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. SpaceX launch and blow up apparently invisible prototype SN11 as it attempts to land, It either blew up in the air during engine re-ignition or Flight Termination System was activated.

    • Is this where we post non-volcano stuff of interest? I did post a comment at the time, we were watching it live.

  2. Is there any asteorids in the solar system that orbits the sun close enough so they are molten or have a surface thats melts into glass during close solar orbits?

    Souch objects woud over millions of years be vaporized by the suns intense light bombardment ..

    The outer parts of the Sun have a very low density ( 1/ 100 th of earths surface pressure for middle photosphere )
    And corona is much less.

    Light Radiation is what heats you up If you go close to the sun

  3. Sakurajima seems to be gradually getting more violent as time goes on.
    Can see another 1914 at some point.
    Another city built in a silly place.

    • Its a silly place but not the silliest place, when Kagoshima was built I think it was probably not so bad a location just now it is much bigger and Sakurajima is erupting all the time, it didnt do that before the 1950s I dont think. Japan is one of those places that is extremely aware of the situation but rather helpless to actually do anything about it now, its impossible to move Tokyo no matter how extreme the earthquake risk is, so building to minimise the damage is the next best thing.

      Castles in Japan were built out of wood and had a base of stones that were shaped but not set together, exactly so that earthquakes wouldnt destroy them, houses were also built out of wood that was held together by gravity, and also put of paper and cloth.

      • One snag is that many roofs, made of heavy tiles to endure typhoons, became deadly missiles during quakes…

    • Great photos of that event in my 70+ yo edition of Thomas Jaggar’s ‘Volcanoes Declare War’. Formerly an island, tt was that event in which its pyroclastic density currents linked it to the mainland.

  4. Large number of earthquakes currently ongoing in Nisyros area. Always been intrigued by the Kos/Nisyros/Tilos area at the eastern end of the Aegean arc, a large batholith underlies this area. The Kos ignimbrite was also an enormous eruption 150ka, almost a VEI7. Fumaroles, geothermal activity and bradyseism are common on Nisyros island. Would be a good subject for a future article!

    • Please. Is a very complex, very interesting region, its geology due for a ‘kick’ when the currently-locked Western end of ‘North Anatolian Fault’ breaks loose…

      FWIW, any word on the stress-field vs creep rates around Istanbul ?? IIRC, there were *some* indications that *part* of submerged section of fault *may* be somewhat lubricated by water, so is creeping rather than fully locked. Would act as a ‘safety link’ to prevent quake propagation along full length at risk. So, in theory, a much shorter duration main-event, albeit with umpteen nasty after-shocks as remaining stresses release…

      Having glimpsed what was left of Old Skopje after a year’s clean-up, I can only plead, ‘Be NOT There’…

      Be a cruel irony if Erdogan gets his beloved ‘Kanal Istanbul’ dug just in time for big quake to collapse the surrounding slopes into it, totally land-locking a big Russian warship…

  5. Is Hawaii the worlds clearest ocean?
    Hawaii is so far from land and land runoff and isolated in the tropical deep sea pacific. Hawaiian waters are extremely low in nutrients its a ”watery desert”
    Visibility in Hawaii is often excellent amazing! 70 meters or more are possible.
    Its sea is a deep indigo Blue in Google Earth .. Almost nothing can grow in souch waters. North Pacific Gyre contains very few plankton and almost No nutrients.

    Coral Reefs make their own nutrients from sunlight and is one of very few animal life that can grow in souch clear Blue oceanic deserts.

    Perhaps Chad knows If there are any even clearer spots in the pacific?

    I also know that Sargasso – sea haves Some super clear blue oceanic desert spots .. thats devoid of plankton

    Its the Subtropical Oceanic Gyres at around lat 18 to 33 that contains the worlds clearest .. bluest and least fertile waters .. But exactly where the worlds clearest ocean water? is .. I dont know

    • I swimmed many times in Kailua Kona .. offshore from boat a mile out .. 75 meters visibilty is not uncommon there .. lack of plankton growth in water

      Perhaps this is as Clear as a tropical deep sea ocean can be?

      Satelite imagery plankton in Hawaii is very very low concentrations

    • Molokini Crater haves some very Clear water indeed! But I think offshore kona coud be clearer

    • Sargasso Sea is also known to be one of the worlds clearest oceans

      But exactly Whats the worlds clearest ocean I dont know

    • Hawaii Tracker is a wonderful resource that just keeps on giving. Philip Ong and Dane Dupont are great with the Kilauea and Mauna Loa updates. I’ve learnt so much small-scale lava lake morphology from these guys.

