You are browsing the archive for hazards Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Magma Cum Laude.
18 May 2010
Reflecting on risk
USGS photo of the May 18, 1980 eruption. I don’t have any stories to share with you about the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, since I wasn’t around then – and the other geobloggers are doing a fine job of collecting reminiscences already. Volcanologists, like everyone else, sometimes joke about their jobs, but it’s anniversaries like today that have prompted me to reflect on it instead. I love the work …
7 May 2010
Volcano Vocab #4: Lahar
As suggested by a commenter on the last Volcano Vocab post, here’s a water-and-volcano-related term for you: Lahar (“lah-haar”). Lahar is an Indonesian word for a mudflow of volcanic material – that is, a mass movement of volcanic debris that contains some amount of water. (A dry flow of volcanic material would usually just be called a debris flow or debris avalanche.) The key thing that distinguishes a lahar from a …
15 March 2010
Looking backward: Past eruptions at Volcán Santa Maria
On our way to visit the Santiaguito Volcano Observatory, Gustavo Chigna of INSIVUMEH (the Guatemalan equivalent of the USGS) was kind enough to take an afternoon off and show us some of the older deposits near Santiaguito. Our first stops were at an exposure of the air-fall deposit from the October 24, 1902 eruption of Volcán Santa Maria. This eruption was a devastating one, stripping the land for more than …
1 April 2009
Poor land-use planning and volcanoes
From http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/images/090319-tonga-volcanic-eruption-ap-video_big.jpg So it looks like someone is already moving in on the new land created by the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai near Tonga*. That’s right – with enough Pa’angas, you could own some of the newest land on the planet, if you don’t mind digging yourself out from under the tephra every few days. The article I found didn’t say much about who’s claimed the land, but it …
9 April 2008
More news from Hawaii: Volcanoes National Park evacuated
(Image from the Hawaii Volcano Observatory) Looks like shifting wind + gas plumes = not fun out at Kilauea. Enough that the park closed completely yesterday, and several of the surrounding communities were put under voluntary evacuation notice. Shifting winds are blowing the gas plume emanating from Halema’uma’u crater out over the inhabited parts of the park and into local communities, which usually don’t have to deal with vog, or …
23 December 2007
The Gods must be restless? Take a look at the scientists.
I just finished reading the most recent National Geographic, and I spent some time thinking about Andrew Marshall’s article, “The Gods Must Be Restless”. In it, he talks about some of the beliefs that have grown up around Indonesian volcanoes – and there are a lot of them, considering that Indonesia has the most active volcanoes of anywhere in the world. I found myself conflicted about the attitudes of some …
Jessica Ball is a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, researching volcanic hydrothermal systems and stability, and doing science communication for the California Volcano Observatory. She previously worked at the Geological Society of America's Washington DC Policy Office, learning about the intersection of Earth science and legislative affairs. Her Mendenhall postdoc and PhD focused on how water affects the stability of volcanoes, and involved both field investigations and numerical modeling applications. Her blogging covers a range of topics, from her experiences in academic geosciences to science outreach and communication to her field and lab work in volcanology.