Cotopaxi volcano

What a lovely Milky Way, just rotating right over the top of it!

(Found via Lane Hartwell, a local photographer.)

earth-shattering kabooms!

Brian Romans, from Clastic Detritus, pointed out on twitter that in recent Icelandic volcano footage, one can see amazing shock waves propagating through the ash cloud after explosions.

Wow! The air vibrates beautifully. Have a look. It happens several times in this video.



Wikipedia says, incidentally, that

The name Eyjafjallajökull is made up of the words eyja (genitive plural of ey, meaning eyot or island), fjalla (genitive plural of fjall, whose nominative plural is fjöll, meaning fells or mountains) and jökull (meaning glacier, cognate with the -icle in icicle). A literal translation would thus be the "island-fells glacier" or the "island-mountains glacier". The name Eyjafjöll describes the southern side of the volcanic massif together with the small mountains which form the foot of the volcano. The village and museum of Skógar are also part of the region undir Eyjafjöllum (meaning "under the Eyjafjalls").

So it's Eyjafjöll that's erupting? It's complicated.

I'm so glad someone did this

from @banger1977 on twitter:

happy tinkling lava

It's flash, so I can't embed it, but just *listen* to the cooling lava tinkle like broken glass as it falls off the face of the flow:
Awesome volcano video, not so pleased about non-embeddable flash, but heck, it's a Canon ad, no?

This (radar?) image from April 15 looks ominous:

Updates on the European ash situation

From AlJazeera, an information-filled and relatively accurate story (text story at that link) about the effects of Eyjafjallajokull's eruption:




The BBC has more too, on their site, including this important tidbit: "The UK's air traffic control service (Nats) said no flights would be allowed in UK airspace until at least 0700 BST on Friday amid fears of engine damage."

• Icelandic volcanic ash alert grounds UK flights
• Photo of ashcloud from the air, changes once an hour
• Iceland's volcanic ash halts flights in northern Europe
• Why a cloud of ash has grounded flights
• The National Post has a map showing closed airports

Today's ashcloud from space:



Because the clouds make it hard to see a visible-light photo, the Norwegian meteorological office released this one


(I'm a tad embarrassed to ask: What wavelength is this? not infrared.)

The glow from the ground:

Eyjafjallajokull volcano still erupts dramatically

My initial reaction was actually (in text, to a friend), "omg omg omg omfg geology."



Right now, several airports in Europe (specifically Norway and the UK) are closed because of ash.

Boston.com's "The Big Picture," one of the best photoblogs on the web, collected pictures of the volcano and its effects today. Some aren't the usual fare, some are especially dramatic, but I think one that most caught my eye was #11 - people in snow gear, standing on dirty snow with ski poles stuck in it, watching flowing lava from a few feet away.


(And for the sake of fun: KCBS said, on twitter: "Why we're just calling it 'a volcano in Iceland'. Try saying this: Mt. Eyjafjallajökull (ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl)" Wikipedia provides the IPA [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœkʏtl̥]) and an audio clip to unconfuse things.)

Addendum: My friend Ailbhe, in the thick of things, clarifies the current airport closure and flight diversion issues -- "UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, north Finland, Belgium, north France, the Netherlands in parts" -- and provides a link to a good reason: Volcanic ash destroys airplane engines catastrophically.

time-lapse lava flow and rock-making in hawaii

The Earth is a living thing, truly.

Saraychev Peak is awesome, as are fast-on-the-shutter astronauts

From Bad Astronomy (one of my favorite blogs)
comes a time-lapse series of Saraychev Peak erupting
and wow is this cool. You've seen the photo series, I suppose. This one is run back and forth, looped, run in slow motion, run in slow motion with the pyroclastic flows highlighted .... it's a two-and-a-half-minute video, but I stared at it all the
way through, then ran back over the most compelling bits, then ran it all way through again.

It's worth spending some time with. I just wish the series were longer, that we could watch the
ash bloom further out of the side of the cloud the eruption created as it pushed air into a colder layer.

I guess asking the ISS to stop for a few minutes so the astronauts could take more pictures would have been asking too much.



(Note: It's got some interesting music attached. I'm sure the video won't take offense if you watch it without sound on.)

dodge the blast wave!

I saw this wonderful picture of Sarychev volcano (in the Kuril Islands, erupting on June 12) yesterday or the day before, but it's been a busy few days with gardening (I got the rest of the potatoes planted, and damn these cucumber beetles that just don't squish easily) , and my "I need to blog about this wonderful photo" kept becoming, "As soon as I get a minute...." because I intended not just to share the picture, but explain what was happening.


Then Andrew Alden at geography.about.com did what I'd intended to do, and explained the details, so I can quote him gratefully.

The eruption plume consists of brown ash. The white cloud cap formed in the air pushed upward by the rising plume in the cold stratosphere. It is a pileus cloud (named for an ancient Greek hat), now being penetrated by the eruption plume. The big ring of clear air around the island formed as the air around the plume moved downward in response. On the ground, three ashflows are moving down the volcano's slopes. The one on the bottom appears to be white with steam.

And here is it, caught on camera by folk in the International Space Station, for science, and for our delight.

(Yes, the title's silly. It's what my husband says every time an action movie hero narrowly escapes being blown up by ducking away from or fleeing ahead of an explosion's blast wave.)

Volcanos sound like airplanes

Cotopaxi Quito plane tourism
Originally uploaded by hyperscholar.

Really.

Listen

Tonga's doing a little remodeling

Underwater Volcano Tonga
Originally uploaded by roan lavery.

Near Tonga, last week, a volcano exploded with an earth-shattering kaboom from below the sea.

I love the shapes and drama of the black, white, and grey of the ash, steam, and other ejecta.

Boston.com's The Big Picture has some pictures that made my heart pound. I actually made a squeak when I saw #10.

There's no real evidence at this point that the volcano is related to today's quake, and it almost certainly isn't.

.

I love this planet. This is an awesome planet.