Tag: Volcano
42 for Loowit’s 42nd vol. 4: Menacing May
May had begun with an ominous quiet.
Ominous? Surely a restless volcano quieting down is a good thing!
Yeah, not when you’ve got one flank of the mountain growing a bulge like a demonic pregnancy and displaying worrying new thermal anomalies. Add in earthquakes and dramatic swelling, and you’re sure the volcano is ready to pop.
Geodimeter station at Toutle Canyon near Mount St. Helens. Skamania County, Washington. May 2, 1980. Caption and image credit: USGS
[Monty Python voice] Look at the bulge! (more…)
42 for Loowit’s 42nd vol. 3: Ominous April
For the people who lived and worked on the flanks of Loowit (Mount St. Helens), her awakening was both curse and blessing. Living with a restless stratovolcano isn’t safe nor comfortable. But the tourism it draws is great for the local economy. Locals leaned in, creating funny hats and shirts, renaming menu items, and finding other creative ways to capitalize on her activity.
For the scientists who flocked to her, it was the chance of a lifetime.
Aerial view of Mount St. Helens and drifting plume, from northwest. Photo taken from U.S. Forest Service observer plane at 12:32 p.m. Skamania County, Washington. April 4, 1980. Caption and image credit: USGS
Volcanologists flocked to her slopes, installing equipment, taking measurements and photos, and flying over the summit as steam and ash spurted into the sky. They’d seldom had a chance to study an actively erupting composite cone so conveniently close to highways and large cities. Loowit was wonderfully accessible, and easy to observe, even in the Pacific Northwest’s capricious early spring weather. (more…)
42 For Loowit’s 42nd vol. 2: March Awakening
There’s this old saying about March: “In like a lamb, out like a lion.” This turned out to be very true in Loowit’s case as the 1980s began.
After over a century of peaceful slumber, Loowit (Mount St. Helens) began to wake. Seismic activity is nothing new around volcanoes, but this swarm was intense enough to shake the snow from her summit.
North side of Mount St. Helens, Washington, as of 24 March 1980. Numerous snow avalanche fracture scarps may be related to continued earthquake shaking. No signs of volcanic activity are evident. Caption and image credit: USGS
She still looked lovely and serene, but as March waned, signs became increasingly clear that magma was on the move in a serious way. (more…)
42 for Loowit’s 42nd vol. 1: Pre-1980 Majesty
What’s the answer to life, the Universe, and how many years it’s been since Loowit (Mount St. Helens) erupted? Why, 42, of course! We’ve plundered the archives of the United States Geological Survey and the US Forest Service for 42 of the best historical photos, plus bonus featured images.
Grab your towels and join me on an epic journey back to the 20th Century, in those years when plate tectonics was still in its infancy, volcanology was still young, and Loowit had yet to stir.
The Standing of the Stones Spring ’22 Edition
(A version of this post first appeared on Patreon. To get early access, plus nifty extras, all while supporting Rosetta Stones, please click here.)
Yeah, it has been a long time since I wrote something substantial, hasn’t it? Even Women’s History Month passed without a peep. Both work and my poor teeth exploded, so it’s been a few months of ending up too drained to word properly while I take care of those matters. Thank you so much for sticking with me regardless. It’s about to get good and earth sciency around here.
I haven’t been completely idle: I’ve been researching Marguerite Thomas Williams, the first African American to earn a PhD in geology. Dozens of articles are out there about her. Precisely none contain any of her words. They list off the same few facts, mostly, which tell us some important and interesting things about her, but don’t give her a living memory. She feels remote, removed, like we’re viewing a damaged newsreel from the back of a theater with a moth-eaten screen and a failing projector. Some of the facts given are there to try to illustrate how unique she was, but they’re wrong: she wasn’t born in the Reconstruction era, in fact was nearly twenty years too late. Even the photo many use to portray her isn’t actually her.
The Year in Volcanoes at Rosetta Stones
2021 was an excellent year for eruptions that were fascinating to watch and not terribly dangerous to humans! Let’s look back on the eruptions we covered, and see where they are now, and what might be in store for 2022.
Kilauea, United States
Tūtū Pele has celebrated the last couple of New Years with sweet summit eruptions. From late December 2021 through most of May of 2021, we were treated to a spectacular end to the water lake in the crater and entertained by the dancing islands of the new lava lake. Pele took the summer off before abruptly returning on September 29th. She’s been putting on a crater lava show ever since, with just a few breaks, including a pause over Christmas. By the new year, she was back in action and put on a lovely show over the holiday.
Since Pelee’s only taken one year off since the 1980s, I’m expecting this year to include some gorgeous lava action from her current home. And stay tuned to see if she does any remodeling at Mauna Loa!
Geldingadalir (Fagradalsfjall), Iceland (more…)
Why La Palma is Like This vol. I: The Seamount that Soared
This post first appeared on Patreon. To get early access, plus exclusive extras, please visit my Patreon page.
