The Earth Story

Original caption:

Drone flight up to the ice cap atop Eyjafjallajökull volcano, Iceland. Original caption:

Original caption:

A GHOSTLY VOLCANO To celebrate Halloween, here is spooky-looking image not of a ghost, but a radar image showing the crater of Eyjafjallajokull, a volcano in southeast Iceland which caused the cloud of volcanic ash to spread over Europe in 2010. It was taken by the Landhelgisgæslan (Icelandic Coastal Patrol) in April 2010 while Eyjafjallajökull was still constantly erupting. Each of the three main openings is 200-500 metres in diameter. -TEL http://www.universetoday.com/63110/incredible-images-of-iceland-volcano-from-just-a-few-kilometers-away/#ixzz2AnS6oE00 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8622978.stm http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2010/volcano-pauses http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1702-02%3D&volpage=var

Atmosphere sorts volcanic ash

This photo shows a high-magnification shot of the ash from the 2010 eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, taken by a scanning electron microscope.

The ash particles were produced by lava interacting with water from melting glaciers. The lava heated the water, causing steam explosions that ripped apart the lava into fragments. The end result of that process is reflected in this image by the angularity of the grains; they’re explosion shards.

If you look closely however you can see another important feature. Focus on the largest grain in the center and the large grain at the bottom-center. The grain at the center has a bit of fine dust on it, but it’s mostly glassy; the texture of the grain is smooth. Contrast that grain with the one below it; the grain at the bottom is full of crystals. Both shards came from the same eruption but they came from different parts of the magma chamber; one part was more crystalline and that property is preserved in the ash shards.

The Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud is famous for having shut down air travel over much of Europe for nearly a week, trapping millions of travelers. New research presented this week at the Goldschmidt Conference in Florence, Italy by researchers from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland suggests that the difference between these 2 grains has important implications for air travel.

There are 2 properties that vary between these grains as a consequence of the difference in crystallinity; density and melting point. Crystals are denser than glass, so the grain at the bottom is denser, and crystals also have a melting point that is hundreds of degrees higher than the glass transition temperature.

This ash was sampled very close to the volcano; as a consequence, the ash is still well mixed. Further away from the volcano however, density starts to matter. As the ash travels over the ocean and moves away, particles settle out. Density plays an important role in this process; the denser the particle, the more rapidly it settles out. The ash cloud that reached Europe, therefore, was different from the one just outside of Iceland; most of the dense, crystalline particles settled out close to the eruption site.

This change in ash composition has implications for air travel. If I’m understanding the aerospace engineering correctly, the crystalline particles are a greater threat to air travel because of the higher melting temperature; they penetrate into the hottest parts of a jet engine before melting, whereas the glassy ash begins flowing at much lower temperatures and thus can’t get into the engine interior.

This research implies that the ash clouds from eruptions like Eyjafjallajökull may become less hazardous as distance from the volcano increases. Future efforts to assess the hazard of ash clouds will need to take this variable into account in addition to properties like the particle density, grain size, and travel direction of those clouds. This is one property that might allow for safe air travel if the level of crystallinity can be verified to be low.

-JBB

Image credit: Ars Electronica Center http://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronicacenter/4659518652/in/set-72157624096900675/

Press report: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-particles-icelandic-volcanic-ash-fell.html

Original Abstract: https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D8015915_67098536_6803015

Let’s start 2017 where I spend a lot of video time, in Iceland. Hard to find better place for that, and this clip comes from one of my favorite studios too.

A GHOSTLY VOLCANO

To celebrate Halloween, here is spooky-looking image not of a ghost, but a radar image showing the crater of Eyjafjallajokull, a volcano in southeast Iceland which caused the cloud of volcanic ash to spread over Europe in 2010. It was taken by the Landhelgisgæslan (Icelandic Coastal Patrol) in April 2010 while Eyjafjallajökull was still constantly erupting. Each of the three main openings is 200-500 metres in diameter.

