submarine volcanism

Thursday Throwdown: Stromboli's tiny bubbles, Hawaiian lava flow update and recovering from EyjafjallajÃ¶kull

eklemetti — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:51:59 +0000

Thursday Throwdown: Stromboli's tiny bubbles, Hawaiian lava flow update and recovering from EyjafjallajÃ¶kull

Lots of little pieces of news I've run across ... time to play a little catch up.

Stromboli: A volcano after Don Ho's heart.

Every once in a while, my RSS feeds will dredge up some articles from years gone by ... and this week there were two New York Times pieces that are a few years old, but interesting nevertheless. The first is about research conducted by Dr. Robert Sohn at WHOI on explosive undersea eruptions. The second is work by Corr and Vaughan about finding subglacial volcanism in Antarctica. Both are interesting reads if you missed them (like I did) the first time around.
Yesterday I talked about lava flows - and specifically the Kilauea lavas that are in the Kalapana subdivision. Here is the current update from HVO on the flows along with some details from the local news (link has video).
We have a new Smithsonian/USGS Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcanic Activity Report - again, filled with great information, including news from Rabaul, lava flows and a >6 km ash plume from Kliuchevskoi, and continuing strombolian activity at Pacaya.
There was some news last week about recently published research on the mechanisms for eruptions at Stromboli. I haven't had a chance to digest it all, but the long-and-short seems to be to think about these eruptions like Don Ho would: "tiny bubbles". The original paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
In case you haven't been visiting the NASA Earth Observatory page in a while, they posted an image taken last week of the current activity at Nyiragongo in the DRC. The image shows the sulfur dioxide-rich plume coming from the main summit crater.
And there have been a lot of articles this week with airlines reporting the cost of the EyjafjallajÃ¶kull airspace closures. The reports are all in the tens of millions of Euros, but across the board, the airlines say ticket sales are back on track. Funny how quickly businesses recover after something like this eruption (even after all their wailing and moaning at the time).

eklemetti Thu, 07/29/2010 - 04:51

Tags

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Global Volcanism Program

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volcanoes and the economy

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volcanoes and the economy

volcanoes in the media

Never heard of the
PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER
http://www.psc.edu/research/graphics/gallery/earthquake.php

maybe some of you find some interesting animations.

How about that:
"RVO reported an eruption from Rabaul caldera's Tavurvur cone on 23 July, after increased seismicity likely beneath Tavurvur cone was detected the previous day."
New Britain's sequence of EQs started after a 7.3 Sunday, July 18, 2010 at 13:34:59 UTC
and then, on July 23rd the sequence of deep Mindanao EQs.
No correlation?
BTW: Another 6.6 aftershock today in Mindanao.
(Data from USGS)

Renato: It's a bit difficult to correlate a specific Tavurvur explosion with the New Britain quakes, since Tavurvur has been banging and thumping away on a pretty regular basis for most of the last fifteen years. (check previous GVP weekly reports) But maybe it's not impossible that the quake could have given magma in the conduit a good shaking up and encouraged gas bubble formation

Rio, you read this: Tectonic Setting and Volcanoes
of Papua New Guinea, New Britain, and the Solomon Islands

volcano.oregonstate.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/southeast_asia/papua_new_guinea/tectonics.html

Think about Ekohs informative posts, my elaboration on the Mindanao deep focus EQs, the Russkie Model and the proof presented in the marvelous Cocos plate subduction and deep folding.

The map of volcanoes active from 1900-1999 is interesting. From what we know of this area, most of the recent volcanic activity makes sense, although it's a tectonically complex region.

And then there are the out-of-the-blue sleepers, like Lamington, with it's sole recent eruption occurring mid-20th century. It was a VEI 4, lasting several years with unfortunate pyroclastic flow deaths over a very large area.

volcano.oregonstate.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/southeast_asia/lamington.html

From John Seach: Lamington is a major andesite volcano located in an area without a Benioff-Wadati zone. The magmas erupted from the volcano have unusually high levels of Nickel and Chromium.

That observation came from a 1983 publication, 'Ophiolite-contaminated andesites, trachybasalts, and cognate inclusions of Mount Lamington, Papua New Guinea: anhydrite-amphibole-bearing lavas and the 1951 cumulodome.', which mentions,

'Mount Lamington, together with three other major andesitic centers â Mount Victory, Mount Trafalgar and Hydrographers Range â rest on a northeast-dipping ophiolite sheet, the Papuan Ultramafic Belt (PUB); there is no evidence for a Benioff-Wadati zone beneath this part of Papua.'

That caused a bit of difficulty for subduction zone modelers, but a new regional model,

New SW Pacific tectonic model: Cyclical intraoceanic magmatic arc construction and near-coeval emplacement along the Australia-Pacific margin in the Cenozoic. (AGU 2008 Wattman et al)

www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2008/2007GC001710.shtml

was published recently.

'A new model is presented whereby the PUB, New Caledonia, and Northland ophiolites formed and were emplaced in a cyclical fashion above an extensive NE dipping Cenozoic intraoceanic arc system which diachronously propagated (N-S) along the entire eastern margin of the Australian Plate.'

Chris, at Highly Allochonthous, has a great descriptive tectonic map of the region.
all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2010/07/fridayish-focal-mechanisms/

And that's what set us off exploring deep focus EQ mechanics. After reading our posts here, it should be a nobrainer to see the depth of these quakes and understand that stretching/thinning and folding quakes will be ongoing, once the Big Crackers released the potential energy of what must be a major fold forming.

An aside: for those who were met with the inevitable NYTimes login webpage after clicking his hyperlinks to the articles on Antarctic subglacial volcanism, see

www.science20.com/news_releases/first_evidence_of_sub_glacial_volcano_i…

and the original letter-article abstract by Corr and Vaughn, Nature Geoscience 1, 122 - 125 (2008), 'A recent volcanic eruption beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet'.

www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n2/full/ngeo106.html

@mike don #3: this was a speculation we were arguing about on that day of New Britain's quake. Just wanted to post this as a reminder. Thank you.
@Passerby: I haven't yet finished all my homework and you're already providing us with ever more precious information. I must confess it's a bit confusing to understand all mechanisms involved in plates/subduction over that specific area, but I'm getting closer. I'ts a big honor to have you here to help us. Many thanks.

Not to worry - the mention of Lamington was to point to the evolving understanding of the mishmash of plates and mechanisms at play in the New Britain-PNG area; SE Asia-South Pacific region IS tectonically busy - and confusing, if you don't tease it apart.

To pick up on the links above, to the research conducted by Dr. Robert Sohn at WHOI on explosive undersea eruptions, and the work by Corr and Vaughan about finding subglacial volcanism in Antarctica, I was interested to see the links between volcanism and global warming being explored. It is not yet accepted that volcanoes might release the heat currently warming the globe, before the earth will cool back down again. The 60 meter rise of the polar region could possibly be a linked factor, and the melting of methane hydrates might well contribute to the explosivity of undersea volcanoes. There are interesting articles on hydrates on pages 64-67 in Google Popular Science.
Interesting times we live in! Thanks Passerby for the explanation of the deep quakes under Papua New Guinea and the Phillipines. There are so many different parts of the world working in different ways. The deep hammer action of the inverse Himalayas is not going to be anywhere near that sort of depth but do you think it has influence on the weaker gravitational field over India?

Interesting that Nevado del Ruiz was removed from the new Smithsonian/USGS Volcanic Activity Report. And we just had a 69km deep 5.0 EQ about 90 km SE of Ruiz. Let us see if it will give a "kick" and trigger volcanic activity.

I don't like to insist on the subject, but steam activity in EyjafÃ¶ll is quite vigorous. There are too many clouds, but you can see how fast it's pushed up from the rim, from ÃÃ³rÃ³lfsfell cam. You can also compare it with other cams, weather permitting.

You mean, do magnetic anomalies map to subduction zones?

Yes. Also to isotactic (glacial) rebound.

But you can verify this for yourself by mapping the geoid against global tectonic maps.

First Complete Image Created Of Himalayan Fault, Subduction Zone. Science Daily September 2009.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090911164435.htm

Underplating in the Himalaya-Tibet Collision Zone Revealed by the Hi-CLIMB Experiment. (2009) Science 325:1371-1374. DOI: 10.1126/science.1167719

Fig 2D. Interpretative cross section of the India-Eurasia collision zone. The graphic shows cross-sectional depth to 200Km, but you know it goes MUCH deeper, from the intense blue (the gravity is pushed down) over India as seen in the colored graphic of the new June 2010 ESA GOCE Satellite Geoid Map (see links below)

Click on the righthand panel, Figures Only link to see the Tibet-India plate interaction graphic.

GOCE Map
www.esa.int/esaLP/SEMY0FOZVAG_LPgoce_0.html

Tectonic map showing India Plate extent
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg

Thanks Passerby. I have learned a lot from these last 2 threads and you have confirmed what I suspected re India and conversely the Icelandic rifting. The layers within the Earth are very uneven...

@Renato: You missed the numerous other earthquakes and eruptions. No correlation, just numerous coincidences because these things really do happen all the time.

@Passerby

The part that had me curious, is that there was an article a few months ago that indicated that a mid depth segment of the Himalaya range was flowing northward. The basement is moving south, and the surface is moving south.

