Monday Musings: Marianas eruption, Yasur disruptions and the Guatemalan double whammy

And little news from Eyjafjöll. The tremor increased these last 36h especially at hvo station and mainly in the 0.5-2 Hz band and slightly in the 2-4Hz band. Slight increase in the 0.5-1 Hz band for the hau station. Insignificant variations for esk, god and mid stations.

We uploaded the SEMs (SEM = Scanning Elektron Mikroskope, we got a FEI Phenom) i did on the Eyjafjalla ash to a Flikr account. So in case you want to check it out...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/sets/72157624173361596/

Can someone explain please. The picture here shows what looks like ash http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/349/screenhunter03may312005.jpg am I wrong? Or is it snowing in the middle of summer?

And on this cam further away its the strangest cloudformation i have ever seen. Or is it also an ash cloud?
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/7766/screenhunter04may312006.jpg

Darriel: The top view looks like raindrops on the camera lens (possibly dirty with ash??). Bottom pic certainly looks like an ash plume at the right hand side; which might not mean a new eruption, could be a dust/ash plume from avalanching down the crater wall. Anybody got any better ideas?

@#3/4: There are most likely raindrops, which are mixed with dust. There is storm today in this area, so you are not seeing clouds but ash, which is in the air again. The area was hit by heavy ashfalls in the last days of the eruption.

http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/stodvaplott.html

Of all the 1-2Hz tremor graphs (green lines), the largest in absolute scale is now HVO, on the southeastern side of Katla. (Incidentally, a close second is ESK, on the southwestern side of Katla.)

Forgot to mention before; the Turrialba webcam is working again

Of the 2-4Hz (blue line) graphs, ESK is by far the highest reading.

Map of tremor stations can be found at http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/tremor.html

@3 It could well be snow in the middle of summer. Ther was snow on the Cuillins down to 1000ft only about a week ago and we are a lot further south. The bottom pic looks a lot like snow falling from a heavy cloud. At least that's what it looks like when we have it.

@Birgit #2, those micrographs are awesome. I found some of them really interesting in the formation and the gas holes in some filled with smaller particles. What did you use to coat them with and are these backscatter or normal? I can't remember all the ways you can view a sample (after all it was 1981 when I got my 2 yr tech degree in em/sem!) I am just curious to know what you did to prepare the samples.

Another question I have is about the FEI Phenom. What is it?

Thanks for posting the micrographs. It is so cool to see what came out of Eyjaf and all the different forms of the ash. One of the pics that I found really weird was one that was a rectangle and appeared to have two differen substances in it. Have you done any microprobe work or xray analysis? I'm not sure what I am thinking here as that would be hard to do on ash as you would most likely get charging of the sample and if you coated it with gold or some other metal that would affect what sort of graph you would get. It would probably take a lot of carbon to prevent that and it probably wouldn't work anyway.

Thanks again for posting those pics. Neat stuff.

#2 @Birgitt, Ich gratuliere Ihnen für die Zartheit Ihrer Sammlung.
Very touching to see ash samples collected in Iceland by our fellow Jón Frimann and there they are, in Austria, reunited in a museum.
I can't tell you how precious this is to all of us from all parts of the world who were here together watching and discussing the wonders of this country and its awesome volcanoes.
Thank you!

Birgit, I figured out that the FEI Phenom is an SEM. Let me know what you can do with it that is different from other scanners, if anything. I am curious.

Just got through checking out the pics and I think the airlines need to see this stuff. Can you imagine breathing it?! Not good.

Thanks again for posting.

Poor Guatemala. They have a tough time now.

Some interesting seismic activity on Iceland I see. I wonder what happens next?

@Birgit #2: Are you sure that the first image in the set is ash and not an AT-AT walker?

@Daniel #3: As far as I can tell, it's either ash or dust. It's too brownish to be snow.

@Matthias, #13: Thats right. Earlier I when I heard about ashfalls in the vicinity of active volcanoes, I thought that this is not too bad. Since I now experienced this myself, I know that this is much more serious.

Awesome activity in Turrialba crater now.
http://www.ovsicori.una.ac.cr/videoturri.html

@Chris, Reykjavik #15: I was just about to ask how often Iceland's capital city had experienced ash falls like this, and you unawarely answered my question. I'm surprised. With so many volcanoes around... Good for you. Thanks. :)

#16 Renato thanks for the link to Turrialba. Does anybody know if the "blue" column is actually blue or a trick of the light on normal steam. If it is blue is that a sign of Sulphur Dioxide degassing?

