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From 1980 to the present, a timeline map of every earthquake in the world with a magnitude of 5 or above. You can play around with different parameters and data, so you can see where the different tectonic plates are, just see where the biggest earthquakes occurred, or add in volcanic eruptions. You can also draw a cross section and it will show how deep the quakes occurred along that line.
My current natural obsession is Mount Etna, a volcano in Sicily that blows perfect smoke rings like it’s frickin’ Gandalf with a pipe-full of Old Toby or something.
It is a relatively rare phenomenon caused by a constant release of vapours and gases. The gaseous mass ascends rapidly through the central part of the conduit, promoting the formation of rings by wrapping the gas upon itself in a vortex motion.
Puff on, Etna, puff on.
Archaeologist and satellite expert Marco Langbroek posted a satellite image of the latest volcanic eruption on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, near the city of Grindavik.
Wow. It’s worth clicking through to see it larger (mirrored here). You can see the Keflavik airport to the northwest of the fissure and Reykjavík is the darker area in the upper part of the image, just right of center. This image really underscores the extent to which volcanoes are fiery, slashing cuts to the Earth’s skin. It’s bleeding! Bleeding lava!
This image was taken by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel 2A satellite and processed by Langbroek. The Copernicus project posted their own view of the volcano today as well:
Again, worth seeing larger. And here’s a closeup view of the fissure.
The famed Blue Lagoon spa, circled in blue, is very close (less than a mile) to the lava flow and is currently closed.
If you want to check out the satellite imagery for yourself, you can find it on Copernicus Browser. I tried for a few minutes to duplicate Langbroek’s view (“combined natural colour + SWIR”) but couldn’t quite manage it.
A new eruption started yesterday in the general area of Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall volcano and drone pilot Isak Finnbogason was there to capture some footage. The shot of the lava flow beginning at the 1:00 mark is absolutely stunning.
This short video is an excerpt from a longer livestream Finnbogason did — here’s another short excerpt that shows just how large the eruption is and how close some people are getting to it:
He’s starting another livestream of the eruption in just a few minutes here (at 2:30pm ET) if you’d like to follow along.
On March 19, after seismic activity in the area, an eruption occurred in Fagradalsfjall, Iceland, adding a new volcano to the country’s already charismatic geology. Because the ongoing eruption is relatively small, steady, and located fairly close to Reykjavik, it’s been well-documented, both by drone and by live webcam. YouTube user stebbigu stitched footage from the live feed into a 5-minute time lapse of the formation of the volcano that covers 18 days, from the first few hours to a couple of days ago. The night views, with all that pulsing orange lava, are especially mesmerizing.
After a series of thousands of tiny earthquakes in the area, a small volcano has started erupting in Fagradalsfjall, Iceland. Drone pilot Bjorn Steinbekk took his brand new DJI FPV drone and flew it right into the eruption, capturing this pair of amazing videos. Said Steinbekk of the experience: “I really thought I would never see my drone again, but man, this was so thrilling to capture!!!”
Update: Here’s a live view of the erupting volcano.
Update: Steinbekk has added several new drone videos of the volcano to his YT account, including this fantastic night view of the lava from directly overhead.
Update: Steinbekk did a 12-hour stream from the volcano the other day and at the end, he sent the drone into the volcano to die:
It’s hard to describe in words, but I have actually been very emotional this morning, crying and sad but also so thankful for this experience and being able to share it with you. I realised last night when I took a walk down to say goodbye to this magnificent phenomenon that you can fall in love with a volcano.
Mick Kalber is posting daily flyover videos of the eruption of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. This one, from June 23, is one of the better ones from the past week and features a frothing ocean of erupting lava and a speedily flowing river of molten rock.
The Volcano Goddess, Pele is continually erupting hot liquid rock into the channelized rivers leading to the Pacific Ocean. Most of the fountaining activity is still confined within the nearly 200-foot high spatter cone she has built around that eruptive vent. Her fiery fountains send 6-9 million cubic meters of lava downslope every day… a volume difficult to even wrap your mind around!
According to the USGS, the temperature of the lava when it erupts is around 2140 °F, which is pretty hot but not as hot as a kiln can get when firing some high-fire clays and porcelains. (thx, christopher)
For his project Cascade of Lava, photographer Michael Shainblum captured several photos of lava pouring out into the ocean in Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii. The double rainbow one is just…
Shainblum also took some photos during the solar eclipse last year.
37 years ago today, on May 18, 1980, Washington’s Mount St. Helens erupted in a blast that killed 57 people and covered a huge swath of the western US with ash and destruction. Alan Taylor, who grew up nearby and vividly remembers the eruption, shared some photos of the eruption and its aftermath at In Focus.
