching you try to defend your crack pot theories against all comers, but you seem to be missing some obvious points.
Phased gravitational effects of the moon. Everyone knows that gravitational force is proportional to mass, so it stands to reason that a girt big full moon will exert a much larger pull than a skinny little crescent one.
Sunspots/volcanoes. Try to think of a kid with a magnifying glass burning holes in a piece of paper, but on a much bigger scale.
Youâll be trying to tell us that the world is round next.

@Carl, (& @the wild theorists)

Often when one's pet theory seems to be going down the drain, logical arguments tend to get tossed to the side.

Also, when there is not enough empirical data to form a solid theory for something that happened, people cannot leave it as is, but go and invent theories from Divine intervention to hangnails.

With the Internet, it's also very easy to put up an impressive site and spout theories, without any actual proof and with circular logic, often with quite a lot of impressive-sounding names, mostly totally out of context, if factual. The purpose varies from trying to get respect and adulation to trying to skin the marks, i.e. to make people hand over their hard-earned money.

Also, the sun can effect a probe 13billion km away from the sun http://www.dailytech.com/Scientists+Rescue+Voyager+2+Probe+on+Edge+of+S…

But it has no effect on the earth, even though the magnetic core of the earth is magnetic, and this core produces a magnetic field that interacts with the sun. For some reason, IO can be effected by Jupiter's gravity to produce eruptions, but earth is really really different.

You really think the sun has no effect on earthquakes/volcanoes on earth at all, we are just a tiny pea compared to the sun http://sloanster.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/sun__earth_size_comparison…

@164:
Did you have copy of the article? Or would I have to schlepp my neither regions to the university library to read it?
Looked rather interesting actually.

Also, if you visualize the mid Atlantic ridge properly you'll think differently. We know more about the crust of other planets like Venus or Mars then we know about earth. The mid atlantic ridge is gigantic, and in sections it's as big as the grand canyon. Only 1% has been properly explored of the whole sea floor.

You can see the ridge at Jan Mayen in the Arctic Ocean, Iceland, the Azores, Bermuda (which initially formed on the ridge but is now far west), the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Islets, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha (which has the highest point on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Queen Mary's Peak, 2 km above sea level), Gough Island, and Bouvet Island.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMaAEiEii4k&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5KOBMKwnQ

Also, it possible that magnetic or solar storms may occasionally play an active role destabilising the earth's "internal dynamo" with respect to mass rotation; thereby triggering magnetic reversals.

If this is the case, for magnetic pole flips. It seems like a very large change, when the magnetic pole flip which in turn changes the direction of polarity of every magnetic rock on earth almost. And this has no effect on lava or earthquakes? An internal dynamo flipping over lol?

If I understand Google trans. rightly, a new 17 June report on Icelandic-only IMO suggests that the crater lake at Eyja is gaining water at about 1meter cubed/second from ice melt on the southern wall...

Eric has a new post....

Hello Carl, no im not Leon.
Im just a Everyday Normal Guy.

Slow down on all the conspiracy theories, there is enough real "crap" going on that we do not need any faked ones.

where is one conspiracy in my post?
its all news data, from nasa? who should i trust when not their info ?

The only thing that is really strange is the Gravity test on the f-u- site! I'm searching for myself for more evidence in this.
But the rest is nothing more then free public and explained data by the scientist you believe in. You can make your own model about the Gas-planet that gets absorbed by its star, no conspiracy theories here, go look around what the explanation for the whole craters on the moon is (again its called "late bombardment").
i just presented official links to the topic nothing more sorry that i distracted some people.

Hello Carl, no im not Leon.
Im just a Everyday Normal Guy.

Slow down on all the conspiracy theories, there is enough real "crap" going on that we do not need any faked ones.

where is one conspiracy in my post?
its all news data, from nasa? who should i trust when not their info ?

