volcanoes in the media
eklemetti | March 23, 2009
Mt. Redoubt in March 2009, prior to erupting
At ~10:30 PM (Alaskan Time) last night, Mt. Redoubt erupted. AVO and the Anchorage VAAC issued a Red Alert for ash as high as 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) around the volcano. Information is scarce about the exact nature of the ash cloud because of the fact that the volcano erupted at night. The eruption has contained at least 5 large explosion and at least one of the seismometers at the volcano has stopped reported (RSO). An ashfall advisory has been issued by the Weather Service, with ash predicted to fall throughout the Susitna Valley (which…
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 16, 2009
Oldonyo L'engai, Tanzania
As with most disasters, the best way to prevent a Katrina-like catastrophe is preparedness. The best successes in volcanic mitigation have been in places where the combination of monitoring, communications and practice fit together like so many legos in a set, allowing for a calm and orderly evacuation when the eruption, or signs of eruption, began (e.g., Rabaul in 1994). This is why it is always heartening to me to see articles about places trying to implement hazard mitigation plans for their volcanoes. Two examples are in the news today:
(1) Officials in…
eklemetti | March 14, 2009I missed this the first time, but Click & Clack from NPR's Car Talk answered a question about how to volcano-proof your car.
If you want to hear it, click here. As usual, the guys in Cambridge (our fair city) do an excellent job with the information and the humor.
{Hat tip to Jen Glass at Arizona State}
eklemetti | March 12, 2009Two tidbits from New Zealand:
- A recent survey of volcanoes in the Kermadec Arc north of New Zealand suggest that there is abundant - and recent - undersea volcanism. Scientists from University of Washington (one of my former homes) and Southhampton University (UK) explored a number of submarines volcanoes including Rumble II West, Rumble III and Brothers, which are all located along the same arc of volcanoes as New Zealand's own White Island and Mt. Edgecumbe. What they found was a change in the shape of Rumble III (1.4 km below the sea surface) since the last survey in 2007 - the summit…
eklemetti | March 10, 2009I am back from the ion microprobe lab at Stanford after a few days of data collection, so I'll be trying to get back on posting schedule here at Eruptions.
UPDATE 3/10/2009 12:45PM: Here is a little (and I mean a little) more information, mostly adding that the local residents have been given a "warning" about the activity.
However, I did notice this morning at Sakurajima in Japan erupted after rumbling over the weekend. There aren't many details about the eruption beyond the fact that volcanic chunks were thrown a few kilometers from the vent, but the BBC does have some nice video of the…
eklemetti | March 10, 2009
AVO has officially downgraded the status at Redoubt from "Watch" (orange) to "Advisory" (yellow). The seismicity at the volcano has dropped off for the last couple weeks and signs that an eruption was imminent have waned. This, again, shows the difficulty in trying to predict the behavior of a volcano. All the signs were there at Redoubt - increased seismicity, increased heat flow at the summit (seen as melting ice and increased fumarolic output), increased volcanic gases (CO2 and SO2) - but as of right now, it seems like these signs only pointed to magma moving up the system, but not out of…
eklemetti | February 25, 2009
The people who remain in Chaiten face the potential for a devasting pyroclastic flow, so says Jorge Muñoz of the SERNAGEOMIN in Chile. The volcano is still producing large ash columns on Tuesday and a flyover of the dome forming inside the caldera has lead to the concern that a collapse on a larger scale than those seen last week could wipe out the town for good.
The government hopes news like this from volcanologists might convince the last remaining residents of Chaiten to leave, but no indication of this has come to pass. In fact, things sound like they're getting heated in the fight…
eklemetti | February 25, 2009
So, there has been a lot of talk about "volcano monitoring" over the last 24 hours, now hasn't there?
Now, I'm not going to revisit this discussion, but as an example of why it might be important, there is an article today about the location of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant in the Philippines (near the potentially active caldera Natib). These are the sorts of issues that need to be dealt with in regards to volcano monitoring - the cascading effect of an eruption. During the 1980 eruption of Mt. Saint Helens, there was a chance that volcaniclastic sediment from the eruption could have dammed…
eklemetti | February 23, 2009
I have never had to leave my home in an evacuation from a natural disaster. I'll put that out there right now. So, I might not fully understand the emotions going through people when they find out that they have to leave their home by no fault of their own because nature has decided that where they live is no longer livable. I especially don't know what it might be like if you are then told you can never go back. You might have a home there. You might own a business there. You might have grown up there. Your great grandparents might have lived there over 100 years ago. Yet, you are told -…
eklemetti | February 15, 2009
UPDATE 2/15/2009 20:30 PM: Marta Calvache of INGEOMINAS says that seismicity has all but stopped at Galeras after the eruption Saturday night, however the area will be kept on alert for more potential activity. However, even with the eruption, apparently there are very few people in the evacuation centers - never a good sign if something really big were to happen at the restless Colombian volcano. Â
Last night, Galeras, near Pasto in Colombia, erupted, prompting an evacuation of nearly 7,000 people living near the volcano. The first CNN article linked above, for some reason, says that…
eklemetti | February 11, 2009I get a fairly steady stream of emails from Eruptions readers, some of which are very worth a post, but sometimes it takes me a while to get around to posting. This is my second attempt to catch up on these mailbag emails. Remember, feel free to email me questions or comments whether you want.