  6. Spotted in the Financial Times: some good advice to take the effort out of cooking. No lava required

    • In lockdown Dear Daughter and I made a sourdough starter from scratch and made bread, crumpets, scones, banana bread out of the dough. I need to do more sourdough bread. It’s so tasty.

  7. I have no idea what’s happening over the IGEPN but they have not posted any monthly reports since August, never reported on the volcano’s most recent swarm at the end of last year, and I have actually asked for GPS and INSAR deformation data in a conversation with the scientist over there and they won’t respond to anymore my messages since then.There as been anomalous deformation since November of last year. Significant change to the inclinometers imply an expanded area of localized uplift or large tectonic instability
    . I can’t rationalize this. Even from a conspiracy perspective, wouldn’t be more logical to give some type of explanation for the lack of reports, fake some data, and/or just not report the disturbing data? They could just talk about the seismic data which certainly doesn’t point to anything crazy happening. Does any one have any ideas?

  8. Imagining What a Metal Volcano Would Look Like
    https://eos.org/articles/imagining-what-a-metal-volcano-would-look-like

    nice article with lots of pics, video etc.
    quotes:
    In 2018, designs for NASA’s Psyche mission to explore the metal asteroid of the same name were being finalized, awaiting approval to be built in a facility in California. Meanwhile, across the country, Arianna Soldati was conducting large-scale experiments that involved melting metal-rich basaltic rocks in a furnace, pouring the lava out, and studying how it flowed.

    “During our last pour of the day, I saw this metal come out and I made the connection,” said Soldati, a volcanologist at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. Asteroid Psyche, thought to be a shard of a failed planet’s metallic core, was likely partially molten at one point.

    Soldati and her colleagues tested a ferrovolcanism scenario involving both silicate rock and metal. Using one of the furnaces at the Lava Project at Syracuse University in New York, the team melted metal-rich basaltic rock in a silicon carbide crucible. Under heat, the crucible degraded and released carbon which combined with oxygen to form carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide then chemically reacted with the basaltic melt and separated it into a silicate melt and a denser metallic melt. When the crucible was poured out, the silicate melt flowed first, and the metallic one followed (see video below).

    They found that the metallic flow was about 3 times denser and about 100 times less viscous and traveled about 10 times faster than the silicate flow at the same temperature—all in line with fluid dynamics theories. “But it was surprising how independent the two flows remained,” Soldati said. “The silicate flow started earlier, and then the metallic one followed, but it went underneath the rock flow and did its own thing. There was not a lot of interaction between the two. They remained fairly sharply separated.”
    /

    • I did always want to know what lava metal would look like. That is, a metal alloy that is basically all the elements in basalt except the oxygen. Would be probably some sort of silicon-iron-magnesium alloy mostly with small amounts of other stuff, which means it is probably very brittle and also likely very flammable… 🙂

  9. This morning I decided to go awol and spent the time indulging in reaction videos to some of my favourite songs. What a rollercoaster ride of bliss. I must do this more often, it’s so life-enhancng and uplifting.
    A selection:-
    In Your Eyes
    Eruption
    In the Air Tonight
    Solsbury Hill
    Pina Colada (Yes! Really!)
    I’m not in love
    Annie Are You OK (Alien Ant Farm)
    Supper’sReady
    One Burbon, one Scotch one Beer
    Ballroom Blitz

      • Thanks
        A motorised mount to track the night sky, and different photo lenses and telescopes attached to a Canon dslr. Trick is to make long exposures and stacking them with software. 🙂

