Volcano Research
eklemetti | March 30, 2009Goma after the 2002 Eruption of Nyiragongo
The activity at Redoubt has captivated a lot of us, but in the grand scheme of things, its eruption are more likely to caused inconvenience and property damage rather than dramatically loss of life (unless something huge and unexpected occurs). However, the same cannot be said if Nyiragongo and/or Nyamuragira (a.k.a. Nyamulagira) in the Congo were to erupt. These volcanoes are close to the city of Goma, a city of nearly 600,000, not including refugees from the fighting in the region. Eruptions of Nyiragongo in 2002 prompted the displacement of 400,…
eklemetti | March 25, 2009Redoubt seems to be setting its pattern for this part of the new eruptive period. There was another small explosion this morning that produced at 15,000 foot / 5,000 meter ash column that moved to the NNW. The seismicity has settled down since the early morning eruption today (3/25) as well.
These types of explosions producing plinian and subplinian eruption clouds that will likely lead to dome building - the same pattern seen at Mt. Saint Helens in 2004-2008 and the previous Redoubt eruptions in 1989-1990. These explosions, producing ash columns that reach tens of thousands feet, will likely…
eklemetti | March 18, 2009I probably won't comment too much on these, but if you need a rundown on every volcanic rumbling on the planet in a given week, nothing is better that the weekly reports compiled by the USGS/Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program. You can check them out both through the GVP website and as a convenient RSS feed.
eklemetti | March 12, 2009Two tidbits from New Zealand:
- A recent survey of volcanoes in the Kermadec Arc north of New Zealand suggest that there is abundant - and recent - undersea volcanism. Scientists from University of Washington (one of my former homes) and Southhampton University (UK) explored a number of submarines volcanoes including Rumble II West, Rumble III and Brothers, which are all located along the same arc of volcanoes as New Zealand's own White Island and Mt. Edgecumbe. What they found was a change in the shape of Rumble III (1.4 km below the sea surface) since the last survey in 2007 - the summit…
eklemetti | March 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…
eklemetti | February 25, 2009
So, there has been a lot of talk about "volcano monitoring" over the last 24 hours, now hasn't there?
Now, I'm not going to revisit this discussion, but as an example of why it might be important, there is an article today about the location of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant in the Philippines (near the potentially active caldera Natib). These are the sorts of issues that need to be dealt with in regards to volcano monitoring - the cascading effect of an eruption. During the 1980 eruption of Mt. Saint Helens, there was a chance that volcaniclastic sediment from the eruption could have dammed…
eklemetti | February 23, 2009Nothing much to report on the Redoubt front except more of the same. The latest report from AVO says (6:44 AM):
Redoubt Volcano has not erupted. Volcanic tremor and intermittent discrete earthquakes continue. Data for the past few hours (since 00:00 AST on 2/23) has consisted almost entirely of low-level tremor, with few discrete earthquakes.
So, it seems that Redoubt continues on its holding pattern. In other fronts, the Anchorage Daily News is running a good synopsis of the monitoring AVO does on volcanoes in the Aleutian chain in Alaska. More updates as seen fit.
eklemetti | February 18, 2009
I found this little press release that doesn't have a huge amount of information, but is interesting nevertheless. The Coordinating Committee for Prediction of Volcanic Eruptions of Japan (nice name) is putting seven volcanoes on "24/7" monitoring. That sounds like we might see a lot of eruptions in Japan soon ... except that their rationale was that these volcanoes "are likely to affect public life by erupting or becoming active in the coming 100 years". That is quite the window of eruptive opportunity! The question is what exactly "24/7" monitoring - does this mean that someone/something…
eklemetti | February 11, 2009I get a fairly steady stream of emails from Eruptions readers, some of which are very worth a post, but sometimes it takes me a while to get around to posting. This is my second attempt to catch up on these mailbag emails. Remember, feel free to email me questions or comments whether you want.
Reader Aldo Piombino sent me an email last month after my post on potential Antarctic volcanism asking about some more unknown volcanoes. He brings up Mt. Marsili in the Tyrrhenian Sea (including a post of his own, in Italian), a volcano of which I was not aware. It is a submarine volcano (info on…
eklemetti | February 6, 2009
For those of you interested in what happens in the realm of submarine volcanism, I can pass on some tidbits I've gotten about NW-Rota 1, a submarine volcano in the Mariana Islands (see bathymetry above). Dr. Ed Kohut (Petrogenex), a friend of mine from my days at Oregon State Univ., is currently on a JAMSTEC research cruise in the Mariana Islands, visiting the area about NW Rota-1. He reports:
"We just reached NW-Rota 1. It is still actively erupting. To put that in perspective, it has been observed erupting every time it has been visited since 2003. Today's actvity is not as vigourous as…
eklemetti | January 24, 2009
It is hard to believe that the eruption at seem to come out of nowhere at Chaiten started over 8 months ago now, and apparently is still not showing many signs of abating. I did get a chance to see some great talks and posters at AGU last month about the Chaiten eruption, with the key points I took away being that Chaiten is erupting a very crystal poor rhyolite (<1% crystals) and that it seems that the source of the magma is relatively deep in the Andean crust. Also, there are some indications that the eruption at Chaiten may have been tectonically instigated - i.e., that earthquakes in…
eklemetti | January 17, 2009
I made it back from New Zealand yesterday after spending the last two weeks looking at some of the most remarkable volcanic landscapes you could imagine. I'll add more detail soon for those of you interested in the volcanism of the North Island, but I'll leave you with a picture of yours truly in from of Ngauruhoe (a.k.a Mt. Doom) along the Tongariro Crossing. The volcano last erupted in 1977 and it considering the youngest vent of Tongariro. Ngauruhoe has had >60 eruptions over the last 150 years.