Reader Aldo Piombino sent me an email last month after my post on potential Antarctic volcanism asking about some more unknown volcanoes. He brings up Mt. Marsili in the Tyrrhenian Sea (including a post of his own, in Italian), a volcano of which I was not aware. It is a submarine volcano (info on…
eklemetti | February 5, 2009
A week ago, if you asked around, I'm sure most people would have thought Redoubt would have erupted by now considering all the seismicity and melting that was seen at the end of last week. However, volcanology is not an exact science, and here we are continuing to watch Redoubt tease us with signs of pending activity. New holes have appeared in the snow that caps the volcano, the seismicity continues and the volcano is still spewing sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide - all signs that magma is intruding the volcanic edifice. However, as on this morning (2/5/2009), the volcano…
eklemetti | January 31, 2009
The "eruption watch" continues at Redoubt ... Saturday revealed that things are getting hotter at the summit near the 1989/1990 dome (see picture above that made Redoubt famous in 1989). The overflight of the volcano revealed new holes in the summit glacial and a multitude of muddy streams formed from the meltwater. This area of very intense fumarolic activity is just below the 1989/1990 dome (~7,100 feet) and has been growing over the past few days. They also report an area at ~9,000 feet on the volcano that shows signs of ice collapse, indicating heat from underneath the snow and ice (…
eklemetti | January 31, 2009
The Anchorage Daily News has an excellent article today on the Drift River Oil Terminal, a depository for oil collected from the platforms in the Cook Inlet. This oil terminal stores at least 1,000,o00 barrels of oil (see article for why we're not sure) and sits, well, at the base of Redoubt (see map below from Anchorage Daily News) on the floodplain of the Drift River (~25 miles from the vent).Â
Now, this oil terminal was more-or-less destroyed during the last episode of volcanism at Redoubt twenty years ago when the terminal was wiped out by floods resulting from the eruptions. Not only…
eklemetti | January 30, 2009
I am surprised as anyone how the public has become captivated by this geologic drama unfolding at Redoubt. Headlines about the volcano are popping up everywhere from CNN to the MSNBC to Slashdot to Popular Science - yes, even the nerds are enthralled, which might be the reason that the AVO servers are overloaded today (and that Eruptions has set new records in visits each day for the last 4 days). The stories are pretty typical: everyone is preparing/panicking, the volcano might have a giant eruption, and so on. This is rapidly becoming the most eagerly anticipated (is that the right word…
eklemetti | January 29, 2009
It is either a slow news day, or something about the eruption watch at Redoubt has captured the attention of someone at CNN.com as it is now the headline on the website (see above). This is interesting (and odd) to me considering that, over the last few days, very little has changed in the status of Redoubt. In fact, AVO has said things have, in fact, settled down a bit. However, they are still thinking that an eruption is imminent, but maybe in the scales of days to weeks rather than hours. The Anchorage Daily News does have a nice map of Anchorage's area volcanoes and when they last…
eklemetti | January 27, 2009
Sorry for the headline, but this is a quick update to emphasize the media and their love of destruction. For example, Redoubt is, indeed, showing signs of a pending eruption, but how large of an eruption is anyone's guess. Most news sources have been fairly restrained with their headlines, such as:
Rumbling Volcano has Geologists on Alert (although oddly filed under "strange" news)
Attention Alaska Pilots - Alert Mt. Redoubt eruption may be Imminent (note that this one incorrectly says Redoubt is on "red" alert)
Inlet volcano Quieter but still Simmering
Alaskan Volcano Rumbling
You get…
eklemetti | January 27, 2009
The Colombian government has extended the evacuations near Nevado del Huila, taking 800 families out of the danger zone near the rumbling volcano. Huila has been making a lot of noise as of late, and Colombian officials in Ingeominas and the National System for Emergencies are worried that the volcano will erupt soon, sending avalanches and lahars down the valleys of the Paez and Simbola Rivers as happened in November of 2008 (see above or the link to the Volcanism Blog). They also note that Ingeominas is installing microphones on the volcano to detect explosions in the crater to better…