The only thing that is really strange is the Gravity test on the f-u- site! I'm searching for myself for more evidence in this.
But the rest is nothing more then free public and explained data by the scientist you believe in. You can make your own model about the Gas-planet that gets absorbed by its star, no conspiracy theories here, go look around what the explanation for the whole craters on the moon is (again its called "late bombardment").

So yeah we have alot of crap around and not enough is being done against it.

The rest with the Internet.Website was just a dream none conspiracy theory neither. We have the technical opportunity, i said nothing more.

Sorry if i distracted some people.

Greg:
Two quick ones here. I worked with hydrophones back in the ninties, so we actually counted the eruption on the sea-bed since they blocked out the subs we tried to find. Gladly or sadly depending on what you wish for we didn't find that many eruptions as 3 million volcanos would give, that is why I am rather skeptic of that high number.

Oh my... The reversals that will dooooooooooom us. It is like the scientific version of Loch Ness:) It might well exist, but first someone has to show a photograph. And before you google for articles I must say that I have allready read most of them, nice theories with some secondary and tirtary proof. Personally I have no problem with the theory and basic concept, what I DO have a problem with is that so many see it as a dooms-day thingy.
In my opinion it would give some power-outages and a lot of work for the cartographers to redraw everything so that the magnetic north would be correct again.
Of course you know that the magnetic north is moving allready? It is called deviation and is rather pesky when you are sailing up here in the north, you always have to calculate how much the magnorthpole has moved since the sea-chart was produced. On a long leg you might be quite a way off and can easily run aground if you are not carefull. Well, at least you had to before the GPS, and soon again when the GPS network shuts down out of not enough new satellites being launched. OTing wildly here... But the point is that I think the magnorth is moving about a degree per year and that it will sooner or later be the south instead. So now suddenness, just a normal boring natural process moving sedatly.

re: #153 Seems my questions got burried. Anyone?

@birseyeUSA (#173)
Why would you use Google translate? It does a less-than-perfect job on Icelandic, and should only be used as a last resort.

Those status reports are available in Enlish, the whole story at http://www2.norvol.hi.is/page/ies_Eyjafjallajokull_eruption and an abbreviated one at http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/articles/nr/1884

first of all thanks 4 being patience with me and carl for pointing me in the right direction it was a theory that i found out and thought it was a possible, only reason i was saying was 4 feed bk and the right one of cause the topic that everyone is taking bout is the 2012 theory in my home town which lead me to this anyway some of you are god dam rude and you didnt need to talk down 2 me it was just theory i though possible 2 much media,scientist etc with different answers all the saying this saying that!

The estimate is 4% of the 3million are active at any one moment. They are not explosive volcanoes. Some are smokers, others are fissure or other type. I mean pyroclastic flows have been recorded on the sea bed, now thought to occur more then 1st thought. Emissions of gas would not always make much sound, especially a few kilometers down. You can't hear everything with hydrophones.

Some pole shifts have been quite rapid. Sure there is movement of the pole all the time, it wobbles. But we are talking about rapid movements in less then a century where a reversal has occured. Man has trouble keeping history of the geology/climate for the last 500 years, this is a millisecond in the history of the earth. We havn't seen everything and we don't know everything. Look at how silly things we used to believe in just 100 years ago. Imagine what they will be laughing at in 100 years time...

>Scientific Criticism Tip of the Day!
>If you find a "scientific" journal that charges it's authors money to publish, than the likelihood of them actually performing any great amount of critical peer-review is low to say the least. The serious journals do not charge money for publication.

Huh??

Interesting thread as always here!
Meanwhile in Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull ejected some ash about thirty minutes ago... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb2oK2kDAO4

#182 - No s*t, Sherlock! Let's hope it does not splash all those half a million cubic meters (17.7M cu ft) of water down the Gigjökull trench all at once.

Hi to all,

@173 Birdseye,I read the recent update yesterday.It dos'ent look good does it ?
@182 D9tRotterdam-Great piece of time lapse video capture there.Quite a blast of ash in a twinkle of an eye !