I was 6 when Mount St. Helens erupted and it was probably my first concrete memory of the wider world from childhood. For days and days, it was all anyone talked about at school. The next summer (or it may have been 1982), my parents, my little sister, and I embarked on a car trip west towards the Pacific from Wisconsin, which I later learned was a last hurrah family vacation before my parents divorced. We motored in a beast of a station wagon resembling The Griswold Family Truckster, and stopped at the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Wall Drug, Rapid City, Yellowstone, and finally Seattle, where the only memory I have is of seeing the Space Needle briefly.
But the highlight of the trip was going to see Mount St. Helens. The landscape looked very much like in the second photo above, trees flattened over an ashy lunar landscape. It’s still one of the weirdest, most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. We collected a couple of jars of ash to take home, along with some pumice stone.
Back at school in the fall, I managed a brief respite from my crippling unpopularity by showing off the ash jars and demonstrating how the pumice floated in water. A rock floating in water! But then the holes in the pumice filled with water, it slowly sank, and with it my new-found popularity. I imagine that pumice and those jars are still somewhere at my dad’s house, in a pile of something somewhere…it would be great to see them again.
Werner Herzog has directed a documentary film for Netflix on volcanoes.
Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Into the Inferno, heads just where its title suggests: into the red-hot magma-filled craters of some of the world’s most active and astonishing volcanoes-taking the filmmaker on one of the most extreme tours of his long career. From North Korea to Ethiopia to Iceland to the Vanuatu Archipelago, humans have created narratives to make sense of volcanoes; as stated by Herzog, “volcanoes could not care less what we are doing up here.” Into the Inferno teams Herzog with esteemed volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer to offer not only an in-depth exploration of volcanoes across the globe but also an examination of the belief systems that human beings have created around the fiery phenomena.
Into the Inferno debuts on Netflix on October 28.
The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history. According to Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, the eruption affected the world’s weather for at least three years, inspired artists & writers, triggered famine, contributed to the world’s cholera epidemic, and altered economic systems all over the world.
Here, Gillen D’Arcy Wood traces Tambora’s global and historical reach: how the volcano’s three-year climate change regime initiated the first worldwide cholera pandemic, expanded opium markets in China, and plunged the United States into its first economic depression. Bringing the history of this planetary emergency to life, Tambora sheds light on the fragile interdependence of climate and human societies to offer a cautionary tale about the potential tragic impacts of drastic climate change in our own century.
William Broad reviewed the book recently for the NY Times.
The particles high in the atmosphere also produced spectacular sunsets, as detailed in the famous paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the English landscape pioneer. His vivid red skies, Dr. Wood remarked, “seem like an advertisement for the future of art.”
The story also comes alive in local dramas, none more important for literary history than the birth of Frankenstein’s monster and the human vampire. That happened on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where some of the most famous names of English poetry had gone on a summer holiday.
The Tambora eruption must have also unleashed quite a racket, perhaps louder than Krakatoa’s loudest sound in the world.
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and was clearly heard 3,000 miles away.
Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Travelling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about 4 hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history.
A much much smaller eruption occurred recently in Papua New Guinea. From the video, you can get a tiny sense of the sonic damage unleashed by Krakatoa:
Holy smoking Toledos indeed. On Reddit, a user details how loud a Saturn V rocket is and what the effects would be at different distances. At very close range, the sound from the Saturn V measures an incredible 220 db, loud enough to melt concrete just from the sound.
At 500 meters, 155 db you would experience painful, violent shaking in your entire body, you would feel compressed, as though deep underwater. Your vision would blur, breathing would be very difficult, your eardrums are obviously a lost cause, even with advanced active noise cancelling protection you could experience permanent damage. This is the sort of sound level aircraft mechanics sometimes experience for short periods of time. Almost twice as “loud” as putting your ear up to the exhaust of a formula 1 car. The air temperature would drop significantly, perhaps 10-25 degrees F, becoming suddenly cold because of the air being so violently stretched and moved.
Even at three miles away, the sound is loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage. But that’s nothing compared to the Krakatoa sound. The Saturn V sound is ~170 db at 100 meters away while the Krakatoa explosion was that loud 100 miles away! What happens at 170 db?
…you would be unable to breathe or likely see at all from the sound pressure, glass would shatter, fog would be generated as the water in the air dropped out of suspension in the pressure waves, your house at this distance would have a roughly 50% chance of being torn apart from sound pressure alone. Military stun grenades reach this volume for a split second… if they are placed up to your face. Survival chance from sound alone, minimal, you would certainly experience permanent deafness but probably also organ damage.
The word “loud” is inadequate to describe how loud that is. (thx, david)
Update: Sperm whales are loud! 200 decibels in water and 174 in air.
