Pacific Ocean
grrlscientist | October 15, 2009tags: North Pacific Gyre, plastics, pollution, Pacific Ocean, streaming video
The center of the North Pacific Gyre is a relatively stationary region of the Pacific Ocean (the area it occupies is often referred to as the horse latitudes). The circular rotation around it draws waste material in and has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces. These…
eklemetti | September 30, 2009The big geology news right now is the M8 earthquake in American Samoa that generated a killer tsunami (which made it all the way to the Bay Area in California).
Mammoth Mountain in California's Long Valley region.
In more benign, volcano-related news:
The aviation alert level at Redoubt in the Alaska has been returned to Green/Normal, which means that for all intents-and-purposes, the eruption that started earlier this year is over. The new dome totals ~91 million cubic yards of lava, slowly adding back to the north side of the volcano.
Eruptions reader Doug C. pointed out to me that there…
eklemetti | April 22, 2009UPDATED 3:30PM Pacific: The Associated Press has put up some silent video of the lava flows reaching the ocean at night
The Geophysical Institute in Ecuador is reporting that the eruption at Fernandina in the Galapagos has intensified over the last 24 hours. Heck, the image accompanying the report looks downright apocalyptic:
Now, I'm actually not entirely sure what is being shown in this image. There is no caption, either. My guess is that this is an ocean entry for one of the lava flows, considering the steam and what looks to be water in the foreground. Of course, I have no idea if the…
eklemetti | April 21, 2009
Fernandina in the Galapagos erupting in April 2009. Image courtesy of NASA.
The latest reports about the ongoing eruption at Fernandina are both coming and going. Reports from officials in the Galapagos National Park suggest that the eruption was become more intense (in spanish), while later reports from the Geophysical Institute in Ecuador say that the eruption is waning. Both reports might be true and reflect the volatile nature of the eruption, but overall it seems that the wildlife (that probably is used to this sort of thing anyway) hasn't been effected too much by the eruption.
eklemetti | April 20, 2009It has been rather quiet on the volcano-front in the last week. Redoubt and Llaima (in spanish), after a few weeks of intense eruption, are both back on Orange Alert. News of the eruptions from Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai and Fernandina is rather sparse in the details. The news of volcanism in 2009 seems to have settled down.
A few tidbits I caught over the weekend:
Chaiten
Damage wrought by the eruption of Chaiten on the town of Chaiten in Chile, taken in early December 2008. Image courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory.
Don't you feel like you're read this sort of story before after other…
eklemetti | April 16, 2009
Fissure vent eruption from Fernandina in the Galapagos Islands.
In news that comes as a surprise to no one, the current eruption on Fernandina in the Galapagos is having some adverse effect on the wildlife in the Pacific archipelago. Numerous dead fish and sea lions have been seen in the ocean near the actively erupting volcano - now, what exactly is causing the deaths is more speculative. I would imagine with the large plume being produced by the volcano, along with the lava flows reaching the ocean, that volcanic gases and the lava's interaction with the sea water might be the leading…
eklemetti | April 13, 2009Fernandina, Ecuador
Fernandina erupting in 2009.
UPDATE 4/13/09 at 12PM: The NASA Earth Observatory has posted a nice MODIS image showing the plume from the Fernandina eruption drifting out over the Pacific.
We have a few more details on the ongoing eruption at Fernandina in the Galapagos Islands. Officials from the Parque Nacional Galápagos (PNG) flew over the island (in spanish) and saw the eruption is coming from a several-kilometer-long fissure vent that flows towards the sea, dividing into multiple flows and then coalescing when it reaches the sea. There is also a lot of vapor being…
eklemetti | April 11, 2009
Fernandina volcano in the Galapagos.
Fernandina in the Galapagos has entered a new eruptive phase according to the Geophysical Institute (GI) at the National University of Ecuador (in spanish). Satellite images show a new crater and ash column from the volcano and the GI will look for evidence of new lava flows beyond the "hot points" spotted on the satellite images.