  10. Chad,
    it seems logical to me that it was a combination. The Deccan traps together with the impact certainly had the consequence that there was no sunlight for many years.
    Concerning the impact there is this beautiful site, in New Mexico I think, of Robert de Palma, all in one neat place. So, the first consequence must have been a monster tsunami, also in those small subareal regions of Europe being much closer to the Americas then. Only 18% of all land was subareal. Then there was the Tethys ocean between North- and South America. Tsunami in South America as well, and if it was huge like 1000 m it had an effect everywhere on the globe.
    Now the oceans. Why did the ancestor of our sharks survive? Maybe dinosaurs only swam and hunted in shallow seas whereas the shark is everywhere. Then I imagine s.th. else: Radiation. Radiation would mean that most species were sterilized, and that the offspring died in their eggshells. S.th. like that.
    Concerning PT, I read an interesting idea in Dorrik Stow’s book. He writes that the coastline was must shorter, naturally after the completion of Pangaea, and besides that the sea level was extremely low exposing the continental shelves which would mean that everything on the continental shelves dried out. Plus the Siberian traps. Plus close to no rain near the Pangaean mountain range.
    So I wonder what will happen before the sun gets too hot, when the Australian plate will have collided with Asia, and when there is a new sort of Neo-Pangaean mountain range from the Pyrenees to the East of Asia. That would be in about 50 million years. America and Eurasia would be connected in the North, the Pacific a bit smaller, the Atlantic Ocean larger.
    Yeah, write s.th. about it maybe. You might get too much traffic though, I don’t know whether you want that. You’d get sensation seekers, dino-tourists, idiots who goggle the T-Rex, avoid the word, also the word Mososaurus. People love dinosaurs. Paleontologists are not too amused about it, as most of the time they are busy with teeth, also rodents’ teeth, sort of work without a spotlight. So if you write avoid every single creature from the Jurassic movies.
    They had s.th. that birds also have: Air chambers in their bones. Some had feathers it seems. I bet the air chambers burst, together with the lungs. The small mammals under the earth, the shark in the depth of the oceans, some snakes and some birds far enough from the impact survived. But the fossils must be from huge tsunamis and instant death, as bodies being buried in mud with the right temperature afterwards result in fossilisation.
    One day they might find the two persons (or parts of them) missing near St. Helens. Fossilized.
    Have a nice Sunday.

    • In about 600 million years the sun will acually be 6% brigther than it is today
      And in 1 billion years 10% brigther

      The entire Earths landmasses turns into a wast seriers of sand dunes.. with life only found in the oceans once again. Daily global temperatures of almost 50 C.. the hot conditions will weather away most of the CO2 and killing the plant life .. and then most of the animal life

      In about 1,5 billion years Earth becomes a hot humid steamhouse runaway greenhouse.. as more and more water evaporates and ends up in the atmosphere trapping heat

      . With all oceans in the atmosphere as steam and magnetic field still active .. Earths surface temperatures coud soar into 1300 C with souch greenhouse

      As the sun gets even older and brigther .. it may even vaporize our planet.. at Red Giant helium flash phase it will be many many 1000 s of times brigther than today! .. heating the Earth enough to make it boil away like a comet .. possible only Leaving a tiny core if Earths orbit widens as the dying sun loose mass

      The far future is very sunny indeed : )

    • 600 million years in the future Earth is Probaly still habitable.. But a hotter sun means more weathering.. than the volcanoes can resupply it and CO2 levels will be dangerously low for life.. killing off most plant life and animals that depend on oxygen. Transforming the landmasses into wast creepy silent deserts Thats as empty as space in larger organisms.

      Death Valley is a good analouge of Earths far future enviroments under an older and brigther sun .. with only anarobic microbes being the things that live.

      Last organisms will shelter kilometers undeground until about 2 billion years from now .. when Earth becomes Venus 3.0

      • Closer in time, Jesper: “Severe climate made central Pangaea uninhabitable”, link. The question is less whether man can survive this, but more, whether he wants to live like that. Man can always get to the conclusion, not to procreate and even commit suicide. In 50 to 100 million years there might be a new Pangaea. You can see it develop, it’s easy. I think it might wander North though, that might help.

        I just hate Pangaea and prefer to read things that start at the end of Trias when rifting must have started, when water came in, when the vegetation changed to the better.
        I love to read about the Western Interior Seaway in the Cretacious, 70 Mya, the Sevier Orogenic Belt, the Mogollon Highlands, the Great Valley Franciscan Complex with a shallow sea and islands, Wrangellia docked on there somewhere, on the other side of the mountains a wide ocean. First mammals, first birds (Wonder Chicken). And I just hate Pangaea, instinctively. We won’t be here anymore, or we won’t like it too much. It was the monster-continent which brought the reptiles. Only reptiles could live there. Most large deserts seem to be a rest of it. Habitable, yes. For reptiles and insects. The next Supercontinent is a lot closer in time, and it will be hotter because of that sun gteting more intense.
        https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12316723-600-science-severe-climate-made-central-pangaea-uninhabitable/

        • Pangaia makes one sense though. The mantle hated it as well, it suffocated. So, it created all those beautiful plumes. One of them might be active in Reykjanes right now, if Carl is right after all. Those beautiful plumes might have been responsable for the rifting, and on the bottom of the oceans near the black smokers is life. So, Pangaea has a point, after all, and without Pangaea, Carl would have to think about a plume genesis in Iceland.

