volcano
eklemetti | January 21, 2010
Sakurajima in Japan, erupting in December 2009. Image courtesy of Photovolcanica.com
Richard Roscoe at Photovolcanica.com has just posted two great sites focusing on two of the most active volcanoes in Japan: Sakurajima and Suwanosejima. These volcanoes are almost constantly erupting with small strombolian events punctuated by occasional plinian eruptions.
Sakurajima is on the island of Kyushu (well, technically Kagoshima, but right off the coast of Kyushu) less than 10 miles / 20 km from the city of Kagoshima. The volcano has been erupting since 1955 with both explosive and effusive…
gregladen | January 4, 2010I had mentioned earlier that the volcanoes of the Virugna region in the Western Rift Valley (as well as other highland spots) have often been islands of rain forest separated from each other by different habitats, including grasslands and wooded savannas. this has produced an island effect that has been a laboratory for evolution, and it is likely that these forest islands (and others in the greater region of east Central Africa and western East Africa) have been the loci of evolution of many endemic species. (See Island Africa: The Evolution of Africa's Rare Animals and Plants by Kingdon…
gregladen | January 2, 2010Nyamuragira, just now erupting, is one of the numerous Virunga Volcanoes, which form a large cluster of volcanoes spanning the border of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, between Lake Ex-Edward (a.k.a. Lake Rutenzege) and Lake Kivu. The largest population center is Goma, on Lake Kivu, along the southern margin of the lava fields from these volcanoes, and made famous in recent years as the site of numerous excursions of warfare, refugee movements, and volcanic lava flows. I've written about Goma and a little about the Volcanoes in the Congo Memoirs.
Have a look at the following map:
This map is…
gregladen | January 2, 2010Mount Nyamulagira, 25km (16 miles) from the eastern city of Goma, erupted at dawn on Saturday, sending lava into the surrounding Virunga National Park.
About 40 endangered chimpanzees and other animals live in the area.
But the country's famous critically endangered mountain gorillas are said to be safe as they live further east.
source
These are very special chimpanzees. I believe I've blogged about them elsewhere, but I'll write new something about them soon.
I've driven though this range of volcanoes, and flown over them as well.
Erik has details here
gregladen | September 25, 2009Mount Rainier (14,410 ft) has lately attracted a small amount of attention because of what is considered by some an increase in seismic activity there, so I thought it might be nice to get a baseline description of this volcano for those of you interested in such things. For scientifically accurate information and interesting discussion on the mountain, keep an eye on Eruptions Blog.
Mount Rainier is a stratovolcano. This means that it is made up of strata of lava, tuff/tephra, ash, and so on that has been pushed out into a conical pattern. The lava from stratovolcanoes is usually…
grrlscientist | September 8, 2009tags: South Pacific Islands, Indonesia, Sumatra, geology, nature, volcano, global warming, Lake Toba, PBS, NOVA, television
Sixty-two-mile-long Lake Toba, seen in the center of this satellite image,
was created by the largest explosive volcanic eruption of the past
100,000 years -- an eruption whose aftermath holds important clues for us
today about rapid climate change, Drew Shindell says.
Image: NASA.
Wow, there are days when I wish I had a television, and today is one of them. Why? Tonight, PBS is showing a really fascinating program; a NOVA show entitled Mystery of the Megavolcano that…
sciencewoman | May 19, 2009Fantastic volcano blogger, and all around cool guy, Erik Klemetti has put out a call for volcano pictures that he can use on his Eruptions blog. I'd love to be able to send him some fantastic shot of a plinian eruption, but I live in a pretty tectonically quiet part of the world.
So this weekend, while Minnow was making spaghetti out of playdough, I decided to craft an offering for Erik:
Of course, as I was feeling all smug about my depiction of a Hawaiian shield volcano, complete with lava entering the ocean and creating hydroclastic fragments, NASA's Earth Observatory posted an image of…
gregladen | May 5, 2009Erik Klemetti has an excellent description of the situation here.
Redoubt is WSW of Anchorage, Alaska but is otherwise, I think, pretty isolated.
Keep an eye on it here and here, via web cam.
