The VC Bar

Welcome to the Volcano Café bar, a place for all things on or off topic and inane ramblings. There has been a need of late to find a place better suited to various theories, long comments and enthusiasm. This page will be less moderated than the main article pages and cleared out every month (this may change depending on use).

Have fun and don’t forget to tip the barman 😉

4,748 thoughts on “The VC Bar

  1. I hereby declare the Volcanocafé Cafébar open for business!

    Go forth and be Merry (and Pippin)!

  2. Nice to see you posted a picture of your work-station, Carl. I really like what you’ve done with the place. Which tower is the rooftop bar?

    • Marvellous idea! Hoping for someone to make/post a monthly (?) riddle post again 🤔 😁
      Sorry about those smileys… got rid of my Fb account two weeks ago…
      It’s difficult without … the smileys, haha!

  3. Good morning, all. I am reading this while eating a lovely breakfast of buttermilk biscuits topped with my homemade preserves ( peach and cherry). Waving at you from a sunny North Carolina before I head outside to do some major bush trimming.

    • Actually that waffle cone ice cream DOES sound good. I remember making something kinda-sorta like that when I was a kid as a way to use up the broken bits of ice-cream-cone in the bottom of the box.

      But more importantly, the whole concept has inspired me for a frozen volcano-themed dessert involving an inverted waffle cone with the pointy end cut away, a crater full of ice cream and flows of molten fudge.

        • I suppose..though I prefer the explosive kind, my kitchen has a very low ceiling. BUT a whipped creme eruptive cloud full of chocolate clasts would not be entirely out of my culinary idiom.

      • CO2 charge cylinders are likely available from your local craft brewery supply shop. With a slight modification and a food safe hose, you could feed the CO2 directly under the chocolate reservoir from the bottom to provide the necessary degassing scenario for a proper eruption… just as energetic as you like.

  4. i’ll have a coffee/ black/hot and double caffine please….. Best!from motsfo thanking God(You know i don’t go anywhere without Him 😉 ) for the rain which is knocking down my latest forest fire of over 8,000 acres.. oh, i did’t mention it? It’s because it really wasn’t important…. lightening started and not fought because it’s just knocking down black spruce(read natural fire starters) and making future habitat for moose and bears and not volcano related…. (here; hold my shovel, and help me out of this hole as i’m through digging) but i do have a question not VC Bar related….. what’s going on with LP events at Teide volcano yesterday? And i had mother moose and twins in the yard 2 days ago…. lovely creatures; babies bounding with joy across the grass eating all the flowers and bushes… ah, youth! Best!motsfo

    • Correction: Fire is now over 11,000 acres and is being surpressed toward houses but that’s still not technically fighting the fire….. not like in California with life threatening advancement/ they are just re-enforcing previous fire breaks and laying hoses…. and it’s still raining… yeah! and i’ll have another cup, please.

  5. So..is this where we come to -not- talk about volcanoes..kind of like Volcaholics Anonymous, but with a little less anonymity and a little more volcanivity?

    To drink, how’s about something hot and felsic. I know I should be “on the wagon”, but I really don’t like the taste of vinegar and sodium bicarbonate.

    Also, how’s the weather where everybody else is? It is absolutely gorgeous here just north of Atlanta… 29°C (85°F), sunny, a little breezy and uncharacteristically not muggy at all for the sub-subtropics in June. The climate-change deniers in this region are no doubt having a field-day.

    • Spike
      I live south west of the ATL. Outside of Newnan. Nice to see someone close by.

      Mac

    • “Also, how’s the weather where everybody else is?”

      Today the heat stress levels were in the 106°F to 112°F realm. (under a heat advisory) and typical for Florida. I spent the day letting my dog back in. He couldn’t quite understand why I didn’t want to join him outside.

      As a distraction, I boiled a half pound of shrimp and had that with a nice remoulade and cayenne along with some hush puppies. 😀

  6. 62F in the thankful rain on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska near a forest fire….. but this is the first rain in weeks… glad for it. Best!motsfo (ps… feeding the neighbors biting cat while they are on vacation and SOMEthing else is helping to clean the plate) 😕

      • yeah if i was younger, i’d stay up and watch for it and i hope they hurry home before this other creature gets in the habit of clean plate club. i put out quite a bit and i’m sure the cat couldn’t have eaten it all and i can’t have the cat inside as some kids are allergic to cats. and i like the Bar, don’t have to worry about offending anyone with an OT post. Best!motsfo

    • 72F in coastal Southern California.
      There was a day in may where it was warmer in Juneau than where I live.

        • Yeah. Yacking about earth sciences in the bar.

          As for the beach ball. The shaded area is the tension zone, so it indicates reverse or thrust faulting.

  7. Yo, you, at the end of the bar-
    what’s that they say about snowy crickets?
    chirps/14 seconds + 42=degrees fahrenheit?
    almost makes me think
    a)this fahrenheit dude was on to something
    b)snowy crickets only live in the whimsical land of fahrenheit

  8. ALERT: toothpaste can expire….. (wow, that tasted terrible, what brand was that i grabbed.. expired 2011) So if i expire, it was …………………………. tooth SOAP POISONING! yuk… had to rebrush my teeth and i can still taste it… and no comments about my housekeeping please….. if i could find the house, i’d keep it. Best!motsfo

  9. i love the Bar, hope i don’t get banned for hanging around here too much…. and hoping this works:
    i think the latest on my forest fire looks a little like go-ziiiiila

      • About 30 minutes drive so quite some distance but the smoke is mostly black spruce so the smoke is irritating.. i understand the smoke is going all the way past Anchorage. Sorry i couldn’t show the pic of go-ziiiiila and i think this site is the bee’s knees and anytime i get too chatty just delete me…. i more than understand.. Best!motsfo

  10. In regards of riddles.
    I am game, but it would have to be on a monthly basis, not weekly.
    There is just no chance in heck that I can do it weekly with my current workload.