The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull is thought to have started 20 March 2010 about 8 kilometres east of the top crater of the volcano. It resumed erupting 14 April 2010 but this time from the top crater in the centre of the volcano, which caused jökulhlaup (meltwater floods) to rush down the nearby rivers. The meltwater getting into the volcanic vent caused the eruption to be explosive, throwing volcanic ash several kilometres into the air, leading to air travel disruption over northwest Europe from 15 April to 21 April and also creating electrical storms. The volcano is now considered dormant.

-TEL

http://www.universetoday.com/63110/incredible-images-of-iceland-volcano-from-just-a-few-kilometers-away/#ixzz2AnS6oE00 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8622978.stm http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2010/volcano-pauses http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1702-02%3D&volpage=var

AURORA OVER THE ERUPTION OF EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL

Photographer Enrique Pacheco captured this image in March 2010. After shooting the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull right next to the lava for two hours, he jumped back into his car and began the drive home. After driving about 1.5 km (1 mile), Pacheco and his companions saw the lights of the aurora from the window and stopped the car. Pacheco reports that the ‘first two shots were shaky due the excitement of the situation, and then I finally calmed down and took it right.’

Eyjafjallajökull erupted several times during 2010; the eruption in April caused enormous disruption of air travel across western and northern Europe. The first eruption of the volcano occurred on 20 March 2010, and came from an ice-free area on the north-east side of the 1660m (5300 feet) high volcano. This produced lava and little explosive activity.

Settings: Canon 7D + 17-40; f4; 10 second exposure; ISO 800.

-TEL

twitter.com/EnriquePacheco_ facebook.com/eppacheco www.enriquepacheco.com

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/volcanoes/icelandic_ash.html

Nauthúsgil - a ravine near Eyjafjallajökull volcano carved by water flowing out of the volcanic system. ​

Eyjafjallajökull tests geoengineering options

Most readers likely remember the eruption in 2010 of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. The volcano erupted underneath an ice sheet, and the interactions between fresh magma and recently melted ice caused hydrovolcanic explosions and generated an ash cloud that choked airplane transportation across Europe for weeks.

The Eyjafjallajökull eruption also turns out to have provided a natural experiment that tested of one of the major geoengineering solutions for climate change.

For many organisms, the element iron is a major nutrient. This is of course true for humans as well, since iron is a major component in our blood. If iron is unavailable, life tends to struggle, and there can only be as many organisms living in the environment as there is iron available to support them. In this setting, iron is termed a “limiting nutrient”.

This setting, iron-limitation, is fairly common in the ocean. Particularly in waters away from continents where there is no input of iron in sediments from continents, iron limits the amount of life that can exist.

This iron-limitation has led to proposals for a geoengineering solution to climate change. The idea is pretty simple; if we could make more life bloom in the ocean, in the form of algae, bacteria, etc., that life could take up some of the CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it into the ocean. If iron is the limiting nutrient, then all that would be needed is to dump iron into the ocean in these iron-limited regions and life would bloom, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.

This process has actually been tested several times on small scales. At least 8 different national programs, including the US-led “Ironex” experiments, attempted small releases of iron into the waters of the southern ocean and were able to detect substantial algal blooms afterwards. Controversially, a private group also secretly released iron off the coast of Canada in 2012, with similar results.

The Eyjafjallajökull eruption provided a much larger version of this same experiment. In the waters off of Iceland, iron becomes a limiting nutrient. The igneous rocks of Iceland are often very iron-rich, and much of the ash from Eyjafjallajökull landed just off the Icelandic coast, in the North Atlantic (see the ashcloud animation linked below).

The Eyjafjallajökull eruption therefore, was a giant version of the Ironex experiment, seeding the North Atlantic with iron-rich ash.

Scientists from the UK's National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, took a series of cruises out into the waters of the North Atlantic following this eruption, giving them a chance to test whether this iron led to CO2 sequestration. Their answer…it did, but not as much as one might have hoped.

