The dramatic eruption of Gunung Kelud, or Kelut, led to a flurry of images of ash appearing on many social media platforms, including Flickr, Instagram and Twitter. As an experiment in a volcanology class, we sought out images that we could locate on a map, and by classifying the ash deposits as ‘light’, ‘moderate’ or ‘heavy’, generated a very rough contour map ...[Read More]
The eruption of Kelut, Java, February 2014
I have used storify.com to put together a synopsis of the February eruption of Kelut, Java, Indonesia. There are some additional links to more detailed posts and related information below. Related posts Fascinating technical analysis of the satellite data from Nicarnica Aviation Erik Klemetti on Wired Volcano Discovery updates on Kelud Satellite imagery collated by Imageo on Discover Magazine Coll ...[Read More]
The Kameni islands, Santorini, Greece
A glimpse of the spectacular Kameni or ‘burnt’ islands of Santorini, Greece from the air reveals in intricate detail the overlapping lava flows, explosion craters and fields of volcanic ash from which the islands have been built in successive eruptions over the past 2000 years, and more. Of course, what we can see from the air is just the literal ‘tip’ of the present-day vo ...[Read More]
Friday Field Photo – Alutu volcano, Ethiopia
Update: June 2015 Our open access research paper on Aluto volcano is now available online: Hutchison et al., 2015, Structural controls on fluid pathways in an active rift system: A case study of the Aluto volcanic complex, Geosphere 11, 542-562, doi:10.1130/GES01119.1
A volcanic retrospective: eruptions of the Soufrière, St Vincent
SV Crater
The records, reports and testimonies of past volcanic eruptions and their consequences contain a wealth of information from which we can learn valuable lessons. This, in a nutshell, is the starting point of one strand of the STREVA project, ‘Strengthening Resilience in Volcanic Areas‘, which is a large programme funded by two British funding agencies (NERC and ESRC) and directed from t ...[Read More]
The Botanic Gardens of St Vincent and the Grenadines
Flower of the Cannonball tree, Couroupita guianensis
The oldest Botanical Gardens in the western hemisphere lie on the outskirts of Kingstown, St Vincent, in the Windward isles of the West Indies – and what a gem they are. As the ironwork above the entrance declares, the gardens were founded in 1765. The original ambition of Robert Melville, the then Governor in Chief of the Windward Isles, was to establish a horticultural research station for ...[Read More]
Remote sensing of volcanoes and volcanic processes
A major goal of volcanological science is understand the processes that underlie volcanic activity, and to use this understanding to help to reduce volcanic risk. Advances in instruments and techniques mean that scientists can now measure many different aspects of the behaviour of restless or active volcanoes, including seismicity (to detect magma movement at depth, for example); deformation (oft ...[Read More]
Friday Field Photo – Soufrière Hills Volcano, Montserrat in 1998
View of the steaming dome of the Soufrière Hills Volcano (SHV), Montserrat, in February 1998, just at the beginning of the first pause in the eruption which began in 1995. Since that time, the volcano has gone through another 4 cycles of slow lava extrusion,along with a number of major episodes of dome collapse. The volcano remains active, and closely monitored by the Montserrat Volcano Observator ...[Read More]
Friday Field Photo: Mocho Choshuenco volcano, Chile
Volcanoes Under the Ice
A fascinating story has emerged this week from a paper in Nature Geoscience by Amanda Lough and co-workers (Lough et al., 2013), on the discovery of a new volcano deep beneath the ice of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The discovery is partly a story of scientists looking in a place where no-one had looked before; this case, using a network of seismometers, as a part of POLENET/ANET ̵ ...[Read More]