But the whale is not really as loud as the rocket, she told me. Because water is denser than air, sound in water is measured on a different decibel scale. In air, the sperm whale would still be extremely loud, but significantly less so - 174 decibels. That’s roughly equivalent to the decibel levels measured at the closest barometer, 100 miles away from the Krakatoa eruption, and is loud enough to rupture people’s ear drums. Suffice to say, you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time swimming with the sperm whales.
How this quad-copter shooting HD footage of a volcano erupting in Vanuatu manages to escape the flying chunks of lava is beyond me.
(via @DavidGrann)
A geothermal engineering project in Iceland drilled 1.3 miles into the Earth and unexpectedly hit a pocket of magma. Instead of capping the hole, as was done in a similar instance previously, they decided to see if they could harness the energy of the magma.
“Drilling into magma is a very rare occurrence, and this is only the second known instance anywhere in the world,” Elders said. The IDDP and Iceland’s National Power Company, which operates the Krafla geothermal power plant nearby, decided to make a substantial investment to investigate the hole further.
This meant cementing a steel casing into the well, leaving a perforated section at the bottom closest to the magma. Heat was allowed to slowly build in the borehole, and eventually superheated steam flowed up through the well for the next two years.
Elders said that the success of the drilling was “amazing, to say the least”, adding: “This could lead to a revolution in the energy efficiency of high-temperature geothermal projects in the future.”
The well funnelled superheated, high-pressure steam for months at temperatures of over 450°C — a world record. In comparison, geothermal resources in the UK rarely reach higher than around 60-80°C.
Scientists have discovered the source of a massive 13th century volcanic eruption: a volcano called Samalas on Indonesia’s Lombok Island. The blast was eight times as powerful as Krakatoa.
Though the eruption was equatorial, its impact was felt and noted around the world. “The climate was disturbed for at least two years after the eruption,” Lavigne said. Evidence of this was found in studies of tree rings that revealed abnormal growth rates, climate models, and historical records from as far afield as Europe.”
Medieval chronicles, for example, describe the summer of 1258 as unseasonably cold, with poor harvests and incessant rains that triggered destructive floods — a “year without a summer.” The winter immediately following the eruption was warmer in western Europe, however, as would be expected from high-sulfur eruptions in the tropics. The team cites historical records from Arras (northern France) that speak of a winter so mild “that frost barely lasted for more than two days,” and even in January 1258 “violets could be observed, and strawberries and apple trees were in blossom.”
Note that at a volume of 40 km3 of debris, Samalas doesn’t even come close to being on the list of the 40 most explosive volcanic eruptions in history, most of which happened millions of years ago. (via digg)
Volcanoes “scream” before they erupt. And they also have a heartbeat of sorts. Listen to these surprisingly intense sounds emitted by a volcano in Alaska before it erupted. The first recording condenses 10 minutes of audio into 10 seconds, so you can hear the pre-eruption scream:
The second recording is of 10 hours of pre-eruption mini earthquakes condensed into one minute of audio.
The pause right before the eruption is Mother Nature dropping the beat. (via @DavidGrann)
This might be the dumbest thing on YouTube, which is saying quite a lot.
Or maybe not…maybe running up flowing lava isn’t the worst thing you can do with your life and limbs.
You will never see anyone closer to a volcano than this.
There were also several comments urging Frodo to throw The Ring in. Oh, YouTube. (via clusterflock)
Stranded, a single-issue magazine produced by people who were stranded by the volcanic ash cloud back in April, is now available for sale.
What we’ve made of it all is an 88-page souvenir of a moment in time when a non-life-threatening crisis hit the world, one for which nobody was to blame, and nobody knew how long it would last. People scrambled to find alternative routes home, any way, any how, or tried to make the best of wherever fate had placed them. It was a moment of unplanned disruption, never to be repeated in quite the same way. The perfect subject for a magazine, in fact.
Over 50 people contributed…it looks really nice.
Here’s European airspace shutting down as the ashcloud from Eyjafjallajokull drifts over the continent:
The music is an inspired choice. And here’s European airspace starting back up again:
(via infosthetics)
Attention designers, writers, photographers, illustrators, art directors: are you stranded in Europe or elsewhere by the volcanic ashcloud? Join Andrew Losowsky in producing a magazine.
If you’d like to be a part of the core creative team who will put together this impromptu publication, let me know as well. The only criterion for any contributor is that, like me, you have to be stuck somewhere unintentionally. If all goes well, the results will be published, probably via MagCloud and/or the Newspaper Club, and any proceeds sent to a charity that helps mitigate the effects of climate change on human populations. After all, we have to repent somehow.
Publication name to consider: The Eyjafjallajokull End-Times.
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