In the waters of the North Atlantic, iron is a limiting nutrient, but there are other nutrients required for life, like nitrates and phosphates (nutrients commonly used in fertilizers). When the iron-rich ash was dumped into the north atlantic, iron was added and algae used up the new iron, but they rapidly ran into another limiting nutrient. In this case, about 20% extra algae grew compared to a normal year, before nitrates became the limiting nutrient.

So, if there’s good news, it’s that Eyjafjallajökull actually did actually cause an algal bloom, but the bad news is it wasn’t as big as one would have hoped. If there’s a message, it’s that even in areas that are iron limited, a small experiment can produce a large bloom of algae, but scaling up to the point where it could actually impact the atmosphere is going to be very difficult because other nutrients can rapidly become limiting as well.

In the end, Eyjafjallajökull pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere in 2 ways; first by causing this algal bloom, and second by shutting air travel across Europe. The problem for people advocating geoengineered solutions to climate change is...the shuttering of air travel is probably the bigger of the 2 effects.

-JBB

Story: http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/03/volcanic-iron-fails-co2

Image credit: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=43690

Animation of ash cloud: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aburt/4660620480/

IronEX and other experiments: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002AGUFMOS22D..12J

2012 private iron seeding: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/pacific-ocean-iron-dumping-geoengineering_n_1986517.html

Cutting CO2 by shutting air travel: http://m.guardiannews.com/environment/2010/apr/19/eyjafjallajokull-volcano-climate-carbon-emissions

A GHOSTLY VOLCANO

Mount Raung — Southeast Asia’s Eyjafjallajökull

When Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) shut down Europe’s airspace for almost a week due to massive clouds of ash that were being spewed from the volcano mouth. Airlines and travelers were infuriated, arguing that a shutdown of an entire continent’s airspace was unnecessary because visibility had not been severely affected by the ash in the atmosphere. But the immediate danger was not poor visibility — volcanic ash in the atmosphere, even in concentrations not visible to pilots, can damage jet engines heavily. Volcanic ash, which is essentially shards of microscopic glass, can clog up components of jet engines, and even raise jet engine temperatures to over 1,000˚C, a temperature capable of melting rock down into magma.

This brings us to Mount Raung on the island of Java in Indonesia, a volcano that has become a source of travel pains across the region. The volcano erupted a few days ago after several weeks of tremors, belching out ash clouds that drifted as high as 6 kilometers into the atmosphere. This natural-color image of Mount Raung and its surrounding islands, captured on July 12th by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows dark ash plumes floating away from the mouth of the volcano. Authorities had shut down all airports within the region, and so far, only Bali’s main international airport has reopened to begin the unenviable responsibility of clearing over 900 flights worth of stranded passengers — a task that could take at least three days.

Mount Raung is one of Indonesia’s most active volcanoes — there have been at least 13 eruptions in the last 25 years — but its latest eruption could not have come at a less opportune time. Many Indonesian Muslims are travelling home to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, and at over 200 million, Indonesia has the highest population of Muslims of any country in the world. Eid al-Fitr is one of Islam’s most important festivals that marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.

-DC

Photo credit: http://1.usa.gov/1Gl08eO

More reading: http://wrd.cm/1M4TQap http://ti.me/1Lh8jzr http://bit.ly/1O5le6F http://bit.ly/1M9SBXt http://bit.ly/1HVoMUo http://bit.ly/19pPgDA

Video of Mount Raung doing its thing: http://bit.ly/1DfTqHd

Dalmatian Mountain

This pattern of black and white was created by a combination of ash from Iceland’s 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, snow on a nearby slope that survived until the middle of summer, dark exposed volcanic rock, and occasional patches of moss. The ash was sculpted into certain areas by the blowing winds as it fell – the same winds carried much of the eruption’s ash southeast towards Europe, disrupting air travel across the continent.

-JBB

Image credit: http://imaggeo.egu.eu/view/1870/

An excellent follow-up to our last post.