          • Carl would not have to think of course.
            Enjoy your Bank Holiday, The British here.

  11. I wonder when Saõ Miguel will erupt again ..
    Ponta Del Gada is certainly in risk zone.
    The Portugal colonizers built the city on a monogenetic scoria cone field, so this is at least a possibilty in the far future. A new monogenetic fissure event woud be a terrfying destruction for this city. But Catania, Goma and Neapels are in much more concern with larger populations. Still you can count 300 mafic alkaline monogentic scoria cones on the Island.

    Saõ Miguel Certainly haves a sluggish magma supply and sometimes results in explosive evolved alkaline melts at the Big calderas.
    The biggest holocene eruption there was a 3km3 Phonolitic plinian event from the fogo volcanic complex. The Phonolite shows How sluggish the supply is.

  12. Red Giant Sun .. will be a very low density feature indeed!! but big enough to be opaque.. it will be an enormous orange yellow white object the the sky .. perhaps with No sharp edge at all If you watched it from the outer solar system .. just a huge yellowish red glow haze.
    Red giants often haves giant granules cells convection because of low density and low surface gravity

    The poor dying Earth will travel inside this low density plasma .. convective heating will be minimal.

    But its the radiation heating Thats another thing 5000 times brigther the sun will be than today .. Venus and Mercury Will burn up like giant comets and merge with the plasma

    I dont know If Earth will surivive whats Chads opinion? will Earth boil away? The radiation heating is What will determine that ..

    Some say that Suns grip on Earth will loosen and its orbit will move outward as sun loose mass and it will escape Incenirating

    • Probably ask Albert but most stuff I read says the Earth will be too close to the sun for it to survive the red giant stage. The sun will be a red giant for a long time, a billion years maybe, the earth will be orbiting maybe only just outside its visible surface, maybe its core will survive but the mantle will be ablated away for sure.

      Probably the best comparison to the red giant Sun is Arcturus, its the same mass as the Sun but a few billion years older. Arcturus has no planets though, at least none we know about. Aldebaran is slightly more massive than the Sun and does have a planet. Aldebaran b actually was in the outer habitable zone when the star was in the main sequence, so if it had any large moons they could have been habitable.

      • Some form of life will survive, there are creatures that are extremely adaptable, tardigrades and so forth. The sun’s expansion may actually make some of the other planets in our system ‘more habitable’, for instance, Jupiter’s moons.

        • Life isnt going to survive on the earth is what I meant.

          Red giants are also extremely luminous, the habitable zone will be in the Kuiper belt, even Neptune will be too warm. Theres nothing in the Kuiper belt that can hold onto a thick atmosphere except maybe Pluto and thats a big maybe, so probably all but the small percentage of rocky stuff will evaporate. There could be more substantial planet sized objects we haven’t seen yet in the Oort cloud, in fact it is way more likely they are there than not, but those will be a bit further out and not really the same question.

          • Well it depends how substantial the warming effect and radiation is, everything between Jupiter and Pluto is between -200C & -400C, many of the moons (Charon for instance) are also quite unstable in their orbits and eccentricity.
            There are several large Kuiper Belt bodies that might house life, Eris, Makemake etc. and there is of course the mysterious potential planet (or planets) X that affects the orbits of these far out bodies.

          • It’s possible, there is also the theory that the sun is a binary star (Nemesis) and it’s twin could have caused the perturbances in the Kuiper belt. If Scholz’s star did had a significant effect, then we will see asteroids reaching the inner solar system in roughly 2 million years.

            I went down a wiki rabbit hole with this and found that there is a roughly 27 million year periodicity in mass extinctions, so what causes that who can say.

          • Nemesis would have been seen by now, we found Proxima Centauri a long time ago and that is a very dim star. We have also found so many brown dwarfs that to have one in the solar system without us knowing is basically 0, they are not as dim in infrared as they are in visible, imagine Jupiter heated to 1500 C it would glow bright. Most cases of the Nemesis or Nibiru theory are brought up as science fiction or by people like that Dutchsince guy only less grounded in reality than he is, somehow..