Good thing someone is keeping an eye on these volcanoes!
sciencepunk | March 30, 2009I keep thinking I should write more worthy articles, but then, I keep finding fantastic things that don't need 800 words of discussion getting in the way. This is one of the latter, and comes courtesy of George Kourounis, ballsy explorer and general badass.
Kourounis took a trip to Indonesia's Kawah Ijen volcano, where miners earn $10 a day for journeying into the depths of a volcano to retrieve sulphur. Here is the site of the world's largest lake of sulphuric acid:
Here is an aluminium can dissolving in the extreme acid (pH ~0.5!):
And here is Kourounis, going for a leisurely paddle…
amillikan | March 27, 2009Geologists have been keeping a close watch on the volcanic activity brewing at Mount Redoubt, the 9,000 foot (2,700 m) volcano found in Alaska's Aleutian Range. In response to the eruption at Redoubt on Thursday morning that released a 65,000 foot (20,000 m) ash column, the Alaska Volcano Observatory raised its Volcano Alert level to "Warning" and its Aviation Alert Level to "Red," both of which are the highest possible categorizations. ScienceBlogger Erik Klemetti from Eruptions is keeping close watch on Redoubt, so pop over to his blog for explosive updates!
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:…
sheril | March 19, 2009'Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington.'
- Governor Bobby Jindal, February 24, 2009
If this video is any indication, both eruptions have the potential to do a lot of damage and it seems to me they're not mutually exclusive. So let's keep an eye on each.
(And spare the fruit fly funding too).
sheril | March 19, 2009..about the undersea volcano that's been erupting over the last four days in the South Pacific!
What you see is smoke, steam, and ash shooting up thousands of feet near Tonga. And while this activity poses little threat to islanders right now, the image reminds me why I'm in favor of "something called 'volcano monitoring'," even if the Louisiana governor disagrees.
pontiff | February 27, 2009On Morning Edition this morning, there was a story about the annual Conservative Political Action Conference which contained a line which made me guffaw:
Representative Paul Ryan: "[rant on spending in stimulus plan]...$400 million dollars to study sexually transmitted diseases!" [rant on about how his daughter is more responsible that President Obama]
Oh my! The horror. Actually spending money studying diseases that infect 65 million U.S. citizens. Yes Rep. Ryan, it would be a real shame if that money improved the lives of those 65 million people (and maybe it might even help, you know,…
bioephemera | February 25, 2009As a native of Washington State, where we could literally scoop white ash off the ground in handfuls after Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, I have one thing to say about Bobby Jindal's totally disingenuous dig at "volcano monitoring": if geoscience is such a big waste of money, sure, let's stop monitoring volcanoes - and hurricanes, too. That okay with y'all?
I wonder what Jindal's fellow Republican governor Sarah Palin thinks of his advice, given that Alaska's Mt. Redoubt may erupt any day. . .
gregladen | November 10, 2007As you have surely heard, the Yellowstone Caldera ... the place where Old Faithful and the Geyser Basin reside ... has been undergoing increased "activity" including some earthquakes and a rising up of the land. Is this a big problem? Should the evacuate? Should those of us living only a few states away start wearing earplugs?
The paper reporting this, in the current issue of Science, concludes:
The caldera-wide accelerated uplift reported here is interpreted as magmatic recharge of the Yellowstone magma body. Although the geodetic observations and models do not imply an impending volcanic…
illconsidered | March 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
CO2 levels are recorded on top of Mauna Loa...a VOLCANO!! No wonder the levels are so high.
Answer:
Yes, it's true, Mauna Loa is an active volcano. In fact it's the biggest volcano on earth! So, should we suppose that Charles Keeling didn't know that? Well, no, he did know this. And using subtle scientific indicators like "wind direction" he was even able to ensure that his readings were not contaminated by any out gassing when it was…
illconsidered | February 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
One good volcanic eruption puts out more CO2 than a decade of human emissions. It is ridiculous to think reducing human CO2 will have any effect.
Answer:
Not only is this untrue, but it couldn't possibly be true given the CO2 record from any of the dozens of sampling stations around the globe. If this were true, that individual volcanic eruptions dominated human emissions and were causing the rise in CO2 concentrations, then these CO2…