Looking at Taal, there are little lites, all lined up, that move from frame to frame. Yikes, it looks like the flightpath for manila is right over the volcano!

@d9tRotterdam 182... ejected something, but not ash from new magma. It went pretty much straight up... and fell straight back down again. I suspect a phreatic event as water from the crater lake gets down the conduit, flashes to steam... eventually pressure builds up and... a BLEVE of sorts :-)

#185 - All the ones I saw, this time, were on the lake. Horizon past Volcano Island is much higher, and a jet passing would be seen in one frame only.

Hi All. I love the science in all of the discussions here, though most of it goes over my head. My source for The Jupiter Effect is the book of that name by John Gribbin (PhD, and member of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy Cambridge, UK) and Stephen Plagemann, (PhD, post doc, and working for NASA) MacMillan Press 1974. The science is admittedly beyond my comprehension. I just assimilate the broad brush strokes of the theory and cannot dispute the detail. My take on climate change is based on 'Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Europe, a.d. 750â950'
By Michael McCormick, Paul Edward Dutton, and Paul A. Mayewski which suggests there can be extreme changes in weather patterns which are outside of the main climate trend.

@183 kultsi that would be awful, can you capture that if it ever happens and stick it up on youtube?
@184 Thanks, Adrian, its all about timing!
@186 Fireman, you might well be right. I thought of the word ejecta, and typed ash, its shorter!

@189 d9tRotterdam - not likely; I'd need to locate a prog to capture video stream. That would not be too hard, I did it for a vidcam at work (when I still had one - got the boot). I'd need to hack into Mila's feed, too, but that might not be too hard.

Stills, OTOH, would be a piece of cake, although they might be a bit apart; uploading them somewhere would also be doable. Making a time lapse outa 'em would also need some prog hunting.

@Chris [177] [153]

Okay, I'll give it a stab.

"Couple of questions..."

" Why sometimes is there a band of earthquakes that sit about 1km below a volcano? ..."

I don't know. I have always attributed this to instrumentation errors. The depth is determined by the shape of the waveform and the time of arrival at several stations. I don't know which one figures most heavily in that process, but I can say that as you get close to the surface the signal is going to become "less clean" and start picking up all sorts of artifacts from the varying soil/rock density and surface feature reflections. It is also possible that there may be a characteristic change in propagation that occurs at some critical level.

"Also how do you distiguish between fault slip tremors and magma injection tremors?"

I imagine that it has to do with the waveform shape. There was a study link here a while back that explored the strange "double couple" aspect of a Bardarbunga quake. Seems the waveform didn't match a horizontal displacement like a usual fault quake has. One conclusion was that there was vertical displacement, probably pointing to a two layer magma chamber feed system.

Caveat: I am not a geologist, I just lurk here.

@#191 - anutter take

1)
Or they might be valid ones: I'd think that during the infaltion/defletaion phases of a volcano considerable stresses would occur, and naturally those get relieved in EQs, even close to the top.

@Kultsi 178 That's the trouble with being on vacation - when I looked at the en.vedur site the 17th report wasn't 'up' there yet, so I hunted around elsewhere & translated - now it's everywhere - sorry -

User:Wikinaut/Moon-Earthquake-Theory- Wikipedia also looked up force! from Wikipedia interesting stuff also looked up;Conjunction[astronomy and astrology] Gravitation,gravitation energy,and 2012 phenomenon[western made up theory] leading me to the geomagnetic reversal{polar shift}a lot to read:]

@Leon - your first reference (Moon-Earthquake-Theory) brought 234 hits on Wikipedia. You need to be more accurate than that, and give specific links to follow: you jump from A to Z without any steps in between, and the rest [of us] cannot follow your thinking.

I don't know whether you are a native speaker of English, but there are some rules for efficient communication in any language:

1) write/speak in complete sentences; in written text that includes capital letters where needed and proper punctuation - which is important even in the spoken language.