#18 Your welcome, Gordon. There was some speculation on gas colors over here a couple of days ago, due to the strange blue haze around Eyjafjöll, but no final conclusion whether it was or was not SO2.

@Renato, #17: In Reykjavik we had almost no ash falling - just a little bit to cover the cars and the raise the concentration for fine particles above the critical concentrations.
I witnessed the massive ashfalls, when I visited the area.

#20 Chris: Yes... I think you posted a very interesting video on this "expedition". Was that you? Sorry if I'm not so sure...
I was curious, because my grandma used to tell me stories about big amounts of ash on furniture when Dezcabezado volcano erupted in Chile/Argentina border, back in the 30 's. She lived near Brasilia, thousands of miles away from the mountain. So, I thought it would have been bad in Reykjavik, from Eyjafjöll.

#19 @Gordon: I think it's a trick of light, now it has all the rainbow into it. Beautiful!
BTW: I 've just remembered that the "blue fog" had something to do with the color of the leaves... I'm not sure...

Hey guys, Turrialba right now is displaying a great show of colours by sunset. It's live.
http://www.ovsicori.una.ac.cr/videoturri.html

For those interested in tremor plots:
http://www.ovsicori.una.ac.cr/sismologia/sismogramas_linea.htm

I wonder if the effect is just light refracted through water droplets or some kind of ionization due to chemicals in the ash plume?

The change of colour through to purple together with the position of the sun, and the loss of colour now with the onset of cloud cover, makes me pretty sure now that it's refracted light through steam.

#25 Whatever it was, still amazing, don't you think? Just waiting to see if any lava flows ' showing...

@Renato, #21: We had a lot of luck with the wind directions - other parts of the country and europe have been less lucky.

#27 @Chris, Reykjavik: Hopefully it's over for now. A pity, though, for us lurkers.
Næsta ferð mÃn til Evrópu myndi vissulega fela à landinu. Hvaða a dásamlegur landi!

Erik,
I'll contact some people to see if I can get some more infor on the eruption in the Marianas.
There is a small, unnamed seamount just to the south of Sarigan near its flank, however if the position on the report is correct it may from a larger separate volcano a bit further south.

Not only volcanoes generate craters: a poor man-made sewage drainage system can do worse.
"In the northern part of Guatemala City, the downpour created a giant sinkhole that swallowed up a space larger than the area of a street intersection. Residents told CNN that a three-story building and a house fell into the hole."
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/31/honduras.storm.emergen…

I am curious what the more knowledgeable make of that diagonal line of quakes points towards Katla.

http://i45.tinypic.com/2qid0ye.png

@20 Chris, Reykjavik Do you often get winds from the SE in Reykjavik? I suspect only when Low passes south or High passes north for the most of the year. Normal winds are out of the SW no?
Oh and nice pictures too. All from Iceland?

After Agatha swept through Guatemala, a sinkhole opened up. I have never seen one look quite like this before. They are blaming it on a poor sewage system. All I can say is "wow!" what a crazy hole!

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/31/honduras.storm.emergency/i…

#32 @Dan, FL: Talking about winds, I was just reading about forecasts on oil spill. Still no good news. I'm so sorry, but still hoping...

@34 Renato We are just waiting for when, not if. We' re hitting the times of offshore winds throughout the summer now.

On a positive note for our beach community though, this will be opening here soon. And he made this decision after the news of the oil spill. :)
http://www.margaritavillehotel.com/

@34, 35, 36...

I had a grim thought last night. That chemical dispersant is meant to break up the clumps and wads of crude so it is less of a visible impact.

In 1997, Hurricane Nora swept across the Baja and managed to topple a few trailers in Arizona. In American Meteorological Society's Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, it was reported that plankton were found in the ice crystal of the cirrus clouds... over Oklahoma.

So.. how will cropland respond to a mixture of crude oil, 2-Butoxyethanol (a paint thinner), organic sulfonic acid salts (not your normal salt, NaCl), propylene glycol and in another version of dispersant, hydrotreated light petroleum distillates.

Yeah Buddy...

#35
@ Dan, take these my, somehow bitter, words as a comfort: thousands of years from now, there will not remain a single oil drop in the Gulf, and none of us, humans, to gaze at surviving Beauty.
For now, let us return to the volcanoes, and get some sense of humbleness.
#31
@Lurking, with your graphs, you're digging our way through the mysteries underlying Icelandic volcanoes! Thanks.

#36 OMG!!!!

