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Redoubt from space

By eklemetti on February 11, 2009.

The NASA Earth Observatory website posted this great image of Redoubt taken from Landsat images in 2000.

You can see a few neat things. The main thing I notice is that the Drift River Oil Terminal is in about the worst place you could put an oil terminal near a volcano like Redoubt. All the material from recent eruptions at Redoubt get focused down into the Drift River, which then heads off into the Cook Inlet via the Drift River flood plain (upper right hand side of the image). When this image was taken, the Drift River is still grey with volcanigenic material even 10 years after the last activity, showing that most of the material is mobilized in that direction. It still amazes me that the oil terminal was ever allowed to be built in that location.

As for the current state of things at Redoubt, AVO reports that the seismicity is still going and things remain much the same as it has been for the past few weeks. Officials on the Kenai Peninsula are assuring residents that they're ready for an eruption. At this pace, they might have months to prepare!

Tags
Alaska
mitigation
Redoubt
remote sensing
Satellite images
seismicity
Stratovolcano
united states
volcanic hazards
volcano monitoring

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It still amazes me that the oil terminal was ever allowed to be built in that location.

Humanity has a talent for building things in geologically unwise places (Instanbul, Naples, Wellington...); but in this case I'd rather cynically opine that either (a) no-one bothered to ask a volcanologist or (b) they ignored them when they gave an unpopular answer.

another grim scenario for the terminal would be if a north facing slope failure actually damed the drift river with a combination of the piedmont glacier bits overlain by lahar material. This would not be a stable situation and the lake formed behind this dam would represent a sizable threat to the terminal