wildlife
ejohnson | September 29, 2009Ligers are known in popular culture for being pretty much Napoleon Dynamite's favorite animal, but a lesser known fact is that the lion-tiger hybrids are actually the largest of the big cats, more massive than either parent due to a quirk of genetics. As Razib explains on Gene Expression, parental imprinting is responsible for the difference in size: Imprinted genes from female lions usually keep "largeness" genes from the males in check, but female tigers have had no selective pressure to evolve such genes. The resulting offspring of a tiger mother and a lion father are the oversized ligers…
eklemetti | September 4, 2009Lets get right to it!
"Manmade volcanoes": can they solve global warming?
It does indeed seem that something is happening beneath Kanlaon in the Philippines. PHIVOLCS reports that the volcano experienced 257 volcanic earthquakes from August 23 to September 1, well above the usually "background" level of ~20-30 a week. Most of this seismicity is centered on the northwest slope of the volcano, suggesting that if magma is moving, it is moving up under this side of the system. However, the seismicity doesn't necessarily have to be magma moving up to erupt. It could very easily be moving up in…
eklemetti | August 23, 2009Some brief notes before I dive headlong into the exciting world of faculty orientation!
A small steam plume coming from Turrialba in Costa Rica. Photo taken in August 2007.
There are some preliminary reports of the state of wildlife (and everything) around Kasatochi Island in the Aleutians from the US F&W and USGS team that headed to check out how the island has recovered since last year's eruption. The shoreline has been radically transformed by the ash and although some seabirds have made attempts to nest in the loose ash, it doesn't seem to have been very successful. However, not…
eklemetti | August 17, 2009I knew that the minute I said I'd be back to a "regular" posting schedule that I would fail miserably, so maybe the less said, the better.
Cerro Galan caldera in Argentina (taken from space).
Thanks to all the readers who have been avidly discussing a number of fascinating topics over the weekend.
I have seen/read a little bit about the tectonic-forcing mechanism idea for some caldera-style eruptions. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that the caldera-forming event - that is to say the collapse of the roof into the chamber - isn't usually the "trigger" as much as a result of a large…
eklemetti | August 9, 2009Does anyone else feel like this has been a rather quiet summer, volcano-wise? Maybe I've been too preoccupied by my move to Ohio, but I feel like beyond a few relatively minor events (Shiveluch comes to mind), the volcano news has been pretty slow compared to the spring of this year. Go figure.
The sulfur dioxide plume from the 2008 eruption of Kasatochi spreading over the northern Pacific Ocean.
Anyway, a few tidbits to tide us over:
Over eighteen years after the eruption, Mt. Pinatubo is still causing fatalities from the copious amounts of tephra deposited during the 1991 event. Five…
eklemetti | July 17, 2009Some of the articles you might have missed this week ...
A lava flow from Kilauea breaks local traffic laws in the Royal Gardens subdivision, Hawai'i
The Mayon Watch continues in the Philippines. No eruption yet, but some of the local newspapers are printing stories talking about "odd animal behavior" and other local "myths" about predicting the volcano, such as the wells drying up. Now, this is not to say that these things might have some predictive value (especially changes in the water table near the volcano as it inflates/deflates), but so far there are no robust scientific studies that…
gregladen | July 9, 2009 It has become virtually axiomatic that as climate shifts or other potential insults to the ecology of a given area occur, plants and animals enclosed in parks bounded by "impermeable" landscapes are at great risk. Instead of the extreme ranges of a plant or animal moving north or south, or across a gradient of rainfall, or up or down in elevation, organisms that are protected in parks are also stuck in the parks and risk local extinction when change happens or disease becomes endemic, or poaching uncontrolled or fire more common or .... well, we can go on and on.
In a new study on "The…
eklemetti | June 25, 2009The Q&A post will be coming over the weekend (there's still time to send me a question!)
Icy cold volcanoes (well, geysers) on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.
In the meantime, here are a few quick hits:
Mt. Cleveland in the Aleutians had a small eruption. The plume was only ~15,000 feet / ~3 km. Cleveland is one of the more active volcanoes in the Aleutians, so this eruption is not out of the norm.
Landslides and rockfalls at Arenal (in spanish) in Costa Rica continue to prompt evacuations of tourists near the volcano. It is interesting to note that officials don't seem worried about hotel…
awild | May 8, 2009
"Lean on Me", by Lesley Smitheringale
The Burrard-Lucas brothers held a wildlife portait competition, and the results are simply spectacular. Click here to see the winners.
eklemetti | May 6, 2009Some brief tidbits from the volcanic realms:
Active volcanism at NW Rota-1
Kilauea? Explosive? You might think of Kilauea as a volcano that generates impressive Hawaiian-style eruptions with fire fountains reaching 100s m and dazzling lava flows, but Don Swanson at HVO sees evidence of a big explosive event at Kilauea. This eruption was ~1,000-1,600 years ago and may have produced a plinian-scale eruptive column and threw cm-scale chunks up to 17 km from the vent.
The intermingling of life and active volcanism always seems counterintuitive, but when you're talking undersea volcanism, all…
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 2, 2009
Image courtesy of AVO/USGS by James Isaak. Photo taken 3/31/2009.
No, this isn't Battlestar Galactica, but the same can be said for the Drift River Oil Terminal: this has all happened before and will all happen again. Coast Guard officials have (finally) decided to move ~6.3 million gallons of crude oil from the Chevron-owned Drift River Oil Terminal at the base of Redoubt. The oil terminal has been a flashpoint since Redoubt began to make noise earlier this year and even up until yesterday, it was unclear what, if any, action the Coast Guard might take with the facility. It had been shut…
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 4, 2009
Folks have been suggesting that life on Earth started near volcanic vents for a long time now (and of course, some people don't buy it). Whether or not life sprung forth near hydrothermal vents, undersea black smokers or from the head of Zeus, it doesn't really change the fact that we find organisms living in these places today, expanding what we might consider "habitable" by leaps and bounds. Case and point, researchers from CU-Boulder have recently found a community of micro-organisms happily living near the summit of Volcán Socompa (above) in Chile in the hydrothermal vents. Now, having…
grrlscientist | February 9, 2009tags: Satomi's pygmy seahorse, Indonesian wildlife, Stephen Wong, Takako Uno, image of the day
Satomi's pygmy seahorse, endemic to Indonesia, is one of the world's tiniest seahorses. Two adults would fit head-to-head across the face of a penny and their offspring are each about the size of a 12-point apostrophe.
Image: Stephen Wong and Takako Uno/National Geographic.
At under half an inch tall (13 millimeters), Satomi's pygmy seahorse -- named after dive guide Satomi Onishi -- is a strong contender for the world's smallest seahorse. With their tails stretched out straight, two Satomi's…
eklemetti | January 19, 2009
One of the more impressive areas I visited while in New Zealand was the Waimangu Valley near Mt. Tarawera (above). The valley itself was created by blast explosions (phreatic explosions) during the 1886 eruption of Mt. Tarawera. These eruptions cut right down the axis of the rhyolite domes (most of which erupted ~1305 A.D.) and extended off the volcanic edifice to form the valley to the west of the volcano. In the valley, no juvenile lava was erupted, instead explosions carved out large pits that formed the Waimangu Valley and today the valley is filled with lakes and thermal features (below…