UPDATE 4/11/09 9PM: I thought I'd add a link to the story in English now that I found one. There are also some pictures of the lava flows from La Cumbre (There is some confusion about name - Fernandina and La Cumbre are the…
eklemetti | April 3, 2009
Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai, taken in late March 2009
Redoubt did the tried-and-true American trick of shoving news of volcanoes in other parts of the world off the news pages, but shockingly, these international volcanoes continued to erupt. Remember that volcano in Tonga? Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'aapi? Still erupting, weeks after the volcano was first spotted. The volcano is still disrupting air traffic in and out of Tonga, which is now even affecting the economy of the islands. Now, the problem is that tourists are creeping ever closer to the emerging volcanic island. The thing about visiting…
eklemetti | March 24, 2009
Mauna Loa fire fountains in 1984
For those of you looking for some non-Redoubt-related volcano news, you can take a look at the 25th anniversary of the last eruption at Mauna Loa (there is some nice video footage provided by KHNL if you follow the link). By no means is this volcano "dormant", but rather this is a typical lull in activity at the Hawaiian shield volcano. Its neighbor, Kilauea, has been erupting for decades, but the last major eruption at Mauna Loa was in 1984, when the volcano sent lava downslope with 3,000 feet of Hilo, moving 15 miles in a few days. Monitoring at Mauna Loa…
eklemetti | March 20, 2009
Now that people have been able to get a better look at the are about Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai, we've been able to get a better idea of what sort of eruption occurred. The explosions and ash/tephra from the eruption have all but wiped out life on Hunga Ha'aapai, as the island contains one of the vents, while the other is only 100 meter off shore of the island - although the tephra erupted so far have joined the new vent and the island. You can clearly see ash mixing with the water around the island and the island itself has been blackened by the coating of ash. This is a classic volcanic…
eklemetti | March 19, 2009Mixing volcanoes and oceans seem to always produce exciting results. Whether it is something as simple as the ocean entry of a lava to something as impressive as a new island emerging, formed by volcanic eruption. Back in the 1960s, a previous unknown undersea volcano off the coast of Iceland erupted to form the island of Surtsey. The signs of the impending eruption were captured from start to finish, with Icelandic fisherman noticing "boiling seas", then steam explosions, then ash eruptions and finally volcanic tephra that formed the island itself. This was followed by lava flows and…
eklemetti | March 18, 2009
The eruption of Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai volcano in Tonga looks to be a big one. Keleti Mafi, head of the Tongan geological service, calls this "a very significant eruption, on quite a large scale", which is no surprise considering some of the spectacular picture we saw of the eruption yesterday. In fact, the eruption is big enough that it has disrupted air traffic over Tonga, as Air New Zealand has issued a warning about the ash column - an ash column that has reached over 15,000 meters/50,000 feet! Luckily for the residents of Tongatapu, a mere 10 kilometers 50 km to the southwest SSE…
eklemetti | March 17, 2009
Image from keizo/weblog
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai (how's that for a name?), a shallow seamount in Tonga, appears to have erupted. An air passenger snapped some pictures of an eruption occurring in the ocean between the Tongatapu and Vava'u and pilots in the area report that (unsurprisingly), the feature is new.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai - at least the part above water (look in the bottom of the image, the islands are marked in green) - is made of two small islands that cap the main seamount and ring the volcano's caldera. The last known eruption from the volcano was in 1988 - over twenty…
eklemetti | February 6, 2009
For those of you interested in what happens in the realm of submarine volcanism, I can pass on some tidbits I've gotten about NW-Rota 1, a submarine volcano in the Mariana Islands (see bathymetry above). Dr. Ed Kohut (Petrogenex), a friend of mine from my days at Oregon State Univ., is currently on a JAMSTEC research cruise in the Mariana Islands, visiting the area about NW Rota-1. He reports:
"We just reached NW-Rota 1. It is still actively erupting. To put that in perspective, it has been observed erupting every time it has been visited since 2003. Today's actvity is not as vigourous as…
eklemetti | October 20, 2008
The headline for this entry sounds more dramatic than it is, but one of the last structures in the ill-fated Royal Gardens subdivision on the big island of Hawai'i finally met its fiery demise over the weekend. For those of you unfamiliar with the plight of the subdivision, Royal Gardens is part of Kalapana, and it was unfortunately situated quite close to the Pu'u O'o rift that has been erupting since 1983. Most of the subdivision has been overrun by lava flows since then, but one of the last two structures still being used was done in by the basaltic lava. The first link has a great map…
eklemetti | October 13, 2008
On Sunday afternoon, a large ash eruption occurred at Halemaumau Caldera at Kilauea. Not only did the volcano belch more grey ash than usual, but also red-hot incandescent material can be clearly seen being thrown from the vent during the vigorous eruption. The coolest thing about the eruption is that it was all caught on film by the USGS/HVO. Take a look (at three times speed) - this video is from the morning of October 12, but there are a series of video from the whole weekend on the website.
eklemetti | September 25, 2008
This might not be directly related to a volcanic eruption, but it has been picked up by a lot of news sources, so I thought I'd give it a mention. A report from researchers at University of Texas hypothesize that some very large coral boulders (up to 10 meters tall) that can be found on the shores of Tongatapu are, in fact, tsunami deposits. That is news enough, but they go on to say that the tsunami could have been volcanically triggered (i.e., started by an eruption or volcanic landslide). The corals are ~122,000 years old and a soil has formed on the corals, so the event was likely…
eklemetti | July 8, 2008Â
Kilauea is busy keeping geologists and tourists alike wondering what the volcano will be doing next. The current report on the volcano tells of a new fire fountain at the Thanksgiving Eve Break-out "rootless cone", about 6 miles from the ocean. The fire fountain started on Sunday night, issuing lava up to 40 feet in the air and the USGS has posted an amazing video of the fountaining on the HVO website. However, unlike the predicted behavior where magma at Kilauea starts near the summit and moves into the rifts, these lavas appear to be unrelated to the activity going on at the summit of…
eklemetti | June 29, 2008
Almost 9 months since its last eruption, Ruapehu is keeping New Zealanders guessing about its next move. Brad Scott of GNS Science (NZ) reports that the crater lake at Ruapehu is reading unusually warm temperatures and high gas emissions, well after geologists there would have expected after the last eruption. Their conclusion doesn't seem to point to an imminent eruption, but rather just "unrest" at the volcano. Ruapehu is a fairly unique situation, mitigation-wise, as the volcano is a popular tourist destination for its skiing, but is also a relatively active volcano. This means that…