♬∞ Punch♏︎Tsubasa ☉☯

Mt. St. Helens, 1980 eruption,

Ella Webb

Europe's most active volcano located in ltaly has been sighted puffing out giant smoke rings.

Mount Etna, Europe's largest volcano, has been emitting spectacular 'smoke rings' since Wednesday, a rare phenomenon known as volcanic vortex rings.

These rings are produced by rapid gas release and the shape of the vent.

Boris Behncke, a volcanologist, mentioned that Etna is producing more vapor rings than any other volcano on Earth.

Despite the impressive display, there have been no major disruptions reported in surrounding villages or at Catania airport.

Mount Etna is one of the most active volcanoes in Europe, constantly being monitored by the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Catania.

📍: Sicily, ltaly

📹: scienceexplored (IG)

Mount Pinatubo is an active stratovolcano in the Zambales Mountains of the Philippines. It is notorious for its June 1991 eruption, the second-largest terrestrial eruption of the 20th century. Effects were felt worldwide, and surrounding areas were heavily damaged by pyroclastic surges — fluidised masses of turbulent gas and rock fragments ejected during the eruption.

15.140887°, 120.349685°

Source imagery: Google Timelapse

The Big Obsidian Flow is the youngest lava flow in Oregon, at the juvenescent age of ~1,300 years before present. It's a product of the most recent eruption of Newberry Volcano, the largest in the Cascade Range north of the California border (Medicine Lake Volcano is the largest overall). Newberry is a bit enigmatic - it's a huge volcano with a high rate of large eruptions but is not on the main Cascade volcanic arc. There's a number of converging fault zones in this area, which probably create significant crustal weakness allowing magma to percolate through the crust quickly.

Obsidian is common in lava flows of the rhyolitic composition, which is the most evolved kind of magma. Rhyolite magma spends lots of time spent in the crust for crustal rocks to contaminate the magma body and for heavier iron/magnesium-rich minerals to settle out, leaving behind a melt with over 68% silica (quartz). Silica is the same stuff regular glass is made of, so the higher your silica content then the glassier your lava flow is likely to be on the surface. The bands present in big chunks of obsidian are the result of shearing, differential cooling/composition, and flowing during the lava flow. This is very thick, sticky, viscous lava that doesn't like to flow. As it cools, it breaks rather than bends and turns the lava flow into a moonscape of glass shards and boulders.

The large amount of obsidian at this and other flows around Newberry Volcano is interesting because the volcano is mostly made of basalt - a lava with a near-opposite composition from rhyolite. Akin to Mauna Loa or Iceland, most of Newberry's lava flows form a broad shield more than 60 miles N-S and 30 miles E-W (roughly 100x50 km). The central part of the Volcano is about ten miles (16 km) across and contains a caldera formed when the central summit collapsed ~75,000 years ago. The caldera has been filled by subsequent eruptions and by two lakes separated by a big pumice cone. This means that the volcano produces - simultaneously - a wide range of magma compositions, indicating a complicated and long-lived magmatic system. Hazards from Newberry (to the 200,000 people living on its slopes) are not limited to fluid basalt eruptions that slowly blanket the landscape but also major explosive eruptions. The Big Obsidian Flow is a representative of the latter. Ash and debris from that eruption is found as far away as Idaho, and is many meters deep near the eruption's vent.

Sketchbook pages,

Ella Webb