    And of course there are alcohol free beverages to be had.
    There is also decarbonized ion-free raw goji berry powdered water on tap for those of that persuasion. Shots of essential vanilla oil is optional in the water. 😉

  11. and raising a full glass to Lurk, who never has an empty glass. Loved that! Best!motsfo

    • Engineer joke: engineer says the glass is neither half full or half empty, but it is the wrong size.

    • i know it’s true because You said so but i sure see different colored balls and i guess that’s better than seeing ‘dead people’. 🙂

      • It is amazing how eyes perceive colour. The coloured bars over some of the balls affect your colour perception. and it appears that the balls take on some of the colour of the bars that cross them. If you zoom in and cover the bars up, the bits of ball you can still see revert to their true colour.

      • Don’t see why. The gizmo was intended to get me into the brick and mortar store where I was inundated with everything but what I wanted, so I spun on my heel and walked out. If they want to deliver it, I can wait.

          • On a fairly grand scale I am afraid.
            What is the question?

            My general answer is that you should use 10 percent of your total earning from the store on Google adwords and FB ads, link your site and the other two together with “dots” and you should have quite an increase in sales. (I guess this was what you actually intended to ask…)

        • Never received money that way, but have spent a lot of it.

          I did have a hand in an online service site for a while, but we used hardcopy check transactions. My role was to set up a locked down website that only allowed access to paying customers. I fabricated my own User account system modeled off of the way Novell servers at the time handled users. The product was downloadable content, and the kicker was that the webserver didn’t even have access to the directory the material was in unless it went through a separate module that had made for that purpose. In essence, the server had to pass it’s own password to my module and the module would feed the server the file which it reparsed and fed to the client. If you breached the webdaemon, you couldn’t get anywhere. (unless you obtained root and knew where to look) I was going to layer it up another level by putting the content on a separate internal server but the legal landscape change and we shut the whole thing down.

  12. Bar Thought:
    i know it isn’t true but i feel a little like:…. here, Honey, you sit over at the kids table and here are some crayons and paper…. but don’t draw on the table,… ok? (in a very little voice…. )………………………ok.

    • Can I borrow your crayon? I need to paint my nose red. 🙂

      Now for the serious answer:
      This was absolutely not the intent.
      It is just a way that we are trying out to see how we best can save the “feel and camaraderie of VC”, whilst producing a more fluent comment stream about the volcanoes themselves.

      In the end, if this version is not working out, we will try something else, or go back to the old system with just a single page (but with the new waffle-rule in place).

      I would hate it if people thought this is the kids table of sorts.

      • i truley understand it’s not a “Kids Table” and i’m loving it so please don’t close down the Bar and besides…… some of the Best! conversations happen at the kids’ table… once had a friend tell me “Kids are the best of us.” …. and i think he was right. 🙂

      • Meh… I’m just waiting for the local news to give me more info on the Condominium burning to the ground our near Perdido Key. It’s the one closest to the Florabama Lounge and my phone’s traffic applet already indicates an accident on the road near there. All the spare FD units were “boxed in” so it’s probably a freaking nightmare.

        Note: “Boxed in” means additional alerts were sent out for more equipment. Residential structure fires usually get everything thrown at them, though I doubt Pensacola Beach’s ladder truck is in the alert list for Perdido Key. It is too far away and would lessen the available coverage for the beach.

        • Looking like maybe 24 to 40 units and a nearby beach house went up. The fire jumped to an adjacent condo complex.

  13. Looking at Kilimanjaros very young looking Ash Pit and Reusch Crater and all the hot sufurious fumaroles
    I assume the volcano last erupted a few 100 years ago to the local rumours of 100 years ago

    • It is probably quite true Jesper.
      Problem is that most people who climb Kili are there for the selfies and not being volcanologists.
      I hope that I soon will be able to go up myself and pick a couple of samples.

      But, there is also the possibility that the last eruption was further back in time, and that the stones are in pristine condition due to altitude.

      • No Kilimanjaro ashpit summit materials been dated when they last erupted?
        Looks like only sefiers climbs to Ashpit
        Last time any ”real” stuff was up there was Walker Lorenz in 2000 s a german Volcanologist
        Using the fumaroles heat ( 102 C ) and thick sulfur deposits he estimated an active 850 C Tephriphonolite or Phonolitic magma body to be only 400 meters below The bottom of the summit ashpit

      • Carl Any historical eruptions must have been very small at Kilimanjaro
        There is no large fresh blocky lava flows

        But inner summit looks very fresh
        Most recent activity was likley explosive
        Ashpit and Reusch Crater looks like the products of vulcanian activity / possible lava dome that was blown away too or a small subplinian with that tuff ring.

        Kilimanjaro is probaly feed by alkaline sillica poor Basanites and Nephelinites 100 km down that diffrentiate into sillica rich alkaline rocks souch as Phonolites or Tephriphonolites or Tephrites on the way up
        Extremely alkaline and evolved rocks
        Mount Erebus haves a similar petrology and geologic setting

      • And if you finds the petrology confusing Carl
        Kilimanjaros summit erupts basicaly the extremely alkaline versions of dacite and ryholite
        Phonolite and Tephriphonolite and Tephrite

        Kilimanjaro is supprisingly large for being so very alkaline. The whole Kilimanjaro complex seems to be alkaline. Alkaline rocks makes up less than 1% of all earths surface rocks.

        The very sillica rich evolved nature of Kilimanjaros magma is a sign the crust is very thick and the magma ascent mostly been rather slow and the Mt Erebus like chemistry suggest low levels of partial melting deep down under high pressure and rich in co2

        Phonolite, Tephriphonolite, Tephrite and Trachyte are the sillica rich alkaline rocks
        They makes explosive eruptions and gentle lava domes and blocky flows like their
        Subalkaline normal Andesite, Dacite and Ryholite equalents in volcanic processes

        Basanite, Nephelinite, Melinilite,
        Depending on alkalinity is the effusive alkaline version equalents of thoelite basalt
        They makes lava fountains and pahoehoe and channels and tube flows
        An alkaline shield volcano is Nyiramuragira

      • Carl when are you going there?
        You haves the saved cash but not the time off for doinf souch an expedition
        I wants you to do this .. bring simple equipment and most important sample the rocks from the ashpit and send them to Lund or Uppsala for dating ( when they last erupted and crystalized )

          • Would have to be in a little while, I am currently a bit too busy.