            Mass extinctions are more like once every 100 million years not 25 million and are certainly not cyclical, you get two in a 50 million year span on either end of the Triassic but there has only been one in the 200 million years since that, though it was a big one. There are minor extinctions more often but that tends to affect only megafauna and is probably quite often biological in origin just from natural evolution, mass extinctions hit everything and are beyond the ability if complex life, until we showed up.

      • Chad just wait until the large Red Dwarf Gliese 710 C pass through the solar system.. 4000 Au or perhaps even closer.. insanely close
        Going to disturb the Ort Cloud.. and send bombardement towards the inner planets

        Gliese 710 C makes it passage in around 1 million years

  13. To keep myself mostly-sane, I write SciFi and urban-fantasy tales, keeping as close to reality as I can manage…
    https://www.deviantart.com/the-nik-files

    Sometimes, a ‘throw-away’ line comes back to bug me.

    In my WIRS tales, we’re one of seven ‘parallels’, thus accounting for the missing ‘Dark Matter’. And Hancock was only half-wrong, ‘Atlanteans’ being a human culture whose Eifel region’s over-fracked geothermal tap went ‘Chernobyl’. Some survivors hunkered down, slowly degenerated. Some clung to their storm-washed alt-Atlantic coast. Some fled, cut a swathe across our Bronze Age, spawned myth & legend with their portable Alt-Tech until it wore out…

    ( Thera / Santorini ? Did they make the same mistake again ?? )

    Meanwhile, their Eifel region continues to erupt flood basalts. Beyond the growing ‘Traps’, sub-continent is ‘Icelandic Barrens’ from their alt-Atlantic coast to Urals. Planet is ‘mild’ Ice Age, sea-level’s about sixty metres below ours. Not quite enough to close ‘Gibraltar’, but impairs exchange. Ditto Black Sea & Red Sea etc…

    Now, a ‘usually reliable’ character says Atlantean Alps stopped the lava from going further South…

    Given three millennia of eruption, would that still apply ? Could lava have found way to eg Rhone Valley ?

    So, more correct to say, ‘…stopped *much* lava from going further South’ ? With a lonnnng lava-tube spilling down into alt-Med ??

  14. So, after learning about the rather unusual process of water dehydration from a stagnant subducted slap that appears to power the intraplate volcano Mt.Paektu/Changbaishan I’ve been immensely curious if there are other locations on the globe with intraplate volcanoes that don’t really fit into the typical models that may fit this behaviour.

    Does anybody know of any locations on earth with the same sort of subduction-type where this kind of process may be ongoing?

    • Perhaps the Tibesti Massif in NW Chad ?

      Due to a totally subducted mini-plate from Tethys’ closure ??

      • Interesting but with the state of the region that’d be quite the challenge to actually research and verify. There aren’t even seismometers out there right?

      • All of East Australia actually, there was probably a plume involved through the Cenozoic but that only explains the big volcanoes, like Wollumbin or Canobolas, it doesnt explain the many volcanic fields which have not shown any age correlation or waning of activity, with extensive volcanism in the last million years at both ends of the continent.

        • It’s an interesting possibility. Volcanic fields seem to be how things originally started in the North China/Korea area afterall so certainly a potential candidate.

          • Yes, but it is inactive, the last central volcano was at Hanging rock in Victoria and that was 6 million years ago. The hotspot seems to have peaked at Wollumbin, a bit over 20 million years ago, that is a massive volcano. The volcanic fields seem to not have anything to do with the hotspot.

            I live in this part of the world so naturally this stuff interests me 🙂

    • Probably Mt Elbrus and those in Romania like Ciomadul.
      Taken from Ciomadul wikipedia:

      This volcanism occurs in a setting where the collision between the Eurasian Plate and the Tisza-Dacia microplate took place,[13][14] preceded by a stage of subduction involving a narrow ocean.[15] This is part of the collision between the African Plate and the Eurasian Plate; subduction may still be underway in the area of the Carpathians.[16] The Vrancea zone, which is 50 kilometres (31 mi) away from Ciomadul, features ongoing earthquake activity; deep earthquakes suggest that a remnant of a slab exists beneath the Vrancea zone.

      • I had a feeling it could be involved in the Carpathians, it’s the only real explanation for Ciomadul/Csomad that makes sense to me.

    • IIRC, I also asked this some time back, as it was a ‘diverting’ phenomenon. Exudate seems cold, not geo-thermal, isotopic mix seems due to organic decay. Mud pot per Baku or Indonesia ?? But why does it move ??