eklemetti | January 1, 2009
I just wanted to point folks to an interview in US News & World Report with the USGS scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, Dr. Jacob Lowenstern. He plays down the swarm, noting that things like this happened in the 1980s and that Yellowstone has seen over 80 eruptions in the caldera since the last "supervolcano" eruption 640,000 years ago. I know Dr. Lowenstern pretty well, and even at AGU when I talked to him (before the swarm), he seemed to play down the huffing and puffing the caldera experiences on a yearly basis. It would take much more activity to get the YVO…
eklemetti | January 1, 2009
Right as Yellowstone is getting interesting (or at least had signs of interest), Eruptions is going on a bit of a break again starting January 2. This time it is because I'm off to the North Island of New Zealand to do some field work. I'll be headed to Tarawera (hopefully both the 1305 and 1886 eruption deposits), Taupo, Tongariro, the area around Rotorua and maybe even White Island (amongst other). I won't have my MacBook, but I will have my iPod Touch, so I'll try to keep track and make brief posts if something big comes up, but feel free to use this post as a clearinghouse for any news…
eklemetti | December 15, 2008I was chatting with a fellow from AVO and he called the simultaneous eruptions of Kasatochi, Cleveland and Okmok a "once in a millennia" event. So, enjoy it!
He also mentioned that the Kasatochi eruption released the most sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere since the 1991 Pinatubo eruption ... but we had an idea of that already.
And who knew that there has been uplift at Uturuncu in Bolivia? I sure didn't, but Steve Sparks does.
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More to come later this week when I can go to all the Chaiten posters.
eklemetti | December 11, 2008
Sometimes I wonder if we know more about the fates of people who died in a volcanic eruption over 1800 years ago than we do about most people who died in any given eruption this year. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with that - we're fascinated by both volcanoes and Roman antiquity - but the level of detail done for the victims of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. is stunning.
Considering that this blog got started (to an extent) thanks to our cultural obsession with Pompeii, I thought it fitting to post a bit about a recent report on the last moments of a family in Pompeii. Nothing really…
eklemetti | December 9, 2008
My blogging frequency might be a little scattershot for the next few weeks thanks to the American Geophysical Union Winter Meeting in San Francisco (if you're at the meeting, you can always hear me talk about rhyolite genesis in New Zealand) and then the holidays. I will be experimenting with blogging from my new iPod Touch during the meeting if I hear something interest - yes, live-blogging a geology meeting, is this a first? - Â but that might also end up being an abysmal failure. I suppose it is the closest I'll come to live-blogging the other Winter Meeting ...
eklemetti | December 9, 2008
The BBC is reporting today on a study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters that attempts to establish a connection between large earthquakes and subsequent volcanic eruptions. The study is focussed on large Chilean earthquakes over the last 200 years (Chile has had some of the biggest, hitting M9 on the Richter Scale) and then examining the number of volcanic eruptions that followed. They find that activity increased in the year after the earthquakes. This suggests that many volcanoes might be "primed" to erupt and just need a catalyst like a large seismic event to promote…
eklemetti | November 11, 2008
I just got back from a 4 day field trip to the Long Valley Caldera in eastern California, so I'm a little behind on posting. The field trip was great and I had a chance to see a lot of pumice, a lot of welded tuff (in the form of the Bishop Tuff, the large ignimbrite that erupted from the Long Valley Caldera ~760,000 years ago) and got to lead the part that looked at the Mono domes (too bad snow covered the Inyo Domes). Pictured above some puffed obsidian - the layers are obsidian and vesicle-rich obsidian - that were erupted, cooled, expanded and cracked (known as "breadcrusting"). This is…
eklemetti | October 17, 2008
The only volcanic arc in the lower 48 states continues to be pretty darn quiet according to the USGS. The Cascade range that spans from Lassen Peak in the south to Mt. Baker in the north (and maybe Mt. Garibaldi in Canada) has been remarkably quiet in terms of eruptions for the last century. In fact, only Mt. Saint Helens and Lassen Peak have erupted since 1900 - and most of the volcano have shown very few signs of even coming close to eruption beyond minor seismic swarms, steaming or land deformation. This is in contrast to the reports from the 1800s that suggest that Hood, Shasta, St.…