From the links you provided, this flow would seem to be associated with the Lhasa and Qiantang blocks. The flow evidently turns off towards SE Asia.

This appeared in an article that equated the massive height of the Himalayas with the high rate of erosion on the southern face of the range.

http://www.pgi.gov.pl/pdf/sad0806Hodg2p.pdf

Region: Mindoro, Philippines
Time: 2010-07-30 00:22:17.3 UTC
Magnitude: 4.8
Epicenter: 120.74Â°E 13.29Â°N
Depth: 115 km

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/read/index.php?pageid=seism_read&rid=184017

(pffffft. pops opens a tall boy)

*squinting at EQ Map, USGS, Mindano/Moro Gulf*

Couldn't find any quakes, regardless of magnitude, at shallow depth in this cluster of 22 events. They are all deep.

earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/120_5.php

The mapped 2010 quakes appear to be associated with the deep focus seismic events.

USGS Map, historical seismicity, maps 1990-2010 and 2010, Moro Gulf, Mindano, Philippines.

neic.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/neic_zhbe_h.html

http://geofon.gfz-potsdam.de/db/eqpage.php?id=gfz2010otlz

Night Passerby and everyone. The tall boy has spoken to me.

|-o

----------------------------------
For followers of the night life there is sex, drugs or rocking with rolling off the Kamchatka peninsula to entertain you.

geofon.gfz-potsdam.de/db/eqinfo.php

Unusually high steam plume on Eyjaf!

Oh - as for a few tens of millions of euro lost for each operator? Hah - peanuts! They could easily have been spending over 30M euro per plane that flew through the volcanic debris. My suppressed evil ego is wishing they had flown after all - looking at available data after the fact, there is a good chance there would be no crashes and the operators could have discovered for themselves how their profits are affected by choosing to fly or to ground their fleet. Ultimately the market would have "rewarded" the operators who made the correct decision - those who didn't fly would have made much smaller losses than those who flew. Unfortunately there are no existing tools that would allow pilots to make appropriate decisions while flying in space with volcanic debris and, contrary to popular belief, what you don't know *can* hurt you.

Garry Hayes at Geotripper referenced this blog today. It covers, in detail, the current Kiluea lava flows, as well as a comparison to past flows:

http://hawaiianlavadaily.blogspot.com/

OT for Erik Klemetti, Boris Behncke or anyone of comparable knowledge.

I have run across several mentionings of different crust blocks "now welded to" another crust block. For example the Jan Mayen continental fragment now being welded to the Eurasian plate or the Yucatan Basin being welded to North America.

Is this just a cessation of fault activity or is there an actual process involved in making these welds? Or is it more of a case where the jagged edges become so snagged on each other that effectively no more movement is possible?

Again removed from the list:
Code Red the (still) ongoing eruption of ChaitÃ©n Volcano:
http://www.aipchile.cl/camara/show/id/14

According to icelandic news yesterday, there is a good chance that EyjafjallajÃ¶kull has gone dormant already and is now just cooling off.

Here is the news, www.ruv.is/frett/eyjafjallajokull-i-dvala

Translate at own risk with Google translate.

Re. Airline losses, to paraphrase a comment once attributed to the founder of the New York Herald, "if you're running an airline at a profit, you need a new accountant"

Is China's Riskiest Volcano Stirring Or Merely Biding Its Time?

Author: Richard Stone
Science 30 July 2010:
Vol. 329. no. 5991, pp. 498 - 499

AAAS ... Advancing 'science' by hiding behind a paywall

Raving: What's the odds this is a rehash of an article that has been mentioned (and linked to) several times already on this blog?

From the article:

Science 30 July 2010, 329:498-499
DOI: 10.1126/science.329.5991.498-a

'Chinese volcanologists keep a close eye on Changbai; they say an eruption does not seem imminent. From 2002 to 2005, the volcano's magma chamber evidently was filling, says Xu. In quiet periods, seismometers register about 100 small tremors a year around the mountain, he says. In 2003, Changbaishan Tianchi Volcano Observatory recorded 1293 tremors. By 2006, the frequency had receded to background rate, and in the first 6 months of 2010 the station recorded 58 tremors.

The mountain rose about 6.8 centimeters in 2003 and 2004, and the ratio of helium-3 to helium-4â"a good indication of magma activity because the source is the mantle," Xu saysânearly doubled during that time. Changbai has been largely quiet since 2005, says Xu, who expects it to kick into another "active phase" again in the next few years. "But that doesn't mean it will erupt," he says. Miyamoto agrees and notes that it is extremely unlikely that the next eruption would rival the millennium eruption.'

There will be a 3-way meeting of scientists to 'get to the bottom' of the North Korean's assertions of eminent eruption. The North Korean scientists have limited, non realtime, access to seismic data. That's one of the problems. The other is China's secretive nature over volcano observatory upgrades and operations close to the border. Their specific desire is to limit data access to science use only - a charge that North Korea may not be willing to adhere to.

China has magnanimously offered to build a seismic station and integrate observations in North Korea. That offer was declined.

First, we need background on this volcano. Fortunately, the Chinese have published a useful background study on-line.

www.mantleplumes.org/Changbai.html

The paper has a couple of familiar themes, eh?

A related paper, cited in the Changbai article above, that answers questions of recent seismicity off the coast of China.

So you see, my Droogie-Droogs, there won't be any of the old volcanic ultraviolence at Baekdu anytime soon. An elevated rate of tremors? Assuredly.

Why? The aesthenosphere is in an active deep upwelling period, as our good friends at IMO/IES have quietly opined.

Summer rainfall is very high at Baekdu; winter regional precipitation has been near or above historical records (despite the area being typically xeric in winter).

Pore-pressure, gravity flux and major mountain-side erosion on the North Korean side. These should be points of discussion when China and the Koreas meet to discuss Baekdu concerns.

The ESA 2009 GOCE Gradient Gravity Map is a useful thing to study to for a regional context of the Changbai tomography graphic.

www.esa.int/images/gradient_picture.jpg

So you see, my Droogie-Droogs, there won't be any of the old volcanic ultraviolence at Baekdu anytime soon. An elevated rate of tremors? Assuredly.

Why? The aesthenosphere is in an active deep upwelling period, as our good friends at IMO/IES have quietly opined.

Posted by: Passerby | July 31, 2010 5:37 PM

Surely not a subterranean DEW line. Get bent hoser why don't you eh. beauty

Interesting that the science is on a sufficiently firm footing now as to be confidently obvious? It might be so. ...

Subterranean DEW line?

I'm having a hard enough time equating "..there won't be any of the old volcanic ultraviolence at Baekdu anytime soon. An elevated rate of tremors? Assuredly..."

with "...The aesthenosphere is in an active deep upwelling period, as our good friends at IMO/IES have quietly opined."

With the other observations, I can agree with the increased seismic activity, but can not see how it rules out potential activity at Baekdu.

I think the parked slab is a pretty wild event though.

The Chinese, with their sophisticated monitoring program at Baekdu, know 'typical' from 'atypical'. 100 shakes per year is typical. We're just a hair over that for the year. Nothing like 2004-05, when the inflation and shakes, and chemistry, showed clear evidence of magma chamber filling.

Since then, it's gone back to being quiet.

The Aethenosphere plays a role in tectonic seismicity, near surface. Also in geothermal activity.

Mass slumping and erosion, and unusual precipitation, lend pressure stress to susceptible stress-strain loaded faulting.

Changbai has deep focus quakes and shall quakes. In order to suss out the cause, you need several layers of data.

Well, if your getting at there being a lack of inflation or a lack of a copious amount of quakes moving in a direction, then I follow that.

I can also see the mass wasting as being contributory to the seismic noise.

I just couldn't make out increased aesthenosphere activity as being indicative of a non volcanic threat.

Probably a brain fart on my part for not picking up on that.

hi all, i was having problem with pc.i was watching a film last night called 'scorcher' were china were doing a nuclear test in there ocean,which sent the Earth of its Axis towards the sun,then had to to use 2 nukes underneath LA to correct the earth could this actually happen when North Korea were testing i think 2008/9 or 10 not sure

@Leon, not a possibility. The quake on Dec. 26, 2004 was of such magnitude that we cannot build a bomb of the equivilent power. That quake was strong enough to affect the rotation of the earth a tiny bit as in microradians (I could be wrong on that term so Passerby correct me if I am wrong :-)) So the posibility of a bomb large enough to tilt the earth's axis is total nonsense. Movies are just that---movies. Most are just for entertainment and what you saw was for entertainment. As far as I know, there has not been a movie from Hollywood or anyone else that has been accurate about volcanoes. Documentaries are much better, especially when they talk to the people who are in the field of geology. Even then, sometimes there can be a bit of overkill. The best on volcanoes are the videoes and pictures of the real thing. Each eruption has a story to tell about the volcano itself and we learn from them. So don't worry about the earth's axis being thrown off by a bomb.

BTW, the earth actually does have a wobble in its axis that takes thousands of years to make a full revolution on that wobble. It is just a natural part of the movement of the earth in rotation and orbit around the sun. The magnetic north pole also changes position. The earth doesn't need us to affect anything it does. We do sometimes out of ignorance such as when we cut too many trees as the clearing in South America and our industry, but the earth moves and quakes on its own.