      IIRC, what’s now ‘Salton Sea’ was isolated from coast by an alluvial fan during last ice age when sea levels were much lower. If another ‘pull apart’ basin, then sediment depth could be considerable, and we’re just seeing the tip of backfill….

      And the pot is following the stress-field of a transverse fault ??

      I suppose one concern is for the utilities & rail-tracks across its path, another is that area could subside…

    • The most likely cause of the move is actually the road. It may have stopped the natural dispersion of the underground gas. Gas can’t get out much that way, so it collects and the increase of gas makes the mud pool follow it. Note that the geyser was rather close to the road. Best way to get the mud to go back where it was is to remove the road!

  15. I knew the Galileo entry probe was extreme but I didnt realise just how much…

    “The probe slammed into Jupiter’s atmosphere at 170,590 kilometers per hour, fast enough to jet from Los Angeles to New York in 90 seconds. Deceleration to about Mach 1—​the speed of sound—took just a few minutes. At maximum deceleration it experienced a force 350 times Earth’s gravity. The incandescent shock wave ahead of the probe was as bright as the Sun and reached searing temperatures of up to 15,537 degrees Celsius.”

    https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/galileo-probe/in-depth/

    It makes you wonder how hot something entering the atmosphere of the sun would be, I know the sun is extreme in its own right but I expect something that is falling into it would heat up to such a degree that the photosphere temperature would be basically 0 K in comparison… I wonder actually would a comet hitting the sun have enough kinetic energy to initiate fusion at the site of impact? Same for massive gas giants hitting each other, would it induce fusion during the impact, temporarily, even if the combined mass stays below the limit of becoming a star.

    • The Galileo Atmospheric Probe Entry enviroment must have been a disturbing sight for soure..what did it looked like local enviroment?

      It entered Jupiter in a dry hotspot desert downwelling .. cloud free abyss
      It fell into a dry zone

      It was afternooon.. as the parachutes opened.. under clear blue hydrogen skies ( Jupiter haves blue skies above the clouds )

      Chad how did that entry site looked like? Clear Blue skies .. over a murky abyss? .. dark abyss plain below?

      it was cloud free at entry spot.. and very good visibility ( the fact that there is No surface below is insanely disturbing! )! So perhaps a pinksh afternoonish sky above a dark mostly cloud free abyss

      Perhaps probe Jupiter entry site looked like afternoon when you look outside the aircraft window .. you fly at 30 000 feet above a calm ocean and Earths night shadow is approaching

      Jupiter is very big indeed .. so you coud see very far indeed horizon is very distant .. huge 50 km tall cumulunimbus towers lit sunlight by sunset woud be visible 1000 kilometer away .. How a gas giant cloudscapes looks like ☁️ 🪐 I have No Idea

      Most of Jupiter woud Probaly look like when you fly an aircraft high over a full cumulus – stratocumulus sky in Earths tropics. Jupiter Cumulonimbus are on an insanely massive scale indeed perhaps like oversized earth MCS

      Sad that Galileo Probe atmospheric did not include a camera! Wants to see Jupiters cloudscape

    • Perhaps most of Jupiters cloudscapes looks like when you are flying in tropical cyclones.. a mix of heavy cumulus and alot cirrus elements.. there are many cloud layers in Jupiters upper atmosphere with huge convective cloud towers poking through the decks

      Most of Jupiters upper ammonia clouds are cirrus forms

      The Galileo Entry Enviroment was a cloud free dry hydrogen abyss .. and probaly quite blue because of reylenght scattering.. the probe descended with parachutes towards the hot inferno below

      It had No camera at all : (

    • The enviroment below the clouds are a pitch black .. almost deep sea abyss
      Rain and hails falling into abyss and evaporation in Jupiters hot depths

      Deeper down Jupiters Interior becomes nightmarishly hot and glowing brigther than the sun ..
      The hot hydrogen ocean below must be like liquid iron … and Liquid Metallic Hydrogen Below that Thats even hotter and denser

      Perhaps there is sillicate and metallic clouds just above the liquid hydrogen raining metals and lava like on Brown Dwarfs

      But its the upper cloud layers that Im curious about! wants a atmospheric probe with a camera

    • I often dreams of flying in a hot hydrogen Zeppelin on Jupiter
      And a rusty old steampunk helium – hydrogen mining floating outpost .. manned by steampunk robots that works for man .. human vistors are infrequent

      Floating in the upper atmosphere among enormous cumulus heads always cracking with ligthing and we see perhaps the huge endless wall of clouds Thats the Great Red Spot

      As well as showers of ammonia snow and hailstones of water 🙂 Jupiter is a blimp – Zeppelin Steampunk dream

    • But the Galileo Atmospheric Probe Entry enviroment was a dry cloud free dowwelling high pressure spot
      6000 km wide .. with very very good visibilty according to the Descent Probes Nephelometer.