            Trevligt, ytterligare en som kan diskutera världsherraväldet på ett korrekt språk. 😉

      • If you do it I wants to hang along and we takes the trek slow and steady to the summit
        This volcano is freaking really intresting both petrologicaly and volcanologicaly and overall its geology…
        I wants to sample the ashpit ring materials

    • There are 10 kinds of people… those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

      {stolen from a friend’s signature line}

    • Barmannen talar två språk väl, och misshandlar fem språk till i varierande grad av förståelighet.
      Je suis un saloup de fromage. 😉

    • and with enough alcohol… we can all be friends…………… (until the fight starts) 😉

      • In my experience, when english people drink too much they (may) start to fight. When Germans drink too much, they (may) start to sing (not sure which one is worse). This recollection of course is terribly stereotypical and unfair! No idea what Alaskians would do. Volcanians would, no doubt, erupt in friendship, comradeship, and lots of lava.

        At one of my past places of residence we had problems with cricket hooligans. It turns out that young men, alcohol, and long hours of boredom is not always a good combination.

        • Alaskans= Alcohol=Bad Choices=Fights=Guns=Police=Courts=Jail or Morgue. Never ends well here. Anytime anything bad happens 10 to 1 alcohol is involved. In my experience, people don’t know how to responsibly drink here. Wow, this is going downhill………………….. Pour me another…. on a brighter note/ found little baby moose poop in the front yard… just a ThankYou note for all the flowers. (what else can they possible gift one?)

          • and we were taking care of the neighbors cat while they went somewhere and they came home but the cat doesn’t want to go home. sigh….. it looks like i’ll be sued for alienation of affection. Had to walk it home with it rubbing all around my legs….. i truly felt like the other woman in a love triangle…. new one for me.. 🙂

          • As a TAD (temporary assigned duty) assignment, I worked as “Navy Police” here in Pensacola. Technically part of Base Police, our group was responsible for retrieving service members from the local jail if the bail was $500 or less. (10% surety). Many of my interactions with local law enforcement (while not acting as defacto bond agent) was to show that military security was nearby working with them around establishments popular with service members.

            Some of the stuff I encountered could singe your hair. Alcohol + Young Service members = Stupid to a cubed power.

            My funniest encounter (a non drunk, though alcohol was the original cause) was when we went off bond on a kid who failed to appear in court. He was very shocked (and unhappy) that we showed up at his barracks and took him back to jail.

            Saved the USN from having to pay the full bail and got USN surety funds reimbursed. At the time NAS had a surety arrangement with escambia county courts.

          • My worst wayward drunk event while working that assignment was the twit that puked all over the back of the van. My retaliation was to leave him in the care of NavHosp since I was concerned about alcohol poisoning. There were no pending civil charges against him since the Deputy gave him the option to pay for the candy bar he stole as long a we got him off the streets.

          • My cat learned the truth at 17
            That love is earned if you are mean
            And if you want attention now
            A bitten leg or foot is how.

            For years she waited at the door
            Impatient at the port of hell
            Sixteen years it took to learn
            That all she had to do was yell.

            And those other cats she deems neglected
            She yells that they may be corrected
            “You fools! A human’s love is only earned
            When human flesh to blood is turned.”

            “Their ears deaf to our gentle mewing
            They never know when we are stewing
            You gotta yell when you want food
            You have to bite when in the mood.”

            “And you, you foolish playful kitten
            You will by savage truth be bitten
            And as you age find proof suffice
            At 17 you can’t be nice.”

            Priscilla’s old now, stiff with years
            She glares at me devoid of fears
            A wicked challenge in her ancient eye
            “It won’t be me who’s first to die.”

  14. Tomorrow it’s time for the annual Swedish midsummer celebrations. For those of you not familiar with the customs, here is a short instruction film.

    Drinking “nubbe” involves rituals of it’s own. First you sing a “nubbevisa” – a short, often humorous song about drinking, then you raise your glass and drink. The first song is by tradition “Helan går”, which translates like “the whole one goes”. “Helan” is the name of the first nubbe and you always drink the entire glass. The next nubbe is called “Halvan” or “the half one”. I recommend that you do as the name implies and only drink half of this one. The same advice goes for all the following nubbes. Nubbe is a small glass of brännvin – basically vodka with seasoning, so be careful and don’t get carried away by all the singing.

    Skål and Glad Midsommar!

  15. Excellent, Peter! Gold Star! to You! and for those who missed it: several years ago the neighbor’s cat(same one we fed while they traveled) once tripped up my Hubby and bloodied his lip, chipped his jaw bone, and broke his arm and lacked the common decency to go for help; just sat there and waited. Bad kitty!

    • Thanks Motsfo. My cat does has some redeeming features. As a kitten she showed a remarkable grasp of Australian Foreign Policy and International Law when our Foreign Minister at the time, Alexander Downer, walked into my shop to pickup some printer ink. I had politely expressed my distain for him committing the country to an illegal war in Iraq by telling him I intended to disembowel him with a blunt penknife if he did it again, as he had publicly expressed his intent to do with Iran next. Priscilla rushed at him while browsing the inks and climbed the pin striped leg of his Armani suit trousers, sinking her claws into his upper thigh before jumping down to hide behind the counter. I told Downer the kitten had been trained to take out his testicles if he failed to get UN approval before committing our forces to another war of choice with no bearing on our national security. To his credit, the man had a sense of humour.

  16. Is this the bar? Pour me a glass of champagne! One of our best mares just delivered a beautiful and healthy foal. A chestnut colt.

      • Thanks motsfo!