I hope you don't worry about what you saw in that movie. It was just a movie.

No.

For the sake of argument, lets say that Earth was whacked by another object... much larger than a standard Mk1 mod-0 asteroid... say, the size of a dwarf planet. A 2410km object moving at 45km/s and striking at 45Â° will generate a seismic event of about Magnitude 15.1.

According to the Earth Impact Effects Program,

http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/

"Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the tilt of Earth's axis (< 5 hundreths of a degree).
Depending on the direction and location of impact, the collision may cause a change in the length of the day of up to 15.3 hours.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably."

So.. I would say that the movie is stretching it a bit.

You are most likely to see a perturbation to Earth's orbit if you add to or take away mass or momentum, and as the simulation notes, even a 2410km diameter rock doesn't make much of an effect. (other than killing all life with the possible exception of few extemophiles that can ride out the melt period on debris slung into space)

Earthquakes don't add or subtract to the momentum of Earth in it's orbit. They can affect the compactness of Earth and change the rotation speed... making days longer or shorter.

That was in response to leon. Diane N CA hit the button before I did.

Subterranean DEW line

I interpreted the 400-600km deep quakes as breaking/flexing of the subducted plate. .. which is fine because the source of signal has been identified.

Given that energetic activity is taking place at 400 km depth, it takes time for the convection to carry it to the surface.

@32: earth rotational axis wobble has a period of 433 days. See Chandler Wobble page, Wikipedia.

@35 Not sure I'm following you on convective transfer of energy from deep quake upwards.

A sort of Subterranean DEW line does exist: a deep ocean boreholes seismic and geomagnetic monitoring network

(Japan) Ocean Hemispheric Network Project (OHP),
eri-ndc.eri.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ohp/index.html

Article abstract describing use of OHP borehole seismometers to model subduction beneath the Pacific and Philippine Plates.

Seismic Evidence for Sharp Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundaries of Oceanic Plates. Science, April 2009
Vol.324, pp.499-502.
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/324/5926/499

Good graphics, via Figs Only hyperlink, right panel.

Graphic of the Lithosphere-Aesthenospere at divergent (spreading) ridges and volcanic/tectonic activity.
www.windows2universe.org/earth/images/earths_crust_gif_image.html&edu=h…

Hypothetically, thermal/geomagnetic pulses migrate upward through near-surface aesthenosphere upwellings, spreading forces propagate through the crust with tectonic release at fissures and also under adjacent volcanic centers.

Sorry to throw a spanner Passerby, but Diane referred to the phenomenon of *precession* - http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sprecess.htm The - discovered by Hipparchos some 2000 years ago. According to this site, the period is 26,000 years but in older Astronomy textbooks, I've seen a figure of 27,000 years.

Leon 31: Just curious, here; the plot of that film sounds very like the corny disaster-movie classic "The Day The Earth Caught Fire" (except that there the nukes were American and Russian, and the detonation to put things right was under Siberia). Just shows that you can't keep a scary-but-ridiculous idea down.

Dunno if it's real, dunno if it's photoshoped, but this screen cap of EyjafjallajÃ¶kull coming up on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" is priceless.

http://i28.tinypic.com/4rakao.jpg

@ Lurking #38. Magic! I would love to have heard the host/questionmaster actually ask the question..... and the given alternatives!

@Passerby #36 and Henrik #37. I was referring to the procession (though I didn't know what to call it), and I didn't know about the wobble that takes 433 days. Thank you, gentlemen for letting me know what I was talking about. LOL

Passerby, what is the 433 day wobble all about? Will you go into a bit more detail on that? Thanks.

37: In her *exact words*
'BTW, the earth actually does have a wobble in its axis'

She didn't type the word 'precession'. I suppose she was referring to the Chile EQ that changed the LOD, but as Lurking pointed out, it's not a change in the rotational axis.

So I deliberately named one of a couple known free nutations. The decadeal-variation is called Markovitz Wobble. The primary excitation component appears to be atomospheric.

The Excitation of the Chandler Wobble (JPL, 2000)
trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/18398/1/99-1877.pdf

In 2006, the Wobble paused briefly for several weeks. Stopped all movement, and caused quite a bit of consternation.

Indeed, there appears to be a connection between the change in amplitude of the Wobble cycle and excess LOD over time. USDOD-Navy data webpage.

maia.usno.navy.mil/plot-eop.html

Unfortunately, doomsday prophesy idiots have decided that the wobble has arcane significance. *sigh* You have to wade through their drivel when searching for papers on the wobble trends over time.

Not surprisingly, several papers published in the past decade have related Chandler Wobble variation to significant earthquakes events at subduction zones.

Iceland under "attack":
"After EyjafÃ¶l goes dormant, giant mosquitoes threaten webcams!"
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/MdAiNiSdzXQIIY_KlJaHzA?feat=direct…
(from: http://www.simnet.is/jonfr500/earthquake/vefmyndeyjafjalen.html)

Diane, see the JPL paper and the Wikipage.

The mechanics of the Wobble are...complex. More so than the JPL paper suggests. This webpage supplies a reasonable laymans synopsis of Atmospheric Angular Momentum.

Atmospheric Angular Momentum
http://www.examiner.com/x-17371-Raleigh-Climate-Examiner~y2009m8d30-Atm…

It describes the piling up of air masses at mid-latitudes and effect on LOD. We are emerging from a low-AAM pattern that spanned the last 3 years.

Your original choice of wording was apt, as it does appear to pertain to variation in Wobble, rotation rate/LOD and plausibly, to earthquakes at subduction zones located under the air mass anomalies.

Others have posited Wobble causative components in glacial isotactic rebound and polar ice-cap melting.

I suspect that glacial rebound has more to do with intraplate fault earthquakes (New Madrid fault and St Laurence Seaway quakes) than with the Wobble.

Earthquakes: Climate and intraplate shocks. Nature July 29, 2010.

www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/466568a.html

Triggering of New Madrid seismicity by late-Pleistocene erosion. Nature 466: 608â611 (2010).
DOI:10.1038/nature09258
www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/nature09258.html

I'm a bit skeptical of writing off the NMZ to a purely erosion activated feature. Granted, it probably played a large role in it, but there is a measurable slow wave zone underneath it.

From "Fossil flat-slab subduction beneath the Illinois basin, USA" Heather Bedle, Suzan van der Lee; Tectonophysics 424 (2006) 53â68

"b) a northeastâsouthwest transect that roughly aligns with the Mississippi River. All four cross-sections show the low velocity region beneath the Illinois basin in the uppermost mantle, and b) shows the slow upper mantle structure attributed to the Reelfoot Rift."

Part of Figure 6 from that document (the "b" part):

http://i32.tinypic.com/904tjt.png

lol films are films and Documentaries are facts i just never heard of nukes moving the Axis.in fact i watch two documentaries on the Haiti earthquake 2010 and 2004 boxing day Tsunami on sunday morning which i found very sad for both.thanks for all your info though intresting read and yeah this film was cheesy but good.

@45:
passingstrangeness.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/reelfootrift/

Interesting, a Mag 3 shake in Southern Louisiana, at 5 Km depth. Zero historical activity going back to 1900, hence an ultra low seismic hazard rating.

Manmade?

Leon was a bit off on the plot of the 2002 Sci-Fi dud, 'Scorcher'. The Chinese bomb tests supposedly cause a rupture at the lower mantle-core interface, shifted the mass of large plates, and the resulting 'immense pressure' is thus endangering Earth by catalyzing a 'global eruption'. *eyes rolling upward*

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorcher_%28film%29

Nothing about axial precession, the Sun, etc.

Axial precession is at one of the scale of polar motions, having a very long period and being associated with the Milankovitch_cycles that affect large shifts in climate, and nutation is at the other end that is thought to be caused by short quasi-periodic climate patterns.

I thought that it might be a 'teachable moment' to segue chitchat towards recent publications on the causes of polar nutation and possible relation to seismic and volcanic activity.

Polar Motion (Wikipedia): The slow drift, about 20 m since 1900, is partly due to motions in the Earth's core and mantle, and partly to the redistribution of water mass as the Greenland ice sheet melts, and to isostatic rebound, i.e. the slow rise of land that was formerly burdened with ice sheets or glaciers. The drift is roughly along the 80th meridian west.

strong Earthquake in Northern Norway today :

3,5 scale

http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/nordland/1.7233555

@#49 Thor,
Perhaps in the Norwegian scale of things is was big, otherwise, no. In the article, they even gave it a big M 5 splat on the map, and clearly, the article was about the feelings of exited people, "Wow! I was in an earthquake!"

The good point is that in the comments the people blame the gummint for the quake... ;)

Shop Holiday soon past, and the first geologists have begun opining that Lady E has not only hit the snooze button, but also turned the clock off as well.

@Kultsi - [50] Those that aren't blaming Statoil, that is. Waddya think... privatising EQs in .no is surely gunna make'em more expensive overall for the average Norwegian?

Rana Region EQ activity > post-glacial uplift, with local factors (last time this happened, I noted heavy precip preceded the event).

See abstract: Seismic activity, inferred crustal stresses and seismo-tectonics in the Rana region, Northern Norway. Quaternary Science Reviews (2000) 19(14-15):1423-1436.