2) don't assume anything - "assume makes an ass of u and me"

3) avoid chat speak: 4 u it may be c00l, but it is not efficient communication, i.e. getting your message across, not on any respectable fora

4) DO NOT (sorry for shouting) get excited about what you are trying to say - you are likely to lose your train of thought and get sidetracked into nonessential trivia having little to do with your point

Leon, I'm sorry for being rude and talking down to you. Shall we both try to learn?

#118 Parclair (sorry also totally OT) - as an ex (but pretty good) PDP-8, PDP 11/44 and VAX programmer, I should have known better that to use that analogy. Doffs hat and bows deeply.

@196 - stigger, you, too, done programming on VAX! Some of the systems I y2k proofed were still on VAX, the others on DEC Unix.

@#140 Boris Behncke, you're responding with more calmness and deliberation that I did upon learning of this prosecution.

So, the know-(next-to-)nothing-(when-it-comes-to-science) news media are the ones dictating science and criminal policy to the government regarding earthquakes? Truly, the inmates are running the asylum. They drum up publicity and galvanize public support for a faux quake-predictor......which results in scientists being charged with manslaughter for failing to predict another quake. Unbelievable. The sooner this preposterous miscarriage of justice is drowned in a sea of international shock and disapproval, the better.

If they think someone MUST be prosecuted for the deaths in L'Aquila, it'd make a lot more sense to serve up indictments of any public official who ever failed to implement earthquake-proofing of buildings that cave in on people during quakes. But no, instead we enter the theatre of the absurd--and prosecute the science community for not having discovered a fail-safe method of predicting earth movements that might kill people.

I'm still waiting for other people here to comment on this frightening issue.
Scientists being charged with manslaughter for not yet discovering something? Anyone?

#197 Kultsi: yes, I was a VMS coder, then VMS-11; STAR, then DEC Alpha 32bit, then Systime with RSX-11 - chased it up to the port to POSIX and UNIX, then 'retired' to go to uni again and read Paeleoclimatology. Loved my PDP/VAX days.

all i was doing is seeing if there was a connection between earthquakes and planetary phases obviously so that you think your right everyone else is wrong fair enough end off

#198 mjkbk and #140 Boris.
I agree with you both. I have not commented because I simply cannot express my fears any more eloquently than Boris did.

@mjkbk #117 / Boris # 140

gawd.. this is appalling stuff.

EVERYONE... go sign this letter.
www.mi.ingv.it/open_letter/

I hope Erik headlines the issue too. Just think of the consequences: either no one dares work for the government in this capacity anymore (yeah.. brilliant idea).. or those that do issue a public warning everytime a mouse scurries along the road which is just as bad as then no one will take any notice of them.

@Leon - It's not that we think that we are right. My first idea with earthquakes was that there must be a correlation between tidal forces (sun & moon) and EQs. The EQs taking place proved me wrong, and I gathered that from the data I observed. THAT is the scientific method: you have a hypothesis; the facts observed either prove you right or wrong. I Was Wrong.

This is a lot of a 'been there, done that; got the T-shirt and it got frayed' situation. IOW, many people around here have seen this before, only some of them - Carl, in this instance - have more patience with, I beg your pardon, nonsense. You did admit you did not know it all, and that alone puts YOU miles ahead of those claim they do. Please, let us tell you how, and you'll come ahead as a winner in this.

@mjbk, #198: And the Aquila quake wasn't really strong. If I remember correctly, it was aourd 5,4. We had a quake with to hits at 6,3 in 2008 here in Iceland, which almost had no effect. A few (less than 10) buildings were damaged, and a lot of stuff in the supermarkets fell of the shelfs. The quake still had around 6.0 in Reykjavik - and nothing happened, exept the webpage from the IMO which went down afterwards.
This is striking.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/assets/images/articles/tba/chapter-one/…

So basically it makes no sense to think that volcanism on a whole has no effect on the sun. http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/ we are just starting to learn more about the sun. And I personally really think it has more effect on the core then we know yet. Since it's the biggest energy source in the solar system. Look how small the moon is and this can effect the tides. Look at the size of the sun and remember the sun is a ball of nuclear energy that throw stuff at us.

