USGS
eklemetti | May 31, 2009
Redoubt steaming away on May 4, 2009. Image courtesy of AVO/USGS
Fairly quiet weekend (except for the start of the College World Series regionals ... I do have a favored team*), volcanically speaking, but the ever-vigilant folks up in Alaska are keeping an eye on Redoubt as the eruption of 2009 continues.
The weekly status (released 5/29) for Redoubt released by AVO has no big surprises, reporting that "small discrete earthquakes and rockfall signals in the summit region have been recorded steadily over the course of the past week. In other words, the dome continues to extrude and part of it…
eklemetti | May 17, 2009
Mount Saint Helens less than 30 seconds after a sector collapse that triggered one of the largest eruptions in the Cascades in the last 500 years.
Today is the 29th anniversary of the dramatic eruption of Mount Saint Helens in Washington state. The eruption dramatically changed the landscape around the volcano along with greatly increasing our understanding of volcanic sector collapses and explosive eruptions. I was going to write a larger entry on the event, but alas, I will instead be lecturing to 100 UC Davis students about the event today instead (sorry folks!)
Instead, if you want to…
eklemetti | April 30, 2009
Volcano monitoring. Image courtesy of the USGS.
Last night I had the opportunity to see a talk given by YVO Scientist-in-Charge Dr. Jake Lowenstern as part of the Volcanological Society of Sacramento meeting and he gave a great talk on the state of volcano monitoring today in the U.S. He laid out a lot of details concerning the Volcano Hazards Program of the USGS and I thought I'd share some of them so we can all have an idea of the ups and downs of the VHP these days.
First off, nothing says fun like the U.S. Volcano Status Map! Apparently the dreaded watch "eye" was not meant to be a…
eklemetti | April 29, 2009The weekly USGS/SI roundup is out. Highlights (beyond Slamet) include:
Explosions (some heard 25 km away) and incandescent blocks that started fires at Galeras, Colombia.
Ash and tephra being thrown tens of meters into the air and a 4-m tall spatter cone being built at Pacaya, Guatemala
Also in Guatemala, Santa Maria's Santiaguito dome produced ash plumes and explosions.
Steam, ash and sulfur odors from the continuing eruption at Redoubt, Alaska.
Increased seismicity, steam and ash plumes along with a thermal anomaly at El Reventador in Ecuador
eklemetti | April 28, 2009This is another busy Wednesday for me as the Geology Dept. at UC Davis will be hosting Dr. Jacob Lowenstern, USGS scientist and director of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. He will be giving the weekly seminar, along with another talk in the evening at Sacramento State as part of the Volcanological Society of Sacramento meeting (which is open to the public for those of you around Sacramento). I'm especially excited for the evening talk entitled "Domestic volcanic unrest and activity in 2009: Kilauea, Redoubt, Yellowstone and Washington, D.C.". I'll be sure to report any fun tidbits.
For…
eklemetti | April 23, 2009Back in the days when Eruptions was on Wordpress, I held a vote about what volcano should be the next to be profiled on this blog. The winner was Mt. Hood in Oregon, and after much waiting, the profile is here. I will actually be out of town until Monday doing some house shopping in this little town. Enjoy this look at one of the most picturesque (and hazardous - #4 in fact) volcanoes in the lower 48 states.
VOLCANO PROFILE: MT. HOOD
Mt. Hood, Oregon in August 2008 taken by Erik Klemetti.
Location: Oregon, U.S.A.
Height: 3,426 m / 11,240 ft
Geophysical location: Along the Cascade arc where…
eklemetti | April 22, 2009Has a week gone by already? It is time for another USGS/Smithsonian GVP Weekly Volcano Activity Report.
Highlights (beyond Fernandina, Pagan and Redoubt) include:
A new underwater eruption at NW-Rota 1 in the Mariana Islands.
Increasing seismicity and incandescence from the rhyolite domes forming at Chaiten, Chile.
A spike in sulfur dioxide emissions from Kilauea, Hawai'i to 700 tonnes/day (up from a 2003-07 average of 150 tonnes/day).
4.5-7.5 km / 15-26,000 foot ash columns produced at Shiveluch in Kamchatka from new lava dome.
Continued dome growth and ~6 km / 26,000 foot ash columns from…
eklemetti | April 15, 2009Busy day so I probably won't get to update much as we're busy hosting Dr. Charlie Bacon, geologist for the USGS, here at UC Davis today. Dr. Bacon has written some seminal papers in his career and is probably the foremost authority of the evolution of Crater Lake/Mt. Mazama (speaking of which, >a new geologic map for the Park was recently released) and the caldera-forming eruption. He's also a really nice guy.
If you want to read some of his papers, you might try these:
Bacon, C.R., Implications of silicic vent patterns for the presence of large crustal magma chambers, in: D.P. Hill, R.A…
eklemetti | April 10, 2009
Active US volcanoes and volcano observatories
After all the well-publicized words of "a certain governor in the lower forty-eight" (as Sen. Begich (D-AK) likes to call him) the "wasteful" spending on volcano monitoring improvements in the U.S. have become reality. Sec. of the Interior Ken Salazar announced $15.2 million dollars to modern the infrastructure of the nation's volcano monitoring networks (that is out of the ~$3 billion that went to the Interior - making volcano monitoring a whopping 0.5% of the stimulus that went to that department). Much of this money will likely go to one of…
eklemetti | April 3, 2009
Image courtesy of USGS/CVO, taken March 8, 2005 from the Cascades Volcano Observatory, Vancouver, WA
For those of you looking for something to relax with and read this weekend, you could wander over to the USGS website and download yourself a copy (for free and legally) of "A Volcano Rekindled: the Renewed Eruption of Mount St. Helens, 2004-2006" (USGS Professional Paper 1750). The report comes in at a mere 872 pages (that's 697 MB download for the whole report), but you can download the pieces that interest you most as well instead of the whole shebang.
Now, I haven't read the whole thing,…
eklemetti | April 1, 2009For those of you looking for real volcanic eruption news (no, there was no "Yellowstone eruption"), here is this week's SI/USGS Volcano Activity Report.
And speaking of April Fools Jokes, this is by far my favorite (mostly by its combination of volcanoes and baseball. How could you go wrong with two of my favorite things - hat tip to Fletcher for finding the article).
Highlights (beyond Redoubt) include:
Earthquakes, tremors and steam at El Reventador in Ecuador
12,000-15,000 foot (4-5 km) steam/ash plumes were spotted at Colima, the Mexican volcano.
A shockwave was felt 10 km away from…