Related paper you can read; The 31st of August 1819 LurÃ¸y earthquake revisited. Norwegian J Geol. (2004) 85:245-25.

www.geologi.no/data/f/0/07/60/7_22301_0/Bungum_et_al.pdf

@Passerby [47]

It wouldn't be the first time. Natural Gas production is all through that area.

The Wiggins Uplift is to the east of there, and from what I've read may be a fragment/shard from Gondwana.

According to "Alleghenian Reconstruction and Subsequent Evolution of the Gulf Of Mexico, Bahamas, and Proto-Caribbean" by Pindell in Tectonica, vol. 4, no. 1, January 1985:

"The probable suture zone, from east to west, lies between the Appalachians and the Mauritanides of western Africa; crosses Georgia between the Suwannee Basin and the Southern Appalachians; continues north of the Wiggins Arch and Sabine Uplift, following approximately the trend of the Gilber town-South Arkansas-Mexia graben system" (Pg 17)

http://i25.tinypic.com/2yudovb.png

Figure 1 from pg 2.

In the figure,
SU = Sabine Uplift
WA = Wiggins Arch
JD = Jackson Dome (old core of a volcano)
MU = Monroe Uplift

But, the basement there is anywhere from 8 to 10 km deep, so this event was up in the sedimentary layers above that at 5km depth.

Hmm...

Now ya made me ponder that a bit.

Roughly 81 myr ago, there was an impactor just North of Montgomery AL near a town now known as Wetumpka. The scar is still manifest on the landscape. Most opinion is that it hit in a shallow sea since most of the Mississippi embayment was... pretty much under water at the time.

I grew up in Jackson, and had always heard about there being an extinct volcano down there. Jackson was originally LeFluer's Bluff and was a trading post on the Pearl River. The whole area is hilly, something that was attributed to the old volcano by my peer group. (drunk teenagers) Most likely it was in part due to the really nasty "Yazoo Clay", which has a HUGE volume change as it absorbs water or dries out. Building foundations usually suffer quite a bit from that. In later years, I figured that this clay was from altered rock... but it turns out that it has more to do with whatever critters were living in that ancient sea.

So.. while digging around for info in that last post, I ran across this:

...Monroe and Toler (1937) described both extrusive and intrusive igneous rocks from the Jackson Dome. Harrelson and Bicker (1979), Harrelson (1981) and Saunders and Harrelson (1992) subsequently studied these igneous rocks. Harrelson (1981) interpreted that doming of the Jackson structure was initiated in the Jurassic, based ostensibly on stratigraphic relations. The doming, which was due to plutonism, continued through Early and mid-Cretaceous time until several volcanic vents opened to the surface, causing explosive volcanism. The volcanism continued almost to the end of the Cretaceous (Saunders and Harrelson, 1992). The volcano is capped by the Jackson âGas Rock,â a reef consisting of bryozoans, foraminifera, and corals (Harrelson, 1981). K-Ar geochronology indicates that the igneous rocks of the Jackson Dome range from 79.0 Â± 2.9 Ma to 69.2Â±2.9 Ma, although dates as young as 65.8 Â± 2.7 Ma (Cook, 1975) and as old as 91.3 Â± 3.4 Ma (Sundeen and Cook, 1977) are reported from other areas of Mississippi. These data indicate that the northern margin of the MISB was an area of intense tectonic activity throughout much of the latter part of the Mesozoic Era...

"Basin Analysis of the Mississippi Interior Salt Basin and Petroleum System Modeling of the Jurassic Smackover Formation, Eastern Gulf Coastal Plain", Ernest A. Mancini, University of Alabama, 1998.

So evidently, when Wetumpka got whacked by the meteor, there were already a lot of things going on with volcanoes and other seismic events.

As if we didn't have enough to worry about.

"Spacequakes" Discovered in Earth's Upper Atmosphere

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/100730-science-space-sp…

So, who is going to plot these? ;)

Yazoo clays = Pachuta Marls. Laid down in a marine environment.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marl
a-c-s.confex.com/crops/2008am/webprogram/Paper48317.html

Good general gab on Alabama Geology. I spent quite a bit of time at the Alabama Museum of Natural History (Smith Hall), back when it housed the Geological Survey, on the Univ. Alabama campus.

Tuscaloosa was a handy place to be, for geological diversity.

vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/LivingWith/VolcanicPast/Places/volcanic_past_alabama.html

I know the Black Warrior Basin and geology and soils of the Gulf Coast tolerably well.

Gawd I hate that "Volcanic Past" site. It has that "lets toss up a boilerplate to at least have something for them to look at" sort of appeal.

*shrug*

The State Geologic Survey has a decent geologic map. I didn't post another link that was dumbed down.

www.gsa.state.al.us/gsa/geo_mapping.html

UA Geological Sciences Dept has a better rendering:
http://www.geo.ua.edu/algeomap.php

The wiki page on geology of Alabama is too brief to be useful, but they do mention the Wetumpka impact. Confirmation of it's existence was published well after I had left 'Bama for the PNW.

Looks like 'Bama is going to be the next phase of a national rolling detailed seismological survey, for the next two years.

www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20100723/NEWS/100729880/1007?Title=State…

Smart idea, and not so far removed from the ocean crustal borehole program (OHP) that the Japanese are conducting throughout the western Pacific Plate and coastal Asia region.

@48 i think it was the actors in the film who said it. your site lead me to this site The national Academies press,Effects of nuclear-earth-penetrator weapons,and other weapons[2005] http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?records_id=11282

"...rolling detailed seismological..."

Very cool. Being in the armpit of Alabama we can't help but be included in the survey.... by proxy.

(P'cola)

You might consider contacting the PIs to help them scope out sites in southern AL. Might get you inside the project with respect to cranking through data (eg, paid position). You're obviously experienced at working up data.

The grad students are newbies. I've been locating/siting and planting remote environmental sensor systems for many years. They need pointers for safe sites that won't be molested - not an easy thing where the locals like to get drunk and shoot at new and interesting targets, like gubermint equipment housing, or solar panels to power them.

Just ask any of the HIGHLY UNDERPAID and UNDERVALUED USGS state water quality hydrology techs.

*Clint Eastwood squint*

Mobile is the armpit; the sugar sands of Pensacola Bay (Redneck Riviera) is heaven by comparison.

Nope... Pensacola spends all it's time trying to be Destin.

Well suited geologically for commerce (natural deep water bay), they do everything they can to drive it out so that they can put in condos and try to attract a tourist industry. Pensacola is truly wedged in the armpit, though it may not be the armpit.

Ref [62]

I'm probably ill suited for that position. My back road knowledge of Alabama is how to get across it when the roads are clogged with evacuees. MS back roads I had good working knowledge of, but that was 30 years ago. NW Florida I could do, I roam these roads on an almost daily basis... but I rarely get below 40 mph (have to make sure the traffic is clear on the other side of the combines and tractors that you occasionally run across) He##, I even found a Darlington Florida once. A few houses, some barns and a stop sign.

As for the shooting... I'd be more concerned about being related to any one there. Recently just North of Graceville FL up in AL, a recently laid off worker went on a spree taking out anyone who he had a grudge with ... including family. That went on for about 15 miles before they figured out how to track him down.

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Monday Musings: Marianas eruption, Yasur disruptions and the Guatemalan double whammy

eklemetti — Mon, 31 May 2010 09:56:08 +0000

Monday Musings: Marianas eruption, Yasur disruptions and the Guatemalan double whammy

Quick news on Memorial Day (in the US at least):

Ash soaked by rain from Tropical Storm Agatha on the roofs of homes in Guatemala after the late May eruption of Pacaya.

Sixteen scientists were evacuated from islands in the northern Marianas due to the eruption of the unnamed submarine volcano south of Sarigan Island. The eruption is continuing to be monitored closely by the USGS and National Weather Service as the plume - which is most steam with minor ash - could disrupt air traffic in/around Saipan. The latest USGS CNMI update:

Seismicity at a single nearby station on Sarigan Island declined soon after the eruption of a large steam and ash cloud from a submarine vent 11 km (7 miles) south of Sarigan Volcano early yesterday. Satellite images show no sign of ongoing activity. An EMO observer aboard an overflight yesterday reported a large area of debris floating in the sea south of the island, and a stationary area of discoloration in the water, presumably above the vent. The crew on Sarigan reported passage of a small wave (less than 0.5 m) following onset of the eruption yesterday.

UPDATE 5/31/2010 3:30 PM EDT: A few more details on the eruption from CNN.
Yasur in Vanuatu has experienced some increased activity, prompting warnings about disruptions of air traffic in the South Pacific. Only minor disruptions to/from New Caledonia are expected as the ash plume only reaches 1.8 km (6,000 feet), but right now when it comes to volcanoes, aviation is the only thing on their minds. No evacuations of local villagers near the volcano have been issued due to the current eruptive activity at Yasur.
Updating the news on the eruption of Pacaya and the arrival of Tropical Storm Agatha to Guatemala, the country has asked for international aid to recover from the duo of natural disasters. Severe flooding and landslides have occurred across much of the middle of Central America - and in Guatemala, ash-laden roofs have collapsed due to the weight of the ash and water mix. Pacaya is still erupting, adding more ash to the mess - with 14 people confirmed dead and over 50 missing.

eklemetti Mon, 05/31/2010 - 05:56

And little news from EyjafjÃ¶ll. The tremor increased these last 36h especially at hvo station and mainly in the 0.5-2 Hz band and slightly in the 2-4Hz band. Slight increase in the 0.5-1 Hz band for the hau station. Insignificant variations for esk, god and mid stations.

