Pagan
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2013This is priceless. There's a line of scented candles and other spa treatment paraphernalia called Voluspa. Volu-spa, get it? Now, the firm shows no awareness of what their chosen name means. Völuspá is a long Old Norse poem in the Poetic Edda, dealing with the creation and eventual destruction (and re-creation) of the world. It's title means "Prophecy of the Seeress", and it's known as one of the most majestic pieces of writing in its language. With this name, the candlemakers are either just oblivious, or they're judging that their target market doesn't know much about the Viking Period.
I…
eklemetti | July 16, 2010Our tour of the Marianas begins SW of Guam. In this area the volcanoes are submerged and make up a region known as the Southern Seamount Province. Our first stop is Tracey Seamount, which lies 30 km west of Guam. Tracey is a ~2 km tall cone and volume of ~45 km3 It is one of the smaller volcanoes in the Mariana arc; Pagan, contains about 2200 km3 of material (Bloomer et al., 1989). It has a sector collapse on its western flank and resembles a submarine Mt. St. Helens. It was investigated by the ROV Hyper-Dolphin from the R/V Natsushima in Feb. 2009, which revealed that the cone is map up of…
eklemetti | July 12, 2010This week I welcome Dr. Ed Kohut as a guest blogger here on Eruptions (while I am off in the Sierras doing some field work). I've known Ed for 10 years now - we were both graduate students in igneous petrology at Oregon State University - and we are both Massachusetts natives. Ed was in the Coast Guard before getting degrees at University of Rhode Island and Boston University before heading of to Oregon State for a Ph.D., where he worked on melt inclusions in minerals. One of his major research areas is magmatism in the Mariana Islands and he was nice enough to put together a look at the…
eklemetti | April 30, 2010News!
Colima in Mexico erupting in 2008.
The current activity at Eyjafjallajökull is more-or-less unchanged, with strombolian activity producing a 3-4 km tall ash-and-steam plume and the lava flows at the crater moving northward towards the GÃgjökull glacier. You can check out an extensive page on the state of this eruption at the Nordic Volcanological Center - along with a new page with thermal and LIDAR information on the eruption from France.
The Icelandic Met Office notes that the lava has been producing meltwater from the glacier - which many Eruptions readers have noticed as floods…
eklemetti | August 19, 2009Busy today with scouting out some field location for the class I'll be teaching this fall. Here's this week's USGS/SI Weekly Volcano Report. The report is a little more eventful than last week's, so enjoy!
Kliuchevskoi Volcano in Kamchatka, taken summer of 2009 by Theresa Kayzar.
Highlights include:
Three volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula are currently producing ash plumes: Kliuchevskoi, Koryaksky and Shiveluch. Shiveluch has been having the most intense eruptions, but the former two are both producing ash-and-steam plumes that reach over 3 km / 10,000 feet.
Talang in Indonesia saws its…
eklemetti | April 16, 2009
Mount Pagan in the Mariana Islands erupting on April 15, 2009. Image courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory.
Up until fairly recently, a lot of volcanoes got away with erupting without anyone knowing the better. However, with all the "eyes in the sky" we have these days, even remote oceanic volcanoes get caught in the act of erupting. Case in point is this image (above) of Mt. Pagan in the Mariana Islands erupting. It was captured by the MODIS satellite yesterday and it shows a health ash plume emanating from the volcano. Pagan is an oceanic stratovolcano on the sparsely populated island of…