        It’s both exciting and nerve wrecking at the same time. Last two deliveries have been troublesome. One last year did not end well for the foal and one earlier this year the foal was stuck so I had to get my hands in there and help it out. For a moment I thought we had lost that one too, but it turned out well in the end. Complications are not usual, but with two in a row it was a blessing that this one went absolutely perfect.

        By the way, they are Icelandic horses and the reason I got interested in Iceland in the first place. The interest in volcanoes came later when Bárðarbunga decided to throw a big lava party.

        • i love the pictures of those little composed creatures against the Iceland backdrop.

          • I have a little treat for you motsfo. This film has got lots of little composed creatures and lots of Icelandic backdrop. Tails from Iceland:

            1c168656a4

          • Horses are fun and social creatures

            But their digestion is horribely bad and inefficent ( horses stomachs are not evolved to eat grass )

            So they haves to eat insane ammounts and horse poop when dried its pretty much same as dry grass.

            Its amazing they are alive with their digestion and very very nutrient poor diet amazing!

            Elephants are just the same in digestion and diet
            Im amazed they can eat wood too

          • Its weird since horses have existed since Early Eocene

            And in Oligocene and Miocene as the global rainforest died
            They had at least 25 million years to adapt their stomach to grasses
            But that did not happen …

            Likley a huge stomach woud have slowed them down and evolution chosed speed infront of huge bulky Bodies in the horse family
            Coud be the explanation

          • Yes, I have seen it before and it’s a great illustration of the spirit of both Icelandic men and horses.

            I have participated in a similar riding experience like in the video, where we brought down the horses from their summer pasture in the mountains. It’s something I’ll never forget. The horses were running loose with riders in the front and in the back. I was in the front with one single mission: don’t let the loose horses overtake you. If the herd starts to gallop, you gallop to stay in front, no matter what the riding path ahead looks like. Luckily they were sensible and stayed easy in the hard terrain. A shot or two of fireball from the flask helped us stay warm and keep the good spirit up.

  17. After reading through alberts post a few times, I have had an idea about something regarding how planets might evolve because of such processes. Im putting it here because its going to be a bit of a long comment… 🙂

    Plate tectonics cycles heat, but it also cycles water into the mantle, and also carbon dioxide, because CO2 dissolves in water and ends up being CaCO3 which is a solid and is lost to the atmosphere. A planet that is the size of the earth but without plate tectonics would have neither process, it would be rather geologically inactive save for a few volcanoes probably of large size above plumes. Said planet would likely also retain its original thick CO2 atmosphere and be covered in a deep ocean with few islands. If it had no significant water then it would be a warm desert planet. Its surface would probably actually be quite stable and life could probably survive but it would likely never evolve naturally.
    Because it has only limited geological activity, but is also very big, this planets mantle would keep heating up over time, eventually resulting in its entire crust being underplated with magma, which then breaks up the crust and turns the planet into an apocalyptic world where the surface temperature is probably nearly 1000 C and covered in lava flows. This would probably happen regardless of the distance to its star, so long as the internal heat is high enough to exceed the radiation of heat to space. Venus is the perfect example, an earth-sized planet without plate tectonics, it is also the perfect example that plate tectonics is probably not an inherent feature of terrestrial planets, but requires something to start it. The sun probably is not the main reason why venus is so hot, the effective temperature of a naked object at that distance is only a bit above freezing, and if you give venus an earth-like atmosphere it is still only about 100 C from solar heating, and that is with todays sun that is 1/3 more luminous than the sun 3 billion years ago, at which the effective heating of the same object would be about 85 C. That is compared to the actual temperature that is 450 C.

    Plate tectonics can probably only happen on planets abut the size of earth too, 0.5-2 earths (venus is 0.9). For terrestrial planets bigger than maybe 3 earths they probably all go through the ‘venus cycle’ with no variation. Those planets probably have such high gravity that their mantles are compressed completely solid except maybe some individual patches of melting which volcanoes would exist at, but the core will be much hotter too, probably close to or even over 10,000 C, so it will take a long time but eventually the heat will need to escape, it will just take way longer, probably billions of years of being pretty stable and maybe habitable before going into hell mode.
    That does also assume that most super earths arent actually ocean planets or mini-neptunes, which are not terrestrial planets (maybe they could still have a solid surface but it would be icy, like a giant version of titan, rather than a hot silicate planet).

    The interesting implication of this is that if this process is entirely self caused by the planet, it would also happen to rogue planets. Maybe a lot of rogue planets are actually habitable temperature if the atmosphere is thick enough, and the bigger the planet the bigger the heat source.

    There is a planet called kepler 145b that is probably terrestrial and has a mass that is maybe as high as 37 earths, more massive than all the solid objects in the solar system and uranus and neptune combined, what an extreme world that must be. There isnt much known about it though.

  18. Once again I am asking for help(I will never ask for money here.)
    For the past 6 months I have been looking to have software developer make a website for me but my resources has been bogged down elsewhere. My mental issues has not helped me in terms of job searching. Is there anyway I can make 1750 dollars in few weeks timespan? I was thinking about domain flipping but my questions on how to make a successful auction has been largely ignored.

  19. I haves a question for the VC Bar
    The core temperature of R136a1… what is that Albert? any suggestion?

    This is the brightest and most massive star we knows of ( 8,7 million times brigther than our sun )
    Its a Young Blue Hypergiant 350 solar masses… its nmore than blue hot 54 000 C photosphere
    If it was at alpha centauri it woud be much brigther than the full moon in the sky.
    Souch huge heavy stars are rare in universe these days… there is lack of free hydrogen to form these monsters in huge ammounts

    Most stars that forms today are much smaller
    The core temperature of R136a1 Im very curious

    • When this monsterium dies it will go off in a Hypernova.. or more suitable for souch behemoth with no other comparisonso far… Ultranova
      The explosion will be so violent it may not leave anything behind… not even a black hole…
      I will happen soon in 2 to 3 million years maybe.. it will be a bright one
      Milky Way will be out – shined for months

      • Or…a Ludicrousnova (sorry – referring to the movie, Spaceballs…)