We uploaded the SEMs (SEM = Scanning Elektron Mikroskope, we got a FEI Phenom) i did on the Eyjafjalla ash to a Flikr account. So in case you want to check it out...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/sets/72157624173361596/

Can someone explain please. The picture here shows what looks like ash http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/349/screenhunter03may312005.jpg am I wrong? Or is it snowing in the middle of summer?

And on this cam further away its the strangest cloudformation i have ever seen. Or is it also an ash cloud?
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/7766/screenhunter04may312006.jpg

Darriel: The top view looks like raindrops on the camera lens (possibly dirty with ash??). Bottom pic certainly looks like an ash plume at the right hand side; which might not mean a new eruption, could be a dust/ash plume from avalanching down the crater wall. Anybody got any better ideas?

@#3/4: There are most likely raindrops, which are mixed with dust. There is storm today in this area, so you are not seeing clouds but ash, which is in the air again. The area was hit by heavy ashfalls in the last days of the eruption.

http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/stodvaplott.html

Of all the 1-2Hz tremor graphs (green lines), the largest in absolute scale is now HVO, on the southeastern side of Katla. (Incidentally, a close second is ESK, on the southwestern side of Katla.)

Forgot to mention before; the Turrialba webcam is working again

Of the 2-4Hz (blue line) graphs, ESK is by far the highest reading.

Map of tremor stations can be found at http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/tremor.html

@3 It could well be snow in the middle of summer. Ther was snow on the Cuillins down to 1000ft only about a week ago and we are a lot further south. The bottom pic looks a lot like snow falling from a heavy cloud. At least that's what it looks like when we have it.

@Birgit #2, those micrographs are awesome. I found some of them really interesting in the formation and the gas holes in some filled with smaller particles. What did you use to coat them with and are these backscatter or normal? I can't remember all the ways you can view a sample (after all it was 1981 when I got my 2 yr tech degree in em/sem!) I am just curious to know what you did to prepare the samples.

Another question I have is about the FEI Phenom. What is it?

Thanks for posting the micrographs. It is so cool to see what came out of Eyjaf and all the different forms of the ash. One of the pics that I found really weird was one that was a rectangle and appeared to have two differen substances in it. Have you done any microprobe work or xray analysis? I'm not sure what I am thinking here as that would be hard to do on ash as you would most likely get charging of the sample and if you coated it with gold or some other metal that would affect what sort of graph you would get. It would probably take a lot of carbon to prevent that and it probably wouldn't work anyway.

Thanks again for posting those pics. Neat stuff.

#2 @Birgitt, Ich gratuliere Ihnen fÃ¼r die Zartheit Ihrer Sammlung.
Very touching to see ash samples collected in Iceland by our fellow JÃ³n Frimann and there they are, in Austria, reunited in a museum.
I can't tell you how precious this is to all of us from all parts of the world who were here together watching and discussing the wonders of this country and its awesome volcanoes.
Thank you!

Birgit, I figured out that the FEI Phenom is an SEM. Let me know what you can do with it that is different from other scanners, if anything. I am curious.

Just got through checking out the pics and I think the airlines need to see this stuff. Can you imagine breathing it?! Not good.

Thanks again for posting.

Poor Guatemala. They have a tough time now.

Some interesting seismic activity on Iceland I see. I wonder what happens next?

@Birgit #2: Are you sure that the first image in the set is ash and not an AT-AT walker?

@Daniel #3: As far as I can tell, it's either ash or dust. It's too brownish to be snow.

@Matthias, #13: Thats right. Earlier I when I heard about ashfalls in the vicinity of active volcanoes, I thought that this is not too bad. Since I now experienced this myself, I know that this is much more serious.

Awesome activity in Turrialba crater now.
http://www.ovsicori.una.ac.cr/videoturri.html

@Chris, Reykjavik #15: I was just about to ask how often Iceland's capital city had experienced ash falls like this, and you unawarely answered my question. I'm surprised. With so many volcanoes around... Good for you. Thanks. :)

#16 Renato thanks for the link to Turrialba. Does anybody know if the "blue" column is actually blue or a trick of the light on normal steam. If it is blue is that a sign of Sulphur Dioxide degassing?

#18 Your welcome, Gordon. There was some speculation on gas colors over here a couple of days ago, due to the strange blue haze around EyjafjÃ¶ll, but no final conclusion whether it was or was not SO2.

@Renato, #17: In Reykjavik we had almost no ash falling - just a little bit to cover the cars and the raise the concentration for fine particles above the critical concentrations.
I witnessed the massive ashfalls, when I visited the area.

#20 Chris: Yes... I think you posted a very interesting video on this "expedition". Was that you? Sorry if I'm not so sure...
I was curious, because my grandma used to tell me stories about big amounts of ash on furniture when Dezcabezado volcano erupted in Chile/Argentina border, back in the 30 's. She lived near Brasilia, thousands of miles away from the mountain. So, I thought it would have been bad in Reykjavik, from EyjafjÃ¶ll.

#19 @Gordon: I think it's a trick of light, now it has all the rainbow into it. Beautiful!
BTW: I 've just remembered that the "blue fog" had something to do with the color of the leaves... I'm not sure...

Hey guys, Turrialba right now is displaying a great show of colours by sunset. It's live.
http://www.ovsicori.una.ac.cr/videoturri.html

For those interested in tremor plots:
http://www.ovsicori.una.ac.cr/sismologia/sismogramas_linea.htm

I wonder if the effect is just light refracted through water droplets or some kind of ionization due to chemicals in the ash plume?

The change of colour through to purple together with the position of the sun, and the loss of colour now with the onset of cloud cover, makes me pretty sure now that it's refracted light through steam.

#25 Whatever it was, still amazing, don't you think? Just waiting to see if any lava flows ' showing...

@Renato, #21: We had a lot of luck with the wind directions - other parts of the country and europe have been less lucky.

#27 @Chris, Reykjavik: Hopefully it's over for now. A pity, though, for us lurkers.
NÃ¦sta ferÃ° mÃn til EvrÃ³pu myndi vissulega fela Ã landinu. HvaÃ°a a dÃ¡samlegur landi!

Erik,
I'll contact some people to see if I can get some more infor on the eruption in the Marianas.
There is a small, unnamed seamount just to the south of Sarigan near its flank, however if the position on the report is correct it may from a larger separate volcano a bit further south.

Not only volcanoes generate craters: a poor man-made sewage drainage system can do worse.
"In the northern part of Guatemala City, the downpour created a giant sinkhole that swallowed up a space larger than the area of a street intersection. Residents told CNN that a three-story building and a house fell into the hole."
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/31/honduras.storm.emergen…

I am curious what the more knowledgeable make of that diagonal line of quakes points towards Katla.

http://i45.tinypic.com/2qid0ye.png

@20 Chris, Reykjavik Do you often get winds from the SE in Reykjavik? I suspect only when Low passes south or High passes north for the most of the year. Normal winds are out of the SW no?
Oh and nice pictures too. All from Iceland?

After Agatha swept through Guatemala, a sinkhole opened up. I have never seen one look quite like this before. They are blaming it on a poor sewage system. All I can say is "wow!" what a crazy hole!

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/31/honduras.storm.emergency/i…

#32 @Dan, FL: Talking about winds, I was just reading about forecasts on oil spill. Still no good news. I'm so sorry, but still hoping...

@34 Renato We are just waiting for when, not if. We' re hitting the times of offshore winds throughout the summer now.

On a positive note for our beach community though, this will be opening here soon. And he made this decision after the news of the oil spill. :)
http://www.margaritavillehotel.com/

@34, 35, 36...

I had a grim thought last night. That chemical dispersant is meant to break up the clumps and wads of crude so it is less of a visible impact.

In 1997, Hurricane Nora swept across the Baja and managed to topple a few trailers in Arizona. In American Meteorological Society's Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, it was reported that plankton were found in the ice crystal of the cirrus clouds... over Oklahoma.

So.. how will cropland respond to a mixture of crude oil, 2-Butoxyethanol (a paint thinner), organic sulfonic acid salts (not your normal salt, NaCl), propylene glycol and in another version of dispersant, hydrotreated light petroleum distillates.

Yeah Buddy...

#35
@ Dan, take these my, somehow bitter, words as a comfort: thousands of years from now, there will not remain a single oil drop in the Gulf, and none of us, humans, to gaze at surviving Beauty.
For now, let us return to the volcanoes, and get some sense of humbleness.
#31
@Lurking, with your graphs, you're digging our way through the mysteries underlying Icelandic volcanoes! Thanks.

#36 OMG!!!!

