Volcano thread

A new paper that underlines my impression from reading that what goes on underground and affects us can be just as complex as what goes on over our heads/in the air around us and affects us.



From the abstract (paper is paywalled):

"...The behaviours of complex systems emerge from the connections between the parts of the system and cannot be predicted by separate investigation of the individual parts. Therefore, Earth science should follow the example of fields such as climate sciences and take advantage of tools developed in complex system science to build an integrated model to test the validity of conceptual models and advance understanding of magmatic systems."

Some volcanic lightning when Lewotobi, on Flores Island in Indonesia, went off again a little while ago:

Krasheninnikov in Kamchatka is erupting, and apparenty also has a crack through which ash is venting along multiple sites:



I don't know the source of that video, but it's probably from a military chopper. (The channel itself is not official and probably not expert, either.)

It's in the UNESCO site, but this is a pretty obscure volcano that last erupted ~400 years ago. From its GVP page, it's fairly active but goes in cycles.

It can pack a punch. Tokyo VAAC reported ash to 28,000 feet with one of today's big blasts, and the other two were respectable as well.

Gonna work up a blog post on it tonight; hope it doesn't escalate.

This video is in Indonesian but it has a few more views of the volcano and (per YouTube autotranslation) they basicially are reading the official story.



Dr. Girina is quoted as saying that lava dome growth is the expected outcome, also that the sudden activity could be related ti the recent M8.8.

I can't get into the Russian volcano-monitoring KVERT site any more but Tokyo VAAC keeps issuing advisories on Krasheninnikov, and the AP reported this morning, with video, that it is still chugging away.

There's nothing dire about this eruption AFAIK, except its potential to interfere with aviation. The cracks are actually part of the volcano and its landscape, not the bad news about structural stability they sometimes can mean when a tall volcanic edifice, say, Ulawun in Papua New Guinea, is erupting. And finally, as far as I can tell, it's just a lava dome eruption in the north summit crater, not an intrinsically explosive eruption, as so many subduction-zone events are (there are ground water-lava or magma interactions, of course).

What's really cool is that this eruption very well could have been triggered by the M8.8. That's extremely rare and very

Volcanologists posted this video of a small lahar descending Colima Volcano in Mexico --



Not at all spectacular and, in this case, not dangerous to nearby humans and their stuff. However, it does show how volcanoes can mess you up even if they're not erupting.

Even that little bit could knock you down and drown and bury you -- it's very dense stuff, and might contain debris, too

This volcano is near the Pacific coast (it's on the border between Jalisco and Colima states) and gets a lot of rain this time of year. Experts call it a natural lahar laboratory.

Lahars are a mixture of water and ash (the ash for this one probably came from Colima's last eruption, in 2015); they can be dilute but this one appears to have the typical consistency of wet concrete. Lahar power here is also demonstrated by the dimensions of the ditch that previous ones have excavated into the mountainside.

The boffins are using this video as a reminder for locals to avoid canyons and other lahar-prone areas near Colima right now.

It's easy to forget the danger, at distance from a dormant volcano, but even if it's sunny where you are, rain up near the summit could be mixing with leftover ash and sending a nasty surprise speeding your way.

And then there are the effects of eruption products falling on glaciers and snow, as at Kkyuchevskoy in Kamchatka right now. The resulting lahars can be big. One dam has failed there so far; haven't heard about any more damage, though there probably is some.

KakashiHatake2000 said:

1.9K views · 30 reactions | BREAKING: The Garnet Fire east of Fresno, California is exploding, and has now grown into a pyrocumulonimbus fire-induced thunderstorm! The smoke plume is between 30,000 and 40,000 feet high! This will become a FIRE-INDUC

BREAKING: The Garnet Fire east of Fresno, California is exploding, and has now grown into a pyrocumulonimbus fire-induced thunderstorm! The smoke plume is between 30,000 and 40,000 feet high! This...

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What does this have to do with volcanoes?

TornadoFan said:

What does this have to do with volcanoes?

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oh oops my bad i should have put it somewhere else sorry

The pyrocumulus clouds certainly look like eruptions sometimes!

Shinmoedake had a visually impressive little explosion yesterday, with the plume up to 5.5 km, per JMA (video from KYT is in Japanese; they also have a live cam) :



It wasn't self-sustaining, and JMA didn't raise the alert from its current Level 3.

The boffins continue to report that the volcanic complex called Mount Kirishima as a whole continues to show expansion at depth, while Shinmoedake -- a peak in that sizable complex -- does not show expansion. Their tiltmeters did pick up contraction after yesterday's blast, though.

Dr. Imura has done at least one more flight and reported (a while back) that a line of craters in the summit crater has coalesced. Separately, he also tweeted that he does not understand what's going on with Shinmoedake at all.

Meanwhile, across the bay -- which is actually Aira Caldera -- Sakurajima continues to expand and have small to somewhat larger eruptions now and then, including in recent days.

There doesn't seem to be any more of that "first the one, then the other" business.

It's all very complex but worth watching closely because of the millions living and working throughout the region

Meanwhile, in Mexico...the Sun rose this morning at my favorite volcano:

Less welcome news at another Mexican volcano -- El Chichon might be waking up.



It had a VEI 5 eruption in the early 1980s after being dormant for centuries. Almost 2,000 people died.

It was also one of the first satellite observations of SO2 emissions circling the globe, nine years before Pinatubo, I believe.

The GVP page has background and details of the 1982 eruption as it happened. Here's the Wikipedia page in English and the Spanish page.

<Layperson speculation> I haven't read up on it to get some idea of its current status, but the GVP eruptive history shows a delay of at least one century between eruptions here- - usually more. It seems unlikely that enough magma has accumulated in just 43 years to feed another "big one."

Perhaps El Chichon plans on going back into the lava dome business? Any eruption at this trachyandesitic volcanic complex could be explosive, with pyroclastic flows, though on a much smaller scale, I would think, unless there are other reservoirs down there.

That can be detected ahead of time.

Gas emissions will be a concern, too -- the 1982 magma had a very high sulfur content. </layperson speculation>

bjdeming said:

The pyrocumulus clouds certainly look like eruptions sometimes!

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yeah

those are some pretty cool views of a volcano smoking especially with that one with the sunrise i wonder what the sunsets would look like