        Regardless, the one I want to see explode is Betelgeuse. It is so close to going, yet it is frustrating to know it could be thousands of years, or it could be tomorrow. I wish it could be tomorrow… 🙂

      • Jesper sorry to disappoint you but there is a possibility it will not blow up on a scale we have never seen, it might just collapse into a black hole directly, no explosive ending. You will only see it if you are in its gamma ray beam, but you really dont want to be there…
        Betelgeuse is for certain going to ve the next star that goes supernova that is actually close (less than 1000 lightyears), and its getting really close, it could have been a yellow giant star to the ancient greeks so in that time it has become what it is now, sounds pretty unstable. Rigel will be a much bigger event though stll about a million years away. It is still a blue star but it is already twice as big in total size as the sun will be as a red giant… betelgeuse is 12 suns, rigel is about 23, and even in a million years will probably still be close enough to be really obvious.
        Still waiting for eta carinae to go though, if you want an actual hypernova that is the place to look, I also live where it is circumpolar so if it happens when im alive il get to see the whole thing 😀
        But we dont want WR 104 to go hypernova, if we see it that means we got gamma ray beamed… :I

        We can also wait until the milky way has its quasar stage, some galaxies do it early and some much later, sag A* is not very big as far as most supermassive black holes go so it probably hasnt done it yet, maybe whats actually why life evolved here.

  20. https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/hvo_volcano_watch.html

    HVO finally released the april-june INSAR data that I and probably many others have been waiting for. They also expmain very well how to use interferograms for those who dont know.
    The graph is showing the level of summit inflation that they have been talking about for a while. 5 cm, 50 microradians, which is not a lot but past eruptions have sometimes happened after less.
    It is also intetesting that inflation is not centered under the 2018 caldera pit, but it is centered with the more broad subsidence that appeared late in the eruption, so it might not be the shallow source inflating like is claimed but the deeper magma body about 4 km deep. That at least would explain why there is no surface activity. That also means the eruption wont necessarily be in the deep pit, it could ba anywhere in the south caldera area.
    50 microradians in 2 months is also going quite fast, at least relative to what would happen during puu oo, if its stayed consistent then we are up to 75 now, and will reach 200 by the end of the year, historically its taken about 150 microradians to cause an eruption, so in early october, but who knows now.

    I know there is an article on how to use the mogi magma chamber model somewhere but I cant find it. If someone with dragon powers can locate said article it would be very helpful for something im trying to do that might rhyme with kawaii particle… 🙂

      • I assume that the equation is by adding (in this case 5 cm) to the diameter of the previous sphere?

        If that is the case then assuming a 2 km wide sphere which has a volume of 4.19 km3, the observations suggest an input of 700,000 m3 of magma, which sounds really low especially where it is. If its at a deeper point though it could either be 4 times that ( 2.8 million m3) or maybe 4 squared times which would be 11.2 million m3, or ive done it wrong and and all my numbers are too low by a factor of 10. Doing that gives the middle number a volume of 28 million m3 which is actually pretty close to what kilaueas supply should be over 2 months. But im not good at theoretical maths so I probably just did this wrong…

        Maybe albert is watching… 🙂

    • The broad area sagged to the east of the crater, I would say is probably a collapsed sill of the Halema’uma’u magma body, that was lying shallow, perhaps 1 km beneath sea level more or less.

      Past year the magma column didn’t lower much, if it had fallen 2 km below sea level it would have taken out the entire Halema’uma’u magma body. But after the eruption, the DI events showed up in the component of the tiltmeters looking towards Halema’uma’u, so an important part of the reservoir was still down there to produce them. Or in other words, the current inflation source probably comes from magma at less than 2 km depth and if it was to break upwards in the future it will probably do so inside the collapse area.

      • It must have been a massive sill to sink as far as it did, the escarpment around the outer edge of the 2018 collapse is 140 meters tall according to HVO.
        I think a 140+ meter thick sill at 1 km depth would be unstable, especially with the high magma stand in april last year and how wide the area of subsidence is, if it was a narrow feature that makes more sense. That sort of depth is also low enough to release SO2 which was not in elevation in that area before. There obviously was something there but probably deeper than 1 km.

        If all the supply from the hotspot has still gone to kilauea like it was doing before last year (most likely scenario, mauna loa or loihi havent done anything weird) then it would be getting close to 0.2 km3 since the eruption ended. The summit inflation was detected in march, so 3 months ago, and also since then the rate of inflation on the east rift has slowed, which probably means the rift is filled up enough to start pressurizing the summit system again. South flank is still moving but evidently not enough to outpace the rate of magma supply. If the flank spreading is taking half the magma, that gives 0.1 km3 to work with since the eruption ended, so 75 million m3 to fill the rift (according to HVO the 2018 dike from pu’u o’o to fissure 8 was about 0.1 km3 so very close) and 25 million m3 in the last 3 months which has been mostly going to the summit. That is pretty consistent with what has been observed for other times kilauea has erupted, 5 microradians is apparently about 2 million m3 of magma, so 50 would be about 20 million m3, and 75 would be 26 million m3, pretty close to my other number above.

        Regarding summit eruptions, the 1961 eruptions started after a total of 6 months of inflation totalling about 150 microradians, which is pretty much exactly on the same track as what we see now, and all the other summit eruptions after that took even less to start. That is about as far as the prediction can go, but I expect another eruption by the end of the year, and probably by the end of september.

        • Since the caldera pit rubble is likley quite dense and hard and probably fused a little. An eruption is more likley to break out in the caldera ringfaults with maybe a wolf like event in a few years, or a large Kilauea Iki version. That sends superfluid lavafalls into the new halemaumau pit.
          A ring fault eruption or just south of the caldera

        • Depends on your definition of sill, I guess, to me the representative volcanoes for this eruptive style are the volcanoes of Galapagos, large and thick subcaldera sills that can collapse into deep calderas and lift the roof of the chamber to feed ring fault eruptions. I think that the summit collapses of Kilauea during the 19th century were related to a thickened sill underlying much of the caldera floor, summit eruptions at that time occurred usually from Halema’uma’u and from an intra-caldera ring fault system, the plumbing seems akin to that of the Galapagos though the eruptive style of the these is much MUCH more vigorous and short lasting, days vs years.