Activity at the Tungurahua volcano in central Ecuador maintains its intensity with a âvery importantâ number of explosions after the âbig oneâ recorded last week, said today the director of the Geophysical Institute (IG) of the National Polytechnic School, Hugo Yepes.
âThe trend has unfortunately not been to decline, as we'd expected, but rather maintained and we see a little more energy in some of the explosions, ie, theyâre getting a little stronger,â he said.
âAt the moment, the volcano activity (...) has changed and that change is entirely related to explosions that are timely, there is a loud noise, a great shot and vibration of windows,â
Yepes interview with Channel Teleamazonas.

Recent development on Tungurahua activity (Spanish)(Nice pics)
"Incandescent bombs reach 1,5 km"
http://www.prensaescrita.com/adiario.php?codigo=AME&pagina=http://www.e…

@41 Renaldo Are you one of those people I'm jealous of that is multi-lingual? ;)
I didn't see anything about Tungurahua on the link you provided.
Pretty cool about the Jimmy Buffet hotel isn't it. Don't know how occupancy will be, but if it's got a Parrothead fashioned bar locals here will fill it up. :)

@all. Speaking of geologic crises-- there's one building in Pakistan. Several months ago, a landslide dammed a river in the mountain country. This has created an enormous lake behind fairly poorly packed soil. The gov't has tried to build a spillway in the dam in advance of the spring melt. The whole thing is coming to a head as we speak. I've been following it on http://daveslandslideblog.blogspot.com/
I've been following landslides because, after all, what are pyroclastic flows and lahars but ....;-) And, this blog covers the dynamics of various types of landslides.

@ lurking 31, that is odd-looking, isn't it? It's like a straight line plot. Hmm.

@34 That sinkhole looks like a dry cenote.

@40 Renato-- wow, those are wonderful pictures of Tungurahua volcan. The first one looks like a classic pre-camera painting of a volcano--

@Dan-- I don't read spanish either (it's on my list of to-dos. I do speak bad spanglish;-) But, I just scroll through the headlines 'till I find the headline or copy with the name of the volcano and click on the headline.

I think you people will be needing some Parrot headed Margueritas, my friend!
Sorry about the link, Dan. Try this:
http://www.elcomercio.com/2010-05-31/Noticias/Pais/Noticia-Principal/31…
Hehehe! I love Google translator!!!!

@Parclair #43:
I loved the dry cenote theory!!!
I think I'm switching my default language on Google Transl. from Icelandic to Spanish.
Though I keep one tab tight locked on ÃÃ³rÃ³lfsfell cam.

Thanks Renaldo I missed the article in Spanish and English. Must be getting tired.

Thanks Renato - geeez Told you I was getting tired.

@Dan, Fla. You've really got my sympathies. I finally tried to read an article about the spill in the Wall Street Journal, and couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs; I was at risk of breaking my teeth from clenching.

On a positive note, my sister, who spent many hours cleaning up animals after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska is heading to the gulf to help clean the animals there. I'm certain that she's not the only experienced cleaner heading in your direction. (That is such a miserable phrase "experienced cleaner". There should be no experience in these matters.)

#47 @Dan: Have another sip of your Marguerita and take a look at the other thread. News about ChaitÃ©n and Kamtchakta.
ChaitÃ©n has been upgraded to one of the 15 deadliest. Radiocarbons and witnesses of a huge eruption that occurred 320 years ago!

For those wanting to break away from active stuff......The view on the ÃÃ³rÃ³ camera at the moment is breathtaking - simply beautiful. She's puffing gently into a blue sky.

yes indeed wonderful. HvolsvÃ¶llur looks nice too.

http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/stodvaplott.html
shows that the tremor has slightly decreased, but hwo knows if the tremors don't get higher again. ;)

@Dan, #32: Actually I would guess that the wind goes more into the south-eastern direction. Yesterday it was different and we had a noticeble cover of ash on the cars this morning.
Thanks for the photos - they are all taken here in Iceland.

@34,43 Good morning over here - I showed the pic to geologist who immediately said "must be in limestone, karst country."

Since there is not much graphic material of the recent eruptions all over the globe available, I thought you'd like to see old Mamma Etna in her most glorious days - thanks to a new slides scanner I have now the possibility to make some of my best photographs shine in all their beauty. This is just the beginning, I've got to choose the best photos out of about 15,000 slides covering 15 years (1989-2004) of encounters with Etna and the other Italian volcanoes ...

www.flickr.com/photos/etnaboris/

Enjoy!

http://www.mulakot.net/images/myndavelar/14flugv.jpg
plume showing nicely also on Hvolsvelli cam

Hi Gina, think everyone is over on the new thread now..
New post
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2010/06/bezymianny_cleveland_and_tung…

Posted by: parclair | June 1, 2010 2:26 PM

Hey your site looks a little bit strange in Firefox on my laptop with Linux .

My friend and I were just talking about this article, she is continually looking for to prove me totally! I am going to present her this write-up not to mention rub it in just a little!

Submarine volcano off Italy may be a tsunami threat

eklemetti — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 06:47:33 +0000

Submarine volcano off Italy may be a tsunami threat

Map showing the location of submarine volcano Marsili, near the Italian coast. Image from INGV.

The subject of submarine volcanism near Italy has come up before here on Eruptions but now it has made the jump into the worldwide media after some claims made by Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV).

The long and short of what I can tell from the articles is that Marsili, a submarine volcano in the Tyrrhenian Sea, could be a threat to create a significant tsunami that would hit Italy (amongst other Mediterranean countries). The volcano lies only 150 km / 90 miles to the southwest of Naples and is under ~450 meters / 1500 feet below sea level. The fear is that an eruption of Marsili would cause part of the edifice to collapse, producing what could amount (in a worst-case situation) to an undersea version of the Mt. Saint Helens 1980 eruption. It could also just suffer from edifice collapse, producing a tsunami similiar to what happened at Unzen in Japan in 1792.

Now I am no expert on the state of research on some of these submarine Italian volcanoes, but some of the articles seem to suggest that the volcano is "ready to erupt". My favorite line might be from an AFP article that states "The Marsili volcano, which is bursting with magma, has "fragile walls" that could collapse". I've never heard of a volcano as being "bursting with magma," but I fear something could have been lost in translation along the way. The evidence presented in the article does suggest that Marsili could be more of a threat to Italy than previously thought, but I fear that the following quote from Boschi is being liberally interpreted:

"Our latest research shows that the volcano is not structurally solid, its walls are fragile, the magma chamber is of sizeable dimensions. All that tells us that the volcano is active and could begin erupting at any time."

(my emphasis).

Now, I read that final phrase as meaning that it is an active volcano, thus future activity is likely - it could be soon, it could be hundreds or thousands of years from now, but the volcano is likely not extinct. However, my guess is that many of the news outlets read that phrase as "it is going to erupt very soon!"

If you want to see some excellent dissection of the Marsili reports, head on over to the Volcanism Blog. You can also see some additional comments on this news from Boris Behncke. For now, I think we can all agree that Marsili should be on our radar as a volcanic threat to Italy, but some of the headlines out here (e.g., "Volcano tsunami could engulf Italian coast 'at any time'"), as usual, are a little over-the-top.

{Thanks to Aldo Pombino for some of the links in this post.}

eklemetti Tue, 03/30/2010 - 02:47

Tags

volcanoes in the media

volcanoes in the media

There was a comment in the previous thread that said "Marsili may be waking up", following the surge of news reports. I should rectify that currently there is no sign of Marsili waking up (also because there is no instrument to record such signs even if they existed), although in 2006 quite intense seismic activity was recorded by temporarily deployed ocean-bottom seismometers. These signals may have been related to eruptive activity (amongst others, it included the famous "tornillo" events that Galeras volcano in Colombia is notorious for). The concern is that it *may* wake up sooner or later, we don't know anything at all about its current state because it is not monitored and all this humdrum about Marsili is an effort to get funding for monitoring. Which in my opinion is definitely warranted - and if in a previous comment I said that Marsili was not on the high priority list, that referred not so much to the INGV than to Civil Defense and the authorities (and more generally, the public as such). I think the INGV would be happy to be capable of monitoring ALL volcanoes that have the least little bit of a probability of erupting, and funding is far from sufficient, go figure in Berlusconiland. We've got a number of volcanoes that should not be considered totally extinct, and which are not specificaly monitored, such as the huge calderas of Sabatini and Vulsini in Latium, not far from Rome. Even at Etna, a couple of seismic stations recently had to be disactivated due to lack of funding, and they were closest to the area where shortly thereafter, in December 2009, one of the most energetic seismic swarms in recent decades was recorded (without, fortunately, resulting in an eruption).

Again, I consider the chance of a catastrophic event at Marsili relatively small but the possibility exists, and this warrants monitoring and some planning by Civil Defense and authorities.

When you are in a managerial position, you learn very quickly how to handle journalists, to make them report what you want reported, or you do not last long at all. To me, it looks very much as Director Boschi has very skilfully exploited this opportunity by a clever choice of words - "could + at any time", which to a journalist would mean "will + very soon". At the same time, he has kept his own back free as he can fall back on what he actually said and cannot be held responsible for journalistic interpretation. Dr Behncke on another thread here commented upon this and said that it sounded as if Director Boschi was out for funding for further research.

Let us congratulate Director Boschi and hope he receives the funding!