      It was late afternoon as it slowly sank into this almost cloud free abyss..

      Kind of hard to imagine what that local Jupiter enviroment woud look like .. the atmospheric probe carried NO camera at all acually.. too harsh Space entry for that

      But the skies woud be mostly Blue perhaps pink during sunset .. Jupiter may be a gas giant .. but a horizon woud defentivly be visible from inside at entry site.. perhaps looking like when Earth casts its own shadow on its atmosphere.. and much more distant than our horizon

      Quite creepy with No surface under!

      • Would be I think quite familiar at higher altitudes, where the temperature is habitable. The air of course is mostly hydrogen so the air would be less dense and everything would sound more high pitched and maybe a bit more quiet.

        Great Red Spot would be a sight to behold, the clouds being over 100 km tall above everything else, actually a recent study says the shrinking of the spot is because it has grown taller and spins faster, it is not at all weakening it is actually getting stronger… 15000 km wide and 150 maybe even 200 km tall, red and glowing with lightning. The whole thing though is probably several thousand km deep, maybe even as deep as it is wide, it is basically the gas giant equivalent of a mantle plume, its interior I expect is probably way hotter than most of the rest of the surface, hundreds of degrees possibly. Its definitely a thing we need to see up close, such an iconic feature yet still so mysterious.

        • Thinking back to the big ‘blemes’ which followed Comet S-L_9’s fragmentary impact, must wonder if Great Red Spot was spawned by impact of an intact comet or asteroid…

          Above a certain size, its storm-system would be the ‘apex predator’, become self-sustaining…

          Random event, or ~70 kyr from ‘Scholz Pass’ ??
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz%27s_Star

          And, yes, I do have a fascination with that event, which inspired a short story…
          https://www.deviantart.com/nik-2213/art/Hunter-s-Night-523385646

          IIRC, there are no big *terrestrial* impact sites of that age, which is too recent for ocean subduction to ‘sweep under the carpet’. In-fall time of *our* stirred Oort objects has been estimated as ~2MYr, so only ‘pending’ on a geological scale.
          But what if some came early ??

    • What the local enviroment woud look like for Galileos Atmospheric Probe
      If you think away, remove the ground with just more atmosphere murkyness

      If I gets the physics right

      • Chad the descent probe carried No camera at all.. so we will never know what it coud see…

        But quite disturbing woud that dry cloud – less spot on Jupiter be .. that it fell into
        Do I get the Jupiter atmosphere physics right with the photo above.. If you remove the ground and replaced it with more murkyness below ?

      • Cloud less dry parts on a gas giant .. woud absoutley absorb light and by defenition become disturbing dark pits of doom..thats what these dry atmospheric hotspots are

        Woud be dark pits even at Noon… with deep blue hydrogen sky above

        But most of Jupiter is covered by reflective clouds

  16. Just started the bones of an article on the Kos Plateau Tuff for your consideration on here, might take a while to write as I’d like it to be high quality and I think the bar is pretty high for phrasing and storytelling on VC! What is the best way to link figures and photos?

    • We are always happy to receive guest posts! The best way is to include them in the file, and we can upload automatically. You can also email the images. The size of the images may need to be considered: 700 pixels on the side works well. Larger images we tend to show in lower resolution with a link to the full resolution. If it is too large to email it is too large for wordpress..

  17. Lava lake at Kilauea only has two small active ponds now, everything else is crusted and the SO2 is at only 150 tons a day, its basically not erupting. The GPS is showing a different story though, the caldera expansion has been accelerating since mid April when the lake began to crust over. Maybe the lake has finally buried the vent so there is no longer a release of pressure, or a lot more magma is added to the system than is erupted anyway, which seems to have been the case since the start of the year.

    I think the eruption will end soon, but another eruption will happen by years end, possibly a much more powerful eruption, if there has been a lot of new magma added since 2018, some 0.6 km3, it isnt going to be all degassed stuff. I dont think the deep pit at Halemaumau is going to last much longer than a year. The stress field has also changed and an eruption outside Halemaumau is a more plausible outcome too, a lava flood fissure like 1974 🙂

  18. Hi I haves an Eye question!

    I know that dead retina cells can never replace or recover themselves

    But can a damaged / stressed photorecptor recover itself ?