Now that we’ve got the geologic context of the Canary Islands as a whole figured out, it’s time to zero in on La Palma. How did she get here? Why are all the recent eruptions happening only on one half of her? What might be in store for the future? Does the fact that the most recent eruption is the longest and most voluminous of her entire recorded history mean the island is doomed? And is her active volcanic ridge, Cumbre Vieja, going to fall into the ocean and wipe out the East Coast of North America?
(I won’t keep you in suspense on that last one: the answer is almost certainly a resounding no. So while we’ll talk a bit about former collapses that have shaped the island, we won’t be spending any time on the megatsunami theory. Sorry not sorry.)
A Brief History of La Palma
La Palma is the second-youngest Canary island, and is still growing. She is, in fact, the most vigorously volcanic of the Canary Islands, boasting the most eruptions on record since the Spanish settlers arrived. And that’s just the last 500-ish years of her history: she’s actually about four million years old, if you count from her birth as a bouncing baby seamount. Nearly all of those years involve very hot rocks. (more…)
The Blanco Fault Zone Rides Again
Do we have to do this again so soon? Really? Oh, geez.
Must we really, CNN? Credit: Dana Hunter
I’m not going to link that article, because while it does quote seismologist Harold Tobin up front basically saying nothing to see here, folks, everything’s normal on the Blanco Fault Zone, it also tries to scaremonger. And I’m so over the scaremongering.
Listen. This is the Blanco Fault Zone. Earthquake swarms with many temblors of this magnitude are its specialty. It means absolutely nothing for the mainland. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Read this very good article on Oregon Public Broadcasting, which laid out the facts in beautiful form.
And no, this has utterly nothing to do with submarine volcanoes. No, not even Axial seamount. Dr. Jackie Caplan-Auerbach wrote an entire post explaining how much it’s not that:
There have been a lot of questions about the recent Blanco tranform activity, including whether these are related to volcanic activity in general, and Axial Seamount in specific. The short answer is no, these are definitively not volcanic quakes, but more detail follows.
First, the Blanco Transform fault is the most active fault in the Pacific NW, with very frequent quakes >M5. We can tell that these are normal Blanco faults by their location, by the way they fail (these are strike-slip earthquakes, consistent with the fault’s normal behavior, and happily, the type least likely to generate tsunamis).There is no volcanism associated with transform faults. The nearest frequently active volcano (and the one people most often ask about) is Axial seamount, which is ~300 km from the activity we are seeing on the Blanco this week. This is much too far apart for these features to be associated with one another.
And I swear we all have to do this every dang time.
For anyone who’s been worried that this is the harbinger of something geologically awful in the Pacific Northwest, please be assured that it is not. This is absolutely business as usual on the Blanco Fault Zone. This is what it does. It’s not going to trigger the Cascadia megatsunami. It’s not even going to cause any minor inconveniences to the mainland. Volcanoes aren’t going to be triggered. Literally the only way it’s going to become an issue is if we decide to build a seafloor city right on top of it. Which, knowing humans, someday we will definitely do.
Just a hair over two years ago, my Scientific American article explained why the Blanco should be considered a fun rather than fearsome fault zone. I shall now reproduce that article here, because literally nothing has changed except the date. Please bookmark this to reference whenever someone starts freaking out over the Blanco’s latest antics. It’s all chill, folks. Just enjoy it’s little productions! Because they’re actually entertaining and informative from an earth science perspective, just the way we like our geology. (more…)
Standing of the Stones: Island Volcanoes Abounding Edition
Hello and welcome to a new, semi-weekly feature in which I’ll share snippets of earth science news, cool things I’ve stumbled across, pretty pictures, status reports on upcoming articles, and whatever else seems interesting.
La Palma: Still on Fire
This has been one of the longest eruptions in La Palma’s recorded history, and is posed to be the longest, if it keeps going. Some of the recent lava fountains have exceeded 1,600 feet (500m) in height. The person who runs the GeologyHub channel has discovered a pattern in the data that suggests something interesting (and ominous to the locals) about the relationship between deep earthquakes and eruption activity on the island.
Can you believe where some of that ash ended up?!
It looks like the eruption may break some records. Interesting times indeed.
Why Is La Palma Like This?
A Kilauea Thanksgiving
Hello, my lovely people! It’s American Thanksgiving, and hopefully most of us subject to it have survived without too many kitchen mishaps and family feuds. If you’ve spent it alone, I hope you’ve had a lovely bit of solitude. And for those of you who, like me, worked the day, I hope everything went as smoothly as a holiday can.
Let us give thanks to Tūtū Pele, who has provided us with this lovely and relatively safe ongoing eruption in her home on Kilauea volcano:
The last 24 hours of activity at Kilauea, as seen by the thermal webcam. Credit: USGS
A few days ago, I noticed a fairly large although fleeting increase in the output of lava from the summit vent. According to the USGS, it lasted just a few hours, and then all went back to the current normal. But it sure did look neat in the summit webcams! I grabbed the relevant bits and slowed them down for you.
Here ’tis in the thermal cam: (more…)