Oldonyo L'engai
eklemetti | February 25, 2010The flu has retreated and I'm getting back on track. Huzzah!
I'll get back to the blog by posting this week's new USGS / Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcano Report. Looks like some interesting stuff in it ...
Looks like there were some small eruptions from Oldoinyo Lengai in Tanzania. The volcano is one of the few (only active?) carbonatite volcanoes in the world, erupting a lava composed primarily of calcium carbonate and sodium minerals with very little silica. It leads to the odd lava that erupt black (and cool ~ 500C) and cool to white, making it one of the…
eklemetti | June 4, 2009Post any new volcano news you find here! I'll be back on June 15.
Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania. Image courtesy of Peter Elliston, taken in 2006.
eklemetti | March 16, 2009
Oldonyo L'engai, Tanzania
As with most disasters, the best way to prevent a Katrina-like catastrophe is preparedness. The best successes in volcanic mitigation have been in places where the combination of monitoring, communications and practice fit together like so many legos in a set, allowing for a calm and orderly evacuation when the eruption, or signs of eruption, began (e.g., Rabaul in 1994). This is why it is always heartening to me to see articles about places trying to implement hazard mitigation plans for their volcanoes. Two examples are in the news today:
(1) Officials in…
eklemetti | December 11, 2008
When people think about volcanic mitigation, a lot of time is spent worrying about monitoring and science. There is nothing wrong with this as we need to know what the volcano has done in the past and what it is doing now to predict its future activity. However, a very important piece of the mitigation puzzle is education, because without educating the public of the dangers of the volcano, many times they will not listen to officials when time for evacuation comes (see Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia in 1985). That is why this report from Tanzania is great: scientists going out and educating the…