    My eyesight is very good
    But just a little worry since I stupidly looked at the sun as small child

    Haves No retina problems
    But just curious for potential damage

    • I looked at the sun more than once as a child. I’m not far behind Albert in age, and no effects so far. Not worth the risk though.

    • Doubtful there is a significant problem, Jesper, but best to go see an actual eye doc. Should be covered under your medical but isn’t that expensive if not (mine is about $190 if no coverage). Get a referral from your primary care physician specifically for the sunlight damage concern – this would allow your medical to handle it instead of vision coverage, which is really only for optical. The eye doc will check visual acuity, do a refraction for eyeglass prescription, and take a look at your retinas.

      Most kids look at the sun at one time or another. Sunlight damage shows up on retina as little white spots. My eye doc saw these on my retinas and advised sunglasses whenever possible. That’s it!

      • MacRoberts – Albert

        I haves a really really fun Eye Question.. give your suggestions

        Our macula is a really tiny area in our eyes

        What woud happen If the entire interior of our eye was as densely covered with cones as the macula? entire eye interior was macula everywhere?

        What woud happen If we had a brain that coud process that ?

        I know that our side vision woud be very sharp too and zero night vision

        Perhaps we woud end up with confusion with sharp vision everywhere

        • Guessing: Cornea and lens are optimized for acuity and focus in fovea/macula region. To take advantage of macular expansion, seems possible the cornea would have to be somewhat larger and allow a greater chord/wider angle for light entry. Maybe our appearance would be a more bulging central eye region. I think lens would also have to be somewhat larger, as well as foveal depression.

          Other changes would almost certainly include a significantly larger optic nerve bundle and associated larger blind spot. Pressure impacts on Glaucoma-like effects could be exacerbated.

          Interesting question, Jesper!

          • You would be disappointed. A lot of processing goes on behind the scenes in the brain. For instance, it shifts the images from both eyes to overlap. It looks for outlines that shout ‘danger’ and takes over muscle control in response. It looks for rapid movement (that mainly uses the outer vision). You would lose all these things by overwhelming the brain. So expect to become slow, have double vision and are unable to catch anything. The upside is that you could read a large line of text without having to move your eyes and could do so in one shot. Reading speed would be phenomenal. Have you seen the movie ‘arrival’? The way the aliens write can only work if you can see the whole structure in one go. Our eyes couldn’t do it

      • I doubt I have any problems with retinopathy

        Polarized Glasses works very well to cure these washed out days

        Polarized Glasses removes all ”Trash Light” in your enviroment

    • Well I can see very clearly
      There been No anomalies At fundus photography.

      But not done OCT imagery

      Only problem I have is in direct daylight: Im light sensitive

      • That is a good problem to have. Being light sensitive means being sensitive to light meaning that your eyes have good receptors. No damage there. But if you are worried, it is better to have a test. It will help you

      • Albert

        Im extremely light sensitive
        And cannot see much color on sunny days .. washed out

        I use Polarized Glasses to bring out the colours and remove the ”trash light”

        My vison is apparently very very sharp: I can see the tinest pixels on my Super Retina display phone from some distance.. while brother cannot see them

        My colourvison is excellent in ideal conditions: specialy man made things are saturated to extreme for me

        Albert perhaps I haves more photoreceptors than normal?

      • Not much I can see during nights or bright days

        But it appears to not be something wrong with my eyes

        • My father in law was CFO of a major eye doc group in LA, still involved in the industry. I just briefly discussed your concerns with him (without mentioning your name, of course). Washed out color perception can be a sign of solar retinopathy. OCT imagery is an indicated diagnostic. Your excellent acuity is a positive thing. Past sun-gazing as a child can result in damage but (amazingly) often heals at least partially. Not always completely.

          Your ongoing concern is reason enough to go get this checked out. You may end up learning little more than you already suspect or know about your vision, but your eye doc may be able to tell you new and useful information about your retinas that helps you preserve your vision going forward. Either way, it’s going to be worth it – yes?

          • Polarized Glasses helps me alot During harsh sunny days

            They really increase the color Alot! Trees becomes very saturated When you puts these on during harsh sunny days

            Glowing coal can be very very colorful to me: flames less so

            Hot iron becomes really red for me

            Flowers are