There is more evidence that magnetic storms can induce earthquakes then CO2 causes global warming. Just not enough scientists have looked at it!

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=168278&sectio…

Since 1975, researchers have compared some 14 000 earth tremors in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan with around 350 sudden magnetic storms occurring over the same period in the region - concluding with some confidence the propensity for earthquakes increases after a magnetic storm takes place. The relationship is complicated but it is centred on the way magnetic storms, interacting with high-speed plasma streams, cause noticeable vibrations as they hit the earth's magnetosphere. The electromagnetic energy in the storm is converted into mechanical energy through a series of conversions in the rocks, such as the 'piezoelectric effect', which are believed to trigger earthquakes. The researchers hope to better understand the physical nature of this 'trigger effect' in the course of future fieldwork and laboratory experiments.

http://www3.nict.go.jp/y/y223/simulation/realtime/movie/2009/test_6.200…

Watch this short video. So lava under the earth keeps completely still during these events?

What about the South Atlantic abnormality? I guess the earth's core is a static structure that only moves due to forces under the ground? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_Anomaly

Off-topic with respect to volcanoes, but on target for #140.

The problem that Boris and Co. face at INGV is this: the multicenter, multi-purpose* agency grew at a fast clip in the 2000s, to the be single largest geophysical research entity in Europe. This occurred at the same time that population rate rose sharply (the third of three immigration waves in successive decades, 1980s-early 2000s), well after the birth and death rate became equal, and while paying 1.45x average energy cost of other European nations, due to Italy being the one of the largest net importers of petroleum and coal.

Italy is a major global economy, but it has weak exports (few natural resources and limited land fit for agriculture, is plagued by chronic corruption and it's government programs consume more than 50% of the annual budget, with the lions share of expenses going to public health programs**. Italy has an economic growth rate that is one half of the debt rate, although it is projected to rise out of recession by the end of this year. At present, it stands behind Greece, Spain, and Portugal in terms of debt worries for the EU.

See (eg., do a Google search with this phrase) 'population growth rate Italy'

Rising Star Analysis Featured Institutions:
http://sciencewatch.com/inter/ins/08/08jul-INGV/

While Turkey was busy peddling it's capacity as regional statesman in attempting to broker a nuclear reprocessing deal to resolve the controversial Iranian uranium production issue, Italy should have rethinking decommissioning it's nuclear reprocessing facility, as it could have been a bargaining lever, producing medical-grade isotopes in return for reduced energy import costs.

* INGV is also one of three government research entities responsible for climate change science and policy in Italy.

** Despite having a Mediterranean-type diet and exceptionally clever cultural controls on alcoholism, Italy has serious issues with cardiovascular, diabetes and cancer rates.

@Mike #167, I am wondering if you were being facitious. If not, one side of the moon is always facing the earth no matter where it is in orbit. The same side always faces the earth. The phases are just the amount of sunlight we see on the moon. It is all related to the position of the moon in reference to the sun and earth that lets us see the phases. I think that perogee and apogee may affect the tides a bit, but not that much. If you were, my appologies.

@Boris, that issue with the scientists is scary. I mean just because one person got it right once and they blame the scientists who cannot possibly predict when a major quake will happen is a travisty of human decency. I am hoping they will be able to show that they really are not at fault because they were using the info they had from instruments. That is really all any scientist can do. I had a geology teacher who said he could predict major quakes. The way he did it is the way I can do it: I know that there will be, in the next six months, a 6+ will happen somewhere in the world. I don't envy you at all right now because it can be so difficult to reach that delicate balance between "yes there will be vs no there won't be." I think you do a very good job of what you do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR0VwLkESzI&feature=related

Nice series on Ocean Geology

@208 http://pinewooddesign.co.uk/2008/05/12/earthquake-cloud-prediction/ Maybe Italy needs to look at China for signs lol

But essentially, I think the Italian problem is that the scientists said an earthquake was NOT going to happen, that was silly. But I guess they were counteracting that guy going around saying it was about to happen, and for some fluky reason it actually did.