          There are a series of old maps of the summit of Kilauea: Charles Malden 1825, the Wilkes expedition 1841, Brigham 1865 , and Dodge 1886. There are maybe more, these are the ones I know of and easy to find through Google, these represent different instances of the caldera floor and show what I mean with the ring fault and the collapses. The ring fault eruptions and the subcaldera sill died with the collapse of 1868, since one of these started in 1864 the map of 1865 shows very well the system of fissures I mean and in ongoing eruption, this system is nowhere to be seen in the map of 1886.

          I would imagine that a complex of sills branches out from Halema’uma’u and the South Caldera Reservoir, not much of a revolutionary idea though, some are probably thick enough to leave a mark on the surface if drained, their importance on magma transport and eruptions should not be discarded.

          And what with the south caldera eruptions? these don’t line up exactly with the arquate faults of the caldera but share the same orientation as the rifts in the area… but I guess anyone can call them how he wishes, not the same as the earlier mentioned ring eruptions however.

          Aand this response ended much longer than I intially envisioned…

          • Actually quite erudite. I enjoyed it. 😀

            My favorite kind of comment. Well thought out.

        • Careful, you might want to bounce those numbers through the Mogi model. Surface deflection in relation to changes in chamber volume is definitely not linear.

          I think Carl settled on a banana shape as best matching Heklas changes. (He’s better at it than I am. I just go with a spheroid whenever I try to brave Mogi’s methods)… and I have to use an adaptation of a Mogi training worksheet that I found out in a geophysics training site. (200 or 300 level course)

          • That is what I have been trying to do but I dont know how to use the mogi model. I assumed it was just the difference in volume of the original sphere and another sphere with a diameter of 5 cm more. But it sounds like there is more to it than that.

            That attempt is where the 700,000 m3 number came from but just the size alone really makes me think that is way too small so I think it is not what HVO does to find their numbers. That is the same amount of lava as puu oo erupted in 3 days at its lowest point, really a tiny amount of magma. As I found before inflation of 5 microradians has historically been equivalent to 2 million m3 of magma, so 20 million for the INSAR period and now 28 million about a month later again.

            The only thing that is really going to be a problem is the depth of the source, if it 1.5 km deep then the above number is more or less the same but if its 4 or 5 km deep then the real number will be 2 or 3 times bigger (or maybe 4 or 9 times bigger if the signal scales with the square of the depth). I did find a mogi formula but have no idea how to use it.

            Im sure HVO will come out with a number soon, my guess is it will be vaguely around 30 million m3 right now for the summit.

          • I have been unable to find any sort of easy to understand way to use the mogi formula, but using the other method I used earlier applied to the erz inflation below pu’u o’o (30 cm between october and april) and found that it would have gained about 19 million m3 from that, which adds to the 0.7 million this calculation gives for the summit data recently. I really dont think this works well at all, extrapolating from historical data finds this number to probably be too small by a factor of 10 at least, if not more.
            If there is anything I am missing with finding a mogi model it would be very much appreciated, I really have looked everywhere for this.

          • The Mogi model is a vector field, I haven’t used those functions before so I am not sure how to handle it either, or more specifically how to get the volume change out of it, I might give it a try tomorrow… Don’t know if I will get anywhere though. And of course it is only assuming the Halema’uma’u inflation source is a nice sphere centered at a depth of 1.5 km, which might not be true.

            The inflation at Pu’u’o’o must be really complicated to model, a deep dike going more or less from Pu’u’o’o to JOKA is probably the main contributor and that already rules out Mogi which only works for spherical chambers (so Okada model instead), the exact depth and lenght of the dike is unknown and pray the deep rift is not involved, that one must have a really weird shape.

          • I guess ill stick with my numbers i found the other way, 30 million m3 for the summit, 80 million m3 for ERZ near puu oo, and about another 0.1 km3 for the south flank slippage in the last year which in total adds up to 0.21 km3 or about what would be expected over a year.

            The fact the south flank is still spreading but the supply is still outpacing it probably means there will be much more rift activity in the future, rather than rapid summit filling and large overflows, possibly another period like the 1960s. 1961 is also the model I used for the current inflation, and its so far been pretty close.

          • If you want a base number for a model to use for kilaueas east rift deformation, the dike is probably about 5 meters wide, and it is at least 3 km deep for the most part as some studies by HVO for the pu’u o’o dike found it would be easier to erupt at the summit than go further downrift if it was shallower than 3 km at its source, its total depth is probably to about 6 km below the surface, so it is 3 km deep. The inflation is ~20 cm at both JOKA and pu’u o’o, but 15 cm only just uprift of pu’u o’o, so it probably doesnt go much up from there maybe because of increased south flank movement at that location. The downrift extent of the deformation probably stops in the vicinity of the highway, so the total length is ~20 km, if this is the real shape then it has a volume of 0.3 km3.
            It might well be rather less than that, HVO has given a preliminary number of 150 million m3 for the dike, which would make the dike it about 1 km deep from top to bottom for the full 27 km length to fissure 17 (between 3 and 5 km deep below surface).

          • I get an even lower value, around 350,000 m³ for volume change. As a reminder the interferogram covers 59 days. Using this Mogi formula:

            I have used the point right above the source which makes R=d=1500 m, the distance to the source, w the movement upwards is 0.05, the rest of the values are 0: no horizontal movement (assumed) and is in 0 x and y.

            The value is very low, I am aware. So then, options: I have applied the model wrong, the model doesn’t apply here, the ERZ is stealing almost all the magma (looking at the deformation is obvious the ERZ is getting much more, but I doubt as much as 99% of supply) or Kilauea is getting less magma than usually does. I guess conclusion here is not to try this without the proper data and knowledge… like I just did.