@Boris, politics, as usual, in Italia. :-D I do understand some of that and we have discussed it before. I knew a man that lived across the street from the Vatican and he had no use for voting here in the US, though he did register, but too late to vote! I wish he was still with us (he had liver cancer, stage 4)as he was a very intelligent and decent man that had good views on things. I miss him.

Anyway, maybe funding will occur "sooner or later".

Maybe I better clarify that. He grew up across the street from the Vatican.

Hi boris, very good.
If the Boschi interview will be useful for finding money to make a monitoring system of this volcano I will be very happy.

>However, my guess is that many of the news outlets read that phrase as "it is going to erupt very soon!"<

Probably true. Back in another life I stationed as a reservist at a US Coast Guard command center. Since we directed search and rescue for the district we often had to field media questions. One thing we were told by public affairs was "never speculate", because that could be reported as a definitive statement. For example is a fishing boat went missing, we might suspect (among other things) a large hatch left open in bad weather. But if you said on the record (before any investigation) that was a possibility, it could be reported as, "Coast Guard blames hatch in missing trawler."

The problem with volcanoes and other natural phenomena is that we have to speculate about what will happen. However, as Erik and Boris have said many times we must emphasize the most likely events and point out the difference between informed speculation and wild fearmongering.

However, this still won't end the sensationalism due to the nature of news reporting. It will be a never ending battle.

Ulrich D put up a link on the most recent Iceland Update topic - http://volcanism.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/marsili-seamount-tsunami-thre… - where the following quote occurs:

"Boris Behncke of the INGV discussed Marsiliâs activity in the course of his Q&A on Dr Klemettiâs Eruptions blog last year, but also remarked that monitoring Marsili was not a priority for the INGV [UPDATE: in fact that is not what Boris meant. He meant that Marsili has not been a priority for the Italian authorities, Civil Defence, and the Italian public, rather than the INGV - see his comment at Eruptions]."

It is yet another illustration of how careful the professional must be when expressing an opinion in print, even if it's "only" on a blog. Also, congratulations to both our host and Dr Behncke for being quoted!

Quite apart from the positioning that comes with media exposure, I think there is indeed a woeful ignorance of the threat of seamounts in general. It's very much a case of out of sight, out of mind. And Marsali looks like a pretty good case in point.

There is a whole string of them between along the Kermadec Ridge and some of these have some pretty whopping calderas on them. McCauley Island is sheathed in a pretty substantial ignimbrite cover. I bear this in mind when we calculate the relative frequences of major eruptions. I reckon you could at least double that number if all submarine eruptions were considered. The only question is how many of them are close enough to the surface to turn into subaerial jobs. Might be quite surprising.

First of all, I found a headline about Marsili on the Daily Telegraph that is pure delight. Not only could southern Italy be engulfed, it could be sunk. We should no longer envy California.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/7535373/Volcano-…

Oh yes, as someone working in this sort of business you have to be extremely careful in choosing your wording. When Etna erupted in 2001, some of the emitted lavas carried abundant chunks of sedimentary rock (sandstone) with them, which had been entrained when the ascending magma broke through a prominent and well-known layer of sandstone that lies below the base of the volcano. I told reporters, in an attempt to be not-too-scientific, that these rocks were older than Etna, and upon further questioning, stated that Etna had an age of about half a million years. Next day the news was all over Italy, saying that Dr. Boris Behncke had discovered that "sandstone half a million years old" had been erupted from Etna. (These sandstones are actually many many millions of years old.) Luckily this was not a really serious incident, it brought me a few smirks from some colleagues, but on that occasion I noted for the first time how easily things you say can end up in the news media in a very contorted way. I guess my boss Boschi and many other experienced colleagues could write a book about such episodes.

Wishing I could reply to a specific post. To EKoh.. God loves the Coasties and so do I. ;-) Your work there is not unappreciated.As for funding, any means to achieve that end is acceptable in my book even if it means lending credence to the doomsday screaming journalists. IMHO.

""A rupture of the walls would let loose millions of cubic metres of material capable of generating a very powerful wave," Mr Boschi said."
(Daily Telegraph article)

If this is indeed Director Boschi verbatim, it's pretty conclusive that he is out politicking for funds - "millions of cubic metres" seems far more impressive than "1/1000 of a cubic kilometre", doesn't it... :)

Erik, maybe sometime you could provide a description of how submarine volcanoes are actually being monitored. This would be particularly interesting to the engineers and other gear-heads that follow your blog. I've seen various different descriptions in various journals, but the technology seems to be immature compared to the land/space based monitoring we're more accustomed to (I'm thinking about the spiders on St. Helens). As noted before, if Mr. Boschi's remarks shake loose more funding for this kind of work it could result in many direct and secondary benefits for volcanologists in Italy are around the world.

We would rather pay for popcorn than monitoring.
Best!motsfo

More than ever before, journalists seem to be coming from the ranks of frustrated novelist/screenwriter wannabes. The news isn't as exciting as a fictional tome or a disaster flick, a la "2012"? Simply 'embroider' the words a bit......et voila!--the great American novel masquerading as a news story. The news media can't blame THIS kind of writing on a science-illiterate public. Leading your audience around by the nose with sci-fi tales instead of sober science reporting is an abusive, self- aggrandizing, "Gee, maybe THIS will get me that Pulitzer" brand of journalism. As for those who seem to say that anything done to get funding is A-OK? Since when is it OK to scare the populace half to death by consorting with the sensationalistic press? Maybe there currently IS no better way, but that still doesn't make it RIGHT.

I think that I have understood why Boschi has said these words.
in Italy science research situation is in a very dramatic stage. More, Boschi has been involved in a war against mr.Bortolaso, the chief of the civil defense, now blamed for corruption. He wanted to take from INGV the seismometers net.
Many italan people suffer of under-information because quite all the news in TV are made by Berlusconi-friendly journalist and many people does not read papers. These journalists show another country in which all is good and there is no crises. The government has an old mind, made by attorney-at-law, literature man or businessmen without any scientific knowledge (and the most blame science as unuseful: letters and art are more important).
So a scientist has only one way to obtain money: he must demostrate that there is a danger.

Just for the record, here's a verbatim and complete translation of the original interview with Boschi on Corriere della Sera, with a tiny little bit of editing [brackets]. It does have a couple of pompous and fuzzy bits to it, and the title reads "The undersea volcano in the Tyrrhenian [sea] is again cause of fear"; that's actually the most sensationalistic part of it. See for yourself.

âIt could happen tomorrow. The latest research tells us that the volcanic edifice is unstable and its flanks are fragile. We have furthermore measured the magma chamber which has formed during the past few years and which has large dimensions. All this indicates that the volcano is active and could erupt suddenly.â
Enzo Boschi, president of the INGV, even though cautious, sounds concerned when telling of the results of the latest research campaign carried out on the Marsili [seamount], the largest volcano of Europe, lying undersea off the coast of the [Italian region] Campania.
From the seafloor it rises to a height of 3000 m and its cratered summit lies 450 m below the sea-level. Its impressive structure is 70 km long and 30 km wide. It is a hidden monster whose real face has been revealed only thanks to bathymetric surveys. Around it a number of hydrothermal emissions have been observed, with a frequency that is more elevated lately, and these, together with the weak structure of the volcano slopes, could cause collapses that would be of more serious concern than a possible eruption. Two events, fortunately of small magnitude, have been recorded recently.
âThe rapid collapse of a significant quantity of materialâ, explains Boschi, âwould trigger a powerful tsunami that would affect the coasts of Campania, Calabria, and Sicily, provoking a disasterâ. The instruments have revealed the shape of the chamber of incandescent magma within Marsili, which has grown and reached a size of 4 x 2 km [height? width? length?]. It is like a boiling kettle with its lid well shut.
Since years Marsili has been under heightened surveillance, after emitting ominous signs. Its history is lost in time and the time of its last eruption is unknown: certainly it occurred long ago. But the signs it has given have stimulated research and the [results of the] latest campaign initiated in February with the vessel Urania of the Italian Research Council, has led to heightened concern. Landslide deposits that were discovered point to an instability that must not be ignored. âThe failure of the slopesâ, says Boschi, âwould mobilize millions of cubic meters of material capable of triggering a massive wave. The indicators that have been revealed are very clear now, but still we cannot make any forecasts. The risk is real but difficult to evaluate.â
The reason for this [difficulty] lies in the geographical position of the volcano [deep below the sea-level]. Etna, over the past few years, has been covered with a dense network of instruments capable of giving warning when an eruption is imminent, at least with a bit of a lead time. Marsili is not only below the sea, but it also lacks this sort of instrumentation ready to listen to its signs of bad intentions. It is necessary to install a network of seismometers around the volcanic edifice, linked to a control center on land. But all this is beyond our financial capacities. With the currently available [economic] resources, a few instruments could be afforded, but not the dense network that is warranted.
âWhat is neededâ, concludes Boschi, âis a system of continuous monitoring, to guarantee reliability. But it is expensive and complicated to install. What is certain is that at any time something irremediable could happen but we have no means to recognize it [in time].â

This is nothing new in journalism. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, my father was in charge of training the Apollo program astronauts in geology. He took them to various locations in the pacific northwest including Newberry Caldera, the three sisters, etc. They had a press conference to answer questions about the trip from the local press. When asked about why they were up in the cascades, my dad answered something to the effect of "we think the recent volcanic deposits from the dormant volcanoes in the cascades may be similar to what they will see on the moon."

