The Earth Story

Videographer takes you on a timelapse trip around the world covering locations they filmed in 2017 and earlier. Enjoy! Original caption:

Now this is neat. IN 2015 the volcano Calbuco woke up and produced a spectacular eruption, with ash clouds fired into the air and pyroclastic flows sent down nearby channels. Here is one of those channels as people returned to it after the eruption. The landscape is coated with ash and the hot ash flows are still steaming as water seeps along them. 

Zoomed in view of the Calbuco Volcano eruption of 2015 (also seen in last post). You can see so much texture in the volcanic cloud - these are all low density enough that none of them collapsed, but breakdowns in these clouds can be a key part of producing pyroclastic flows.

Incredible video shared on Vine of the 2015 eruption of Calbuco Volcano, Chile. Here’s just one shot - this is timelapse of the eruption cloud being ejected upwards.

Volcanic lightning and lava thrown into the air during the 2015 eruption of Calbuco Volcano, Chile

Gorgeous HD Video of the Calbuco volcano and its recent eruption.

Volcanic distortion Installing radar on satellites has revolutionised our view of the Earth. Not only can relief mapping of incredible accuracy be undertaken, regardless of cloud cover, but by stacking images of the same place taken at different times, changes can be tracked over time. The two images will match if there has been no change, and be out of phase if they have, creating an interference pattern that conveys useful information. Such data is of use for example in volcano monitoring, where ground deformation linked to shifting magma within the edifice can be tracked remotely from space. More recently is was used to assess the effects of last Saturday's earthquake in Nepal as we reported some days ago (see http://on.fb.me/1R2WHTi) Last week volcan Calbuco in Chile had three convulsive episodes (which we reported on at http://on.fb.me/1DNaRgO http://on.fb.me/1bC8F6m and http://on.fb.me/1JVcqOG ) and NASA used data from a European satellite called SENTINEL to produce this interference pattern. The image shows the deformation between the 14th and 16th of April, spanning the eruptive events. The leaf shaped bullseye pattern is to the west of the actual cone, and shows where the surface has subsided as the magma chamber below emptied and collapsed. The black areas are water, Lago Llanquihue northwards and the Pacific southwards. Loz Image credit: NASA and EPA/ALEX VIDAL BRECAS http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11434

Volcanic haze over Argentina

Last week saw the visually spectacular eruption of Volcan Calbuco as it awakened after nearly half a century of slumber (see http://on.fb.me/1bC8F6m and http://on.fb.me/1JVcqOG). The astronauts aboard the space station had a bird's eye view, and one of them snapped the haze of ash and aerosols as it hung over the continent.

What normally happens is that ash plumes rise northwards parallel to the Andean chain until they meet the rough level of Buenos Aires. Here two great masses of air meet, called Hadley convection cells, vast gyres that carry heat from equator to poles and spawn much of our weather and the locations of deserts and wet zones. Where the cells meet, the winds change, and the ash shears right as seen in the second photo, straight our way. The second image comes from the eruption a couple years ago of Cordon Caulle, and I wrote about it at the time (see http://on.fb.me/1F6b5Cu)

As for us, a bunch of flights got cancelled into Buenos Aires and my home city of Montevideo, and last Friday evening's sunset was so spectacular that I understood at once the link between the eruption of Tambora in 1815 and Turner's amazing sky paintings. And I have half a mm of volcanic ash on my window railings and a thin coating on my tiled floor.

On top of that, as i write this, the news tells me its popped off again prompting the third photo, though the event was mild compared to the first two. An evacuation was ordered again though, just in case. We run into an important concept here in hazard management, as it is often hard to tell whether a volcanic event will last hours like these, days, like Mt St Helens, or years like Montserrat.

Loz

Image credit: Samantha Cristoforetti/ESA

NASA PA

http://wrd.cm/1bkfUhY http://bit.ly/1E269wg

Holy crap

Gravity Waves in the atmosphere are waves set off by some disturbance where the air oscillates up and down, restored to its original position by gravity.

These are gravity waves created by a pressure wave from….an exploding volcano. The VIIRS instrument on the Suomi-NPP satellite caught these gravity waves in the atmosphere identified by clouds surrounding the Calbuco volcano, which exploded in Chile a couple days ago (see more here: http://on.fb.me/1bC8F6m).

-JBB

Image credit: NASA http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=85767

Calbuco wakes up after 42 years

The Ring of Fire never stops rumbling, somewhere along the edge of the subducting Pacific and related smaller oceanic Plates magma is stirring or erupting. Chile being a very long thin country sitting pretty right above the zone is prone to more than its fair share of earthquakes and eruptions, and following on from the beautiful (and fortunately minor) eruption of Villarica last month (see http://on.fb.me/1AanAtA and http://on.fb.me/1Jz4diZ), another of the many smoking peaks found in this nation has passed over its pressure point.

Subduction zone volcanoes are usually explosive, since their magma tends to be more silica rich and viscous, meaning that the gases that drive eruptions as they exsolve from the rising magma (due to lowered ambient pressure) can't escape as easily as with more fluid magma like basalt. This results in huge columns of pulverised rock, hot lava and ash being expelled when the bursting point is finally reached, and yesterday's eruption was no exception.

Calbuco volcano is in the Andes in the south of the country, and erupts a kind of viscous magma named Andesite, after its ubiquity in this chain of mountains. Its last eruption was in 1972 (its 10th since 1837), but it has had some spectacular explosions in the distant past, including a collapse event a couple million years ago, and may well do again. Wednesday evening's event lasted an hour and a half, and prompted the evacuation of a zone extending 20km around the peak, though it was followed by another brief blast overnight. No fatalities or injuries have been reported so far, though schools have closed and flights into the salmon capital of the country of Puerto Montt have been cancelled. The volcano is unmonitored, so it is hard to know exactly what is rumbling within, as there is no helpful seismic array surrounding it.

Loz

Image credit: 1: Alex Vidal Brecas/EPA 2: David Cortes Serey/AFP/Getty Images 3: Luis Hidalgo/AP 4 Reuters

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MdUQY6xQG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXxjEnTM7Cw Sources:

http://bit.ly/1QqxH7W http://di.gg/1QrifbM http://bzfd.it/1Pwj5m8 http://bit.ly/1z1T3U8 http://bbc.in/1HnF8dE http://bit.ly/1daI68J

One of the best “caught in the act” videos you’ll ever see from a Volcano, from the recent Calbuco eruption in Chile (you’ll see a fuller post on this volcano soon). The “wow” is priceless.

Stunning time-lapsed video of the ongoing eruption at Calbuco volcano in Chile