            Regarding the slip of the south flank, it needs the basal decollement to rupture so that it only happens with large earthquakes or slow slip events. Right now the flank is only responding to the refilling of the rift zone, it inflates and pushes (deforms) the flank to eventually build enough strain for the next rupture and slip event.

          • Damn, that is the image of a different formula, luckily it only changes d by z.

          • I think maybe there just isnt enough information to go off of. Historically 1 microradian has been a change of about 2 million m3, but that was before last year, and now it isnt even clear the shallow source exists still. It probably still does, but it might be much smaller. Or it doesnt and hence the signal is coming from the main chamber that is 3 times deeper and with considerably larger volume, the variables are very wide. Really the only thing we know is that none of the magma right now is less than 1 mile deep, because there is no SO2 excess, that would favor a deeper mogi source but it still doesnt give much to work with.

            I would guess the majority of the magma is going into areas that are too deep to show easily on the insar, and because its not a big fast dike its not going to make the same sort of signals, on none of the insar pictures is any obvious inflation along the east rift visible, but we know it happened because the gps shows it, the summit does show on the insar, and is up to 8 cm of inflation in 3 months which is twice what it took for the east rift, so that already shows it is much faster changes even if its a smaller volume.

            Il stick with my eruption in late september prediction.

        • Coming back to this, after quite a bit of searching, I finally found something. It was a facebook comment on hawaiitracker, about a conversation said person had with someone at USGS, and that it was mentioned that kilauea was about 10% refilled in January. Not a lot to go off of but HVO hasnt said anything yet.

          Through my own work I have estimated the volume of last years eruption to be 1.17 km3, with 0.87 km3 of that in fissure 8 (very close to volume of 2018 caldera) and 0.3 km3 in all the other fissures at various times. The dike that formed last year was 0.12 km3 according to something I remember seeing from USGS a while ago, so in total the amount of magma involved in last years eruptive events was more or less about 1.3 km3. Obviously, 10% of that is 0.13 km3, or 130 million m3.

          If this number is a reliable number then in the 6 months between the end of the major activity at fissure 8 in early august 2018, and January 2019, there has been 0.13 km3 of magma intruded into kilauea. While on the very high end this is still within the range that it was going at before in the equivalent time period, the overall annual value (0.26 km3/year) if not an artifact of my number being incorrect, might be reflective of decompression melting, so it would appear likely that things will resume more or less the same as before, once kilauea has fully recovered. In any case there has been no reported change in the deformation levels at the summit, so it would be relatively safe to assume a linear progression since then which is what I based my prediction earlier on. My 5th prediction… but of course nobody is perfect 🙂

          A mogi source also probably doesnt work very well for the recent deformation either after looking at it, the model assumes a sphere when probably if there is anything at all left under halemaumau the inflating body is more of a flat sill than a sphere.

          • The numbers make sense. But do realize that part of the refill comes from the underpressure after the eruption. That means what entered the Kilauea chamber since the eruption includes pre-existing magma from elsewhere under Hawaii. It will be above the normal rate.

          • Yes that is true, that initial rush of magma to fill the low pressure is probably what powered the often vigorous activity that appears to have happened after the late 18th century collapses, which was observed by the ellis expedition. It is a likely case similar activity will happen in the near future if this is the case. Though with the easr rift showing so much activity still things could be very different still.

  21. just sitting at the bar taking a load off ….. never seen better weather in Alaska… HOT! 75 to 80F sadly many are suffering in the smoke from our forrest fire… 59,000 acres. (shhhhh! don’t tell anyone but for awonder we are being cleared and cooled by on shore breezes from the inlet. Don’t know what the future will hold but now it’s good. Pour me another… enjoying the discussions! Don’t mind me and Carry on. Best!motsfo

  22. If memory serves, in 1999 at Planet Hollywood in Jakarta, there was a volcano in a corner of the bar. Every few minutes or beers (?), it glowed with a rumble.
    Unless it was in one of the many other bars on the planet I’ve been to.

    (translated from french with DeepLdotcom)

  23. 62,000 acres and counting….. just passing the time…. this forest fire is clearing out old stands of black spruce and making way for better enviroment for wildlife…. it will burn until it has burned all the fuel or rain puts it out. Off shore breezes should start up again today and clear out our smokey air…. we’ve only had 2 days of bad air….. and that’s pretty good. Several more bears spotted in area. None too close. Thanks, God. Moose and car accident last night (not me… i don’t know who; neither the people or moose involved) but sadly another fatal small plane accident… second in a week. Alaska is tough on small planes. Almost time for lunch… fish tacos and then a nap…..a ‘full’ schedule this afternoon… (Hey, i’m old… gotta take it easy in this smokey air) Best!motsfo

    • Sorry to hear that you have conifers going up. That’s a nasty turpentine like aroma. Here we get sweet flavorful cypress smoke when they do controlled burns to clear out undergrowth.

  24. just had a 4.7 not too far away…. was frying fish and Hubby made me cut the gas and put the pan in the sink. “Don’t You want to look it up on the internet?? …. No, i want to finish frying this fish….. ” 😉 i did wait for a moment to see if it was going to get bigger… we’ve been having a lot of little ‘adjustments’ as i like to call them. Air pretty good here… more than 70,000 acres on the forrest fire now. Best!motsfo

    • May have been an aftershock but more likely was a ‘normal’ event. Too deep to do much damage, one would hope. how was the fish?

    • Deliberately posting BEFORE I read the link.
      Both my father and I are quite heavily narcoleptic. He is one of Europe’s most highly qualified psychotherapists and a published author. I may not be quite so academically gifted as he is , but I tend to find success in my creative ventures.
      Both of us would attribute at least a part of our successes to narcolepsy.