It was a bit similar with Iceland, we all saw the swarm around the volcano, and the Iceland MET said it wasn't going to erupt initially.

But it is silly to put them on trial, because buildings kill people in earthquakes, not scientists giving warnings. And what were they supposed to say, stay out of your house for the next 10 years just in case one happens? But they should not have said it won't happen....

Diane, Boris is pointing at the letter that strongly advises against giving predictions of earthquake hazard risk, and instead supplies advisory tools: the Italy-Sicily EQ Hazard Map, geotechnical monitoring of geomechanical remedy of slope and structural instabilities.

We had another series of unusual, shallow shakes (2 km) here in south-Central WA today, the strongest at mag 4.2 and occurring in an area that sees very few.

We've had s continuation of mild and wet late Spring weather this week.

@Greg 211:

Did the IMO really say that? Watching it all happen right from the start of 2010 from within the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University, we all put it down as "an intrusion event that has a possibility of reaching the surface" (as with most intrusion events).

As time went on and things developed differently to the past intrusions under the volcano (e.g. summer 2009), we seemed to think it had more chance of erupting. And that's what we got.

I don't remember anyone ever saying "No, it will not erupt" but I may be wrong.

@Passerby

Based on your last post, I assume that you are in Washington state. Is there a resource there that reports "silent" quakes or slow earth movement? I'm curious because that may explain the long period of relative silence in Cascadia Events. "Silent" quakes have been seen in that region before.

Well, yeah. Since you ask...

http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/09012902-study-links-seismic-slip-tr…

Thought I'd better provide a bit of elaboration.

Monitoring Stations Detect 'Silent Earthquakes' (In Costa Rica, Pacific Northwest, Japan Trench, etc). Feb 2009.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090215151609.htm

The previous article, above, was also published in 2009, a collaborative effort between U-Dub (uh, that's Univ Wash to outsiders), USGS and INGV geologists.

Are such slow EQs also spotted in Iceland? I mean, on a rifting, non subduction zone?

Don't know, Renato. Could they be at work in transverse planes to the ridge (at transform faults)? There is some subduction-like crustal reworking at distance from the MAR.

Per my posts above, didn't necessarily want to go 'here' but..what the hell, may as well throw it in, as it pertains to our friend Lurking's ETS (Episodic tremor and slip) question.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/etc/091228-sun-moon-trigger-eart…

@Chris, Reykjavik #204. The L'Aquila quake was a 6.3. Here's the USGS summary about it:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2009/us2009fcaf/#sum…

Off topic - Amazing, gecko sat on the taal webcam right now!

http://www.mycam-asia.tv/cams/philippines/luzon/batangas-taallake-yc/di…

@ Diane # 209
Thanks Diane.
I was just using my warped English sense of humour to try and support Carl, who was a lone voice against the madness back then. Glad to have fooled someone.

@mjbk, #219: Thanks for the correction. Then it was of similar strength, but there still happened much more in Italy.

According to mbl.is, the crater lake in Eyjaf. is nearly boiling hot. So much for the onsen idea...

Tad OT, but fire's up...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49547840@N08/4711016599/

@Reynir, #223: Since even signs didn't prevent tourists from checking the temperature of water in geothermal areas with their hands, I am not so optimistic...

@Chris #225: I knew that just about every tour group has its Twoflower, but... sheesh!

new quakes under eyjafjöll, today

Just a suggestion here: how about we all go to the new thread?