Activity at the Tungurahua volcano in central Ecuador maintains its intensity with a âvery importantâ number of explosions after the âbig oneâ recorded last week, said today the director of the Geophysical Institute (IG) of the National Polytechnic School, Hugo Yepes.
âThe trend has unfortunately not been to decline, as we'd expected, but rather maintained and we see a little more energy in some of the explosions, ie, theyâre getting a little stronger,â he said.
âAt the moment, the volcano activity (...) has changed and that change is entirely related to explosions that are timely, there is a loud noise, a great shot and vibration of windows,â
Yepes interview with Channel Teleamazonas.

Recent development on Tungurahua activity (Spanish)(Nice pics)
"Incandescent bombs reach 1,5 km"
http://www.prensaescrita.com/adiario.php?codigo=AME&pagina=http://www.e…

@41 Renaldo Are you one of those people I'm jealous of that is multi-lingual? ;)
I didn't see anything about Tungurahua on the link you provided.
Pretty cool about the Jimmy Buffet hotel isn't it. Don't know how occupancy will be, but if it's got a Parrothead fashioned bar locals here will fill it up. :)

@all. Speaking of geologic crises-- there's one building in Pakistan. Several months ago, a landslide dammed a river in the mountain country. This has created an enormous lake behind fairly poorly packed soil. The gov't has tried to build a spillway in the dam in advance of the spring melt. The whole thing is coming to a head as we speak. I've been following it on http://daveslandslideblog.blogspot.com/
I've been following landslides because, after all, what are pyroclastic flows and lahars but ....;-) And, this blog covers the dynamics of various types of landslides.

@ lurking 31, that is odd-looking, isn't it? It's like a straight line plot. Hmm.

@34 That sinkhole looks like a dry cenote.

@40 Renato-- wow, those are wonderful pictures of Tungurahua volcan. The first one looks like a classic pre-camera painting of a volcano--

@Dan-- I don't read spanish either (it's on my list of to-dos. I do speak bad spanglish;-) But, I just scroll through the headlines 'till I find the headline or copy with the name of the volcano and click on the headline.

I think you people will be needing some Parrot headed Margueritas, my friend!
Sorry about the link, Dan. Try this:
http://www.elcomercio.com/2010-05-31/Noticias/Pais/Noticia-Principal/31…
Hehehe! I love Google translator!!!!

@Parclair #43:
I loved the dry cenote theory!!!
I think I'm switching my default language on Google Transl. from Icelandic to Spanish.
Though I keep one tab tight locked on Ãórólfsfell cam.

Thanks Renaldo I missed the article in Spanish and English. Must be getting tired.

Thanks Renato - geeez Told you I was getting tired.

@Dan, Fla. You've really got my sympathies. I finally tried to read an article about the spill in the Wall Street Journal, and couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs; I was at risk of breaking my teeth from clenching.

On a positive note, my sister, who spent many hours cleaning up animals after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska is heading to the gulf to help clean the animals there. I'm certain that she's not the only experienced cleaner heading in your direction. (That is such a miserable phrase "experienced cleaner". There should be no experience in these matters.)

#47 @Dan: Have another sip of your Marguerita and take a look at the other thread. News about Chaitén and Kamtchakta.
Chaitén has been upgraded to one of the 15 deadliest. Radiocarbons and witnesses of a huge eruption that occurred 320 years ago!

For those wanting to break away from active stuff......The view on the Ãóró camera at the moment is breathtaking - simply beautiful. She's puffing gently into a blue sky.

yes indeed wonderful. Hvolsvöllur looks nice too.

http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/stodvaplott.html
shows that the tremor has slightly decreased, but hwo knows if the tremors don't get higher again. ;)

@Dan, #32: Actually I would guess that the wind goes more into the south-eastern direction. Yesterday it was different and we had a noticeble cover of ash on the cars this morning.
Thanks for the photos - they are all taken here in Iceland.

@34,43 Good morning over here - I showed the pic to geologist who immediately said "must be in limestone, karst country."

Since there is not much graphic material of the recent eruptions all over the globe available, I thought you'd like to see old Mamma Etna in her most glorious days - thanks to a new slides scanner I have now the possibility to make some of my best photographs shine in all their beauty. This is just the beginning, I've got to choose the best photos out of about 15,000 slides covering 15 years (1989-2004) of encounters with Etna and the other Italian volcanoes ...

www.flickr.com/photos/etnaboris/

Enjoy!

http://www.mulakot.net/images/myndavelar/14flugv.jpg
plume showing nicely also on Hvolsvelli cam

Hi Gina, think everyone is over on the new thread now..
New post
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2010/06/bezymianny_cleveland_and_tung…

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