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July 14, 2022
110 years since the largest Alaska eruption
To put the largest eruption in Alaska’s written history in context, Robert Griggs pondered what might have happened if the volcano that erupted in summer of 1912 was located on Manhattan Island rather than the Alaska Peninsula. “In such a catastrophe all of Greater New York would be buried under ten to fifteen feet of ash and subjected to unknown horrors from hot gases….”
August 27, 2020
A bad night in a good box
Early in his career, on a wet, windy, foggy night, Guy Tytgat checked into the loneliest hotel in the Aleutians. His room was four feet wide and five feet tall, made of fiberglass, and perched on the lip of a volcanic crater.
December 19, 2019
Spreading volcano follow-up: Cross sections showing normal faults and thrust faults
Geo Models: The GIF shows the results of about 15 minutes of deformation with fresh sealant straight out of the tube. The summit of the cone collapses into a graben, and the flanks of the cone spread outward, creating compression that generates thrust faults and folds.
December 13, 2019
Redoubt’s big impact 30 years ago
On December 15, 1989, a pilot who had flown a 747 passenger jet all the way from Amsterdam was looking forward to landing in Anchorage. There, he would take a short break before continuing to Tokyo.
November 19, 2019
A different take on the model volcano, the “most cliché science experiment” you can do (at least that’s what the internet says)
While eruptive demonstrations will always be cool, I think the gravity-driven structural evolution of large volcanoes is equally interesting and consequential and subject to illustration with models.
October 7, 2019
Sifting volcanic paydirt to help forecast eruptions
More than 100 volcanoes pimple the adolescent skin of Alaska, spreading from ear to ear. Some are loud, flamboyant and obnoxious. Others are sneaky and quiet, escaping notice until a pilot sees a gray plume that wasn’t there yesterday.
March 19, 2018
Considering climate from the Canary Islands
I have the pleasure of attending an AGU Chapman Conference this week in Puerto de la Cruz, a small town on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. The Canaries are a small group of volcanic islands just off the coast of Morocco governed by Spain. They’re essentially the Atlantic Ocean’s version of Hawaii.
April 7, 2017
Life returning to island destroyed by eruption
Nine years after it erupted, Kasatochi Island is just beginning to resemble its neighbors.
Kasatochi is a speck in the middle of the Aleutian chain between Dutch Harbor and Adak, about 75 miles east of the latter. The volcanic island had no modern history of erupting until August 2008. In a few days that summer, the island changed from the lush green home of a quarter million seabirds to a gray pile of ash.
