April 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of the great eruption of Tambora, on Sumbawa island, Indonesia. This eruption is the largest known explosive eruption for at least the past 500 years, and the most destructive in terms of lives lost, even though the precise scale of the eruption remains uncertain. The Tambora eruption is also one of the largest known natural perturbations to the climate syste ...[Read More]
Update on the eruption of Gunung Kelud
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]
Friday Field Photos: Eruptions at Lokon-Empung volcano, Indonesia
This week I am at a workshop near the twin-peaked volcano Lokon-Empung, in Sulawesi, Indonesia. True to form (it is the most active volcano in Sulawesi), Lokon has been rather active, with fairly frequent small explosions forming some small but dramatic ash plumes. The active vent is not at the summits of either Lokon, or Empung, but instead at the crater called Tompualan, which lies in the saddle ...[Read More]