When the reporter tried to correct him by saying the volcanoes were extinct, dad said that no, they were just dormant and could erupt again. That led the reporter to start questioning him about which ones were dormant and how soon they could erupt. My dad kept trying to deflect them by saying that there would be lots of warning signs and we would know days or weeks ahead of time. But the reporter persisted and finally got him to admit that it was theoretically possible that My Hood could erupt next week. The next question was what would happen if it did, to which dad answered "it would dump a lot of ash on Portland".

The headline in the paper the next day was "NASA Geologist Predicts Mt Hood to Erupt, Portland to be Buried in Ash!". Dad got a stern talking to from Deke Slayton the next day about not getting off topic with the press...

Not much has changed since then in journalism.

Boris - thanks for posting that translation!

Tex - that is a great story! Thanks for sharing it.

Actually, what are the risks of seamounts in terms of severity and frequency?

off the top of my head:
caldera collapse forming a tsunami
flank collapse forming a tsunami
large explosive eruption causing a tsunami and possible ashfall (or pf also causing a - you guessed it - tsunami)
(... what am I missing ?)
ergo.. the greatest risk is probably that of a major eruption causing a tsunami which as everyone above has stressed is very unlikely. However, wouldn't this risk best be countered by a tsunami warning network like the one in the Pacific? Is there anything comparable in the Med? I think the Germans were instrumental in installing the system in the Indian Ocean, it would be ironic if a European country were to ignore the risk at home.
Finally how high is the tsunami risk in the Med actually? There is a lot of seismic activity in the eastern Med and I would have thought the topography (closed body of water) would accentuate the impact of any tsunami.

@Bruce, the Mediterranean is a classical tsunami environment with a long, long history of devastating tsunamis. Most of them are earthquake related, but several large volcano-induced tsunamis are also known. Stromboli in the Aeolian Islands off northern Sicily has undergone repeated partial flank collapse in the past millennia, each probably generating a major tsunami; a small collapse in December 2002 caused a tsunami 10 m high when it flooded the lower portions of Stromboli island, causing considerable damage. Santorini during its ~1650 BC ("Minoan") eruption produced tsunamis in the eastern Mediterranean that may have even left a trace in the Bible, and a large flank collapse of Etna about 8000 years ago is suspected to have generated a similarly massive if not even larger tsunami. Historical earthquakes have regularly been followed by tsunamis, from Spain to the Middle East. The most recent of these events was the 1908 Messina (Sicily) earthquake with 80,000 to 100,000 fatalities, many of them due to a large tsunami. So yes, this is a high-tsunami-risk area, and after the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster there was much talk about establishing a tsunami warning system in the Mediterranean but I haven't heard too much about this lately. This may be in part due to my incapability of following all developments in the field. So I hope I just missed that bit. But it's not been much in the news, which is why I suspect nothing much has happened, given the current crisis and the stark disinterest in particular of the Italian government toward research.

Another problem with the Mediterranean is its size. With tsunamis you need a decent amount of ocean between you and the wave-triggering event to get some warning. The Mediterranean is simply not that big. At least with the Straits of Gibraltar any tsunami will have a limited shoreline it is able to hit and do significant damage to.

Looking at the figures for that volcano and the distance to the Italian coast it is simply inconceivable that a warning could be provided in time to do anything beyond superficial good. If anything this volcano could be said to present more of a danger to Naples than Vesuvius, Campi Flegri or Ischia do in some scenarios. At least with those three volcanoes there are monitoring stations which are likely give at least some warning of an upswing in activity. With this monster there could be a flank-collapse event and the first people would know of it would be the withdrawing of the sea on the Italian coast prior to the tsunami hitting.

I couldn't find a realistic cutoff for depth, regarding tsunami risk, but the vast majority of these destructive waves are caused by earthquake or coastal or submarine landslide, with much less risk associated with submarine volcano and least risk from large extra-terrestrial bolide collision with the sea surface at critical marine depth.

I did find quite a few citations that state that many seamonts are too deep to cause tsunami.

Looking at Italy's economy
http://italyeconomicinfo.blogspot.com/

And knowing that, like the US and other nations facing substantial public debt, quite a bit of it (private finance initiative canoodling) still lies hidden from public inspection.

The Marsili SeaMount may be a ticking time-bomb, but as Erik flatly states, the duration before failure is unknown. The Italian economy is near zero growth, it has succumbed like many others to the lure of securitisation instruments or asset finance transactions to finance costly public support programs.

Maintaining status quo for geological monitoring may be as Good as It Gets, for the time being.

If they want to be creative, INGV could explore relatively low-cost sensor-probe deployment by remote robotic modules, with program development under joint programmatic support from International Big Science (space, climate, earth science agencies) with similar need. Japan, Canada, US, Europe and UK, China, Russia and even Iceland would have vested interest in this type of monitoring effort if it could be made global, to share costs and monitoring load.

The driver? Assess a subset of submarine volcanic activity with the goal of estimating CO2 offset by iron and mineral nutrient emissions-fed algae. Recent reports suggest this mechanism is a substantial player in carbon dioxide sequestration in the oceans. Climate modeling efforts will need better submarine volcano emissions estimates, and in return, the geologists, geochemists and volcano-heads get seismic, gas and GPS data.

Tsunami warning system in the Mediterranean:

March 24, 2010. Harris Corporation's Maritime Technology and Services to Aid New Tsunami Warning System in Mediterranean Sea.

http://www.harris.com/view_pressrelease.asp?act=lookup&pr_id=2931

'This system will consist of an array of seismometers and very sensitive pressure sensors installed on several hundred kilometers of seafloor and connected to a Harris OceanNetâ¢ buoy moored about 80 kilometers off the southern coast of Cyprus. The buoy is one element of the Offshore Communications Backbone (OCB) project that Harris is developing with CSnet. OCB is a modular, expandable system of seafloor equipment, power, communications and services for long-term, deep-ocean observation.'

'Harris is supporting CSnet International, Inc., whose CSnet (CYPRUS) Ltd. affiliate is teamed with the Oceanography Centre of Cyprus to develop and deploy a prototype Tsunami Warning and Early Response system for Cyprus (TWERC).'

Project went on the books in 2008, set for deployment in 2011.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1685238820080416

Boris, you may want to have your boss get in contact these folks to see if there are plans to put sensors near the seamount chain that would aide INGV monitoring efforts.

If so, you may want to craft a carefully-worded statement to HAND to the press, as an agency response to growing public concern over the seamount.

@passerby, sounds like the underwater version of swords into plowshares. Not so much money anymore in deploying military sensors, so why not use much of the same technology for the public safety market.

@Mots, I think you hit the nail on the head! ;-D

Could anyone tell me if this is just noise or something more? quake. utah.edu/helicorder/ymr_webi.htm
There is a bit of a signal at surrounding stations also.

And now for something completely different.
Koryaksky is quite stunning right now. No eruption beautiful on a good clear day.
http://www.kscnet.ru/ivs/kvert/video_camera/koryak/koryak.htm

@Someguy. Looks like wind noise to me. I, however am not a Volcanologist.

I am not an expert either but I do keep an eye on those seismographs and check them several times a day, every day and I have been checking them that way for the past 5 years. I think it's some noise, some real...it looks like they may have ice on some of the antennas too. There have been 2 quakes in the past 24 hrs close to Mammoth Hot Springs that didn't even register on that webicorder. I think several of them are not working correctly and haven't for about a week....The activity has been picking up there over the past few days though....look back at yesterday for YMR and you will see a lot of activity and it wasn't just noise.

I know some strange signals come from this station usually during drive times. This has been the nicest weather day in a while so it would surprise me that wind or ice noise would be causing this today.

There is a recent scientific paper on that, showing Marsili is a collapse-prone volcano. I think it is where "the fragile walls" come from. Access to geophysical research letter is required to read the paper:
Caratori Tontini, F., Cocchi, L., Muccini, F., Carmisciano, C., Marani, M., Bonatti, E., Ligi, M., Boschi, E. (2010), Potential-field modeling of collapse-prone submarine volcanoes in the Southern Tyrrhenian Sea (Italy), Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L03305, doi:10.1029/2009GL041757.

Chris Rowan, over at Highly Allochthonus blog, was nattering today about Aquila area Bufo toads maybe not being such reliable seismometers. He links back to a former post that describes the unexpected stretching tectonics involved in the lethal Aquila 2009 earthquake. You would expect an EQ compression mechanism, but this is a complex back-arc system. Good graphic, excellent explanation. See:

http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2009/04/tectonics_of_the_it…

Boris Behncke...thanks for the write up...i would think that something 70km x 30km x 3km should be monitored...now!

"Our latest research shows that the volcano is not structurally solid, its walls are fragile, the magma chamber is of sizeable dimensions. All that tells us that the volcano is active and could begin erupting at any time." - that is so true. I think you put alot of effort in this presentation. It was very informative!

It appears like you are creating difficulties yourself by wanting to resolve this challenge rather than taking a look at why their is a trouble within the 1st spot

It appears like you're producing problems oneself by attempting to resolve this situation as opposed to taking a look at why

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