      • is there any medication to help with this condition? and on a side note, do You do anything dangerous in Your life like drive or cook? or shapen knives? Is there anything that triggers Your condition.. ie, people making You laugh or sneeze? i’m intrigued…
        Best!motsfo

        • and entertained with vision of Your Dad falling asleep and patient on couch going on and on…. 😉

  25. To elaborate on my lava lake theory and also not overrun Carls article :>

    My idea is that if you get a volcano with a high magma supply then put an open hole in it, then the magma more or less will just flow out. This is what puu oo was, just a hole in the earths crust basically. True lava lakes however dont overflow, they just sit there, over time they might slowly rise but they are pretty static. The same goes for strombolian volcanoes that erupt for long periods of time like stromboli, not usually a lot of magma but an open hole nonetheless, so the actual amount of magma going in is not high, when you give these more magma they overflow rapidly, or they do what stromboli did the other day.

    When I talk about high supply, I mean the yearly average of how much magma goes into the volcano. Ambrym has a very high supply at depth, but it is not a massive flood basalt volcano the size of iceland so most of that magma doesnt make it to the volcano itself. I have no idea why but it just happens. Many arc volcanoes likely have higher potential supply rates of magma than hotspots but most of that magma just circulates back down and only the gas makes it with a small amount of magma. Arc volcanoes in general have more volatiles too than hotspots, especially water and CO2, unless they cheat and put country sized glaciers on top of them 🙂

    Final bit is also to agree with what Albert said about grimsvotn being a rift volcano. If you compare to kilauea (because it rifts and has no ice) in the 60s, it could have most definitely restarted its lava lake with its high supply rate, but it it didnt, instead it erupted on its rift many times because it was easier to erupt there. It did eventually restart the lake in 1967 but it was more a lava fountain that all the lava got ponded near than a real convecting lava lake.
    In the 1868-1924 period it would have been difficult for kilauea to erupt on its east rift, the pressure would be too high, so its then lower supply would just go to the summit vent that was already long open since probably the 1790s. After 1924 the open hole was destroyed and it couldnt reopen so nothing happened.
    I guess if grimsvotn did exactly this it would be bad, erupting on the rift, but same principle.

    This also ended up being longer than I wanted it to be but I think (hope) it explains my idea better.

  26. Since this is fully OT, I drop it into the Bar.

    Long time readers are likely familiar with my per-occupation with the concept of “The Black Swan.”

    One thing that really should be known, is that the originator of the term and the idea, has grown a bit fed-up with the yammering bobble-heads on TV throwing the term around like a volleyball in their pet catchphrase tournament. This was evident in his follow-on book “AntiFragile.” My intent is not to hype some market phenomena or a doomsday event. Fact of the matter, if you see it coming, it isn’t actually a swan at all. To catch everyone up, Taleb’s Black Swan definition is as follows.

    1) The event is so improbable that people (that’s us) wrongfully assume that the probability is effectively zero.
    2) The event is profound in it’s effect.
    3) The event is explained away after the fact with logic.

    At the core of Taleb’s idea, is that the Gaussian Curve (aka Normal Distribution/curve) does not have fat tails. In other words, it drops off towards zero too fast and does not correctly represent the actual probability of the event (or transient).

    A quick refresher.

    In a Normal Distribution, 68.3% of the measured events will be within 1 standard deviations of the mean. 95.5% within 2 standard deviation, and 99.7% within 3 standard deviations.

    Why the yammering about Black Swans and Fat Tails? Because Taleb was not the only one to notice. It seems that extinction events don’t follow the Guassian Curve very well either.

    https://www.sciencealert.com/a-mysterious-universal-pattern-in-the-fossil-record-might-finally-be-explained

    • Note: That “Female Population Height” plot is based on 817 actresses/performers that appear on the screen in some way. That will skew the curve towards what ever the producers see as appealing to their audiences.

    • And that plot was redacted due to an error. Better to have no plot than an inaccurate one.

      • motsfo deciding she doesn’t know what You are talking about and i guess You redacted it without any long black marker… 😉

        • The redaction was because I hosed up a unit conversion. Based on my plot, women were much shorter than reality.

    • There are many reasons why exceptional events may exceed expectations. Typically, it means you didn’t understand the uncertainties, or the uncertainties aren’t gaussian. A second possibility is that you forgot abut time scales. That likely plays a role in the extinction events: if whatever is causing the extinctions to increase lasts for longer than typical fluctuations in species numbers, the effect is going to amplify over time. If it lasts ten times as long, you’ll get much higher extinction numbers than expected. But the most common effect is that you didn’t look at straight numbers but at differentials.

      Take global warming. A typical day may have a temperature of 20C with a dispersion of a few degrees. Now warm up by 1C (as we have indeed done). You will find that the typical day is warmer by 3-4 C! Why? Because of the steep slope of the gaussian. The plot show the two gaussian (before and after global warming), and the bottom shows the difference which is what you experience. Some days are colder than before but the majority of days are warmer, and the peak of the difference is at +3C compared to the olden days. That is why global warming has such an effect on wld life and environment.

  27. Good bout of tremor on the big island. 10:51 utc – 11:22

    2019-07-16 10:50:43 2.2 46.7
    2019-07-16 10:50:21 2.2 34.6

    I think some of the tremor was clipped by the webicorders.

          • Little more minor (for this area) tremor on the big island, this time with no associated deep quakes.
            17:43 – 18:03 UTC

            Mac

          • More deep activity at Pahala

            Some brittle quakes first, don’t know if starting the sequence?

            2019-07-18 00:00:06 1.9 31.3
            2019-07-18 00:04:14 2.9 32.3
            2019-07-18 01:03:39 1.8 34.1

            Then tremor:

            2019-07-18 04:52:16 2 37.8
            2019-07-18 05:40:42 2.6 35.6
            2019-07-18 05:54:45 2.2 40

        • We have some more tremor starting to show. Not sure if this is deep tremor since some of the instruments are stuck at 14:00 UTC. This is from KUPD that is still reporting and was at 14:21 when I took this snap shot. I am guessing that there is a technical glitch.

          • I am guessing the tremor is probably:

            2019-07-19 13:59:34 2.1 45.8

          • We have some more, this time a lot less intense, does not show on most of the seismographs but lasting longer than most of the others. Closest quake by time is a 2.5 off the coast of Hilo…2019-07-20 12:51:10 2.5 37.4.

            This is MITD

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