Cracking Volcanoes

Hello everyone! I hope you're all having a nice New Years Eve as you read this. Last month, I heard that Google had updated its Earth Engine Timelapse tool to include Landsat images right up to 2016. If you haven't heard of Earth Engine , it's an incredible platform developed for the analysis of geospatial datasets. The Timelapse feature on the website means you can watch how the Earth has changed over 30 years. This includes watching cities expanding, lakes and glaciers shrinking, or, as I will show in this post, how volcanoes can come to life and shape our planet. So for this post, I have browsed through the Timelapse tool to bring you some of the best examples of volcanic activity that you can see. A lot of credit should also go to David Pyle, who produced a similar post way back in 2013 . Enjoy! Note to mobile users: Unfortunately the Earth Engine Timelapse feature has not yet been optimised for mobile browsers. I highly recommend you read this post on a desktop b...

A selection of the large eruptions that Santiaguito has produced in 2016. Left: 11 April (Source: INSIVUMEH ). Middle: 19 May (Source: INSIVUMEH ). Right: 17 June (Source:  Stereo100Noticias ). Last week Anthony Lamur and I were back in Guatemala to collect more observations from Santiaguito volcano . The fieldwork was prompted by the occurrence of several very large eruptions at the volcano in 2016 (like those in the image above), a departure from the regular but relatively small explosions that are typical of the place. What we wanted to know was what mechanism is driving the much larger explosions? Our campsite on Santa Maria on the morning of June 13th. The shadow of Santa Maria (3,772 m high) stretches far into the distance.  Our task for the trip was simple: we would camp on Santa Maria and watch Santiaguito for a few days with optical and thermal cameras to record any explosions. We also deployed a temporary acoustic microphone to record the infrasound prod...

If you have been following myself or Liverpool Volcanology , you will probably know that the group has been carrying out an extensive amount of fieldwork around Santiaguito volcano in Guatemala. You can read about those trips in previous posts  here , by Felix on GeoLog , and an amazing article by Nathanial Hoffman . For this post, I'll be writing about the first of hopefully many articles to come out of our efforts, published in Geophysical Research Letters . A gas-and-ash plume rises from the Caliente vent at Santiaguito in November 2014. The article, put together by Silvio de Angelis , details how we used infrasound and infrared thermal data to characterise small explosions at Santiaguito. This analysis was also complemented by measurements of ash collected after the explosions.  What we wanted to know was: how much ash is in the explosion plume, and how fast and high is it being injected into the atmosphere? Silvio, Armando and Andreas  deploying a stat...

This is a guest post by Becky Coats , a volcanology postgraduate here at the University of Liverpool. She has written about her amazing recent fieldwork to Unzen volcano in Japan!   Meet the A Team: Mission Unzen-Fugen, feat. (left to right, top to bottom) Claire Harnett , Paul Wallace , Dr. Mark Thomas , Dr. Takahiro Miwa , James Ashworth ,  Dr. Jackie Kendrick , Prof. Yan Lavallée , and me! This trip was a collaboration between the University of Liverpool (Jackie, Yan, Paul, James and myself), the University of Leeds (Mark and Claire) and the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, Japan (Taka). Those of us from UK universities were in Japan from the 8th to the 20th of May and were granted permission for 6 days work on the lava dome each armed with our own specialist tasks but with one collaborative question: How stable is the dome today? My assignment was to collect samples from a near by pyroclastic deposit that represent the ...

Another week, another cheeky self-promoting post. This time, I have published a new paper in Solid Earth   on my research on the eruption of Unzen volcano in Japan. The project involves a volcanic spine, thousands of volcanic earthquakes, and a whole medley of analytical tools. Interested? Read on... Incandescent glow seen on the newly forming lava dome at Unzen volcano in 1991. Pyroclastic density current deposits can be seen in the foreground. These currents, also known as pyroclastic flows, were derived from collapses of the highly unstable dome. Photo credit: Fumiaki Kobayashi Let's start from the beginning. Lava spines are a curious and spectacular formation found at volcanoes around the world. These plugs of lava are squeezed out of lava domes during eruptions, grinding as they go, and eventually reaching hundreds of metres in size. One such spine grew at Unzen volcano in Japan in 1994, and is the focus of the new paper. Extensive field and experimental investigatio...

When a cloud of hot dust is thrown high into the sky by a big mountain of hot rock, it can be a problem for air ships that fly people around. Right now, we use space machines and special computers to work out how high the hot dust cloud is and to guess where it will go. This way can take too long for people who fly the air ships around. In our paper, we show a really quick way of working out how high the hot dust is. When the big mountains of hot rock throw the hot dust into the sky, they make a sound that we cannot hear but our special machines can. We can use this sound to work out how fast the hot dust is being thrown into the sky. With this, and a special number machine, we can work out how far they will go into the sky. Using the sound from a real hot mountain that threw out hot dust in 2009, we show that our way can very quickly work out how high the hot dust will go. Our way of working out how high the hot dust goes will better help the people who fly air ships around, and help ...

The past 15 months at Volcan de Colima in Mexico has seen a lot of change to the lava dome at the top of the volcano. In this post, I have gathered a chronological collection of images and videos to illustrate how much activity the volcano has experienced in that time. We begin in May 2014, with one of my own photos from a flight over the volcano. Here you can see a mostly intact dome with a very small collapse scar on the south flank. The south-east side of the summit lava dome at Colima in May 2014.  The volcano was also producing a small lava flow to the west, and experiencing several explosions a day. A small ash plume rises from the summit of the volcano in June 2014.  Now we jump forward to November 2014, when the volcano experienced pyroclastic flows accompanying a large explosion. A large explosion plume and a pyroclastic flow emanate from the volcano in November 2014. View from the south. Source: @MikeVolc In December, the number of daily e...

Or rather, what went  down  at Volcán de Colima ? Nearly two weeks ago the Mexican volcano experienced an intense phase of activity that prompted evacuations from local settlements and closed the nearby national airport. Now that the activity seems to have calmed down (relatively), I wanted to summarise what we know and discuss the possible implications it has for the future of the volcano. Incandescent rockfalls seen descending the flank of Volcan de Colima early on the 10th of July, not long before the first of the major pyroclastic flows later that day. Image credit: webcamsdemexico.com What happened? Here are the facts. Prior to the paroxysmal phase on the 10th of July, there was a lava dome rapidly growing inside the summit crater. Incandescent rockfalls from the overflowing dome (see above image) and frequent small explosions were a common sight. All of which was typical activity for a volcano which has been almost continuously erupting since November 1998 (with t...

It's time to dust the cobwebs off this blog! This post is a guest post from my friend and colleague Adrian, a fellow volcanology postgraduate here in the University of Liverpool. He is writing about his research on Unzen volcano in Japan, which was published last week. Enjoy!  My first paper, created in collaboration with Oliver and a host of co-authors from the University of Liverpool, Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and research institutions in Kochi, Nagasaki and Tsukuba, Japan, looks at the mechanics of a spine growth episode at Mt. Unzen volcano, Japan. Left: The 'Tower of Pelée' spine at Mt. Pelée, Martinique, 1902. Photo credit: unknown. Middle: The 'whaleback' spine at Mount St Helens in 2005. Photo credit: USGS, taken Feb 22 2005.  Right: The remnant of the spine at Mt. Unzen. Photo credit: Yan Lavallée.  Lava spines are a spectacular feature of some lava dome volcanoes. They appear as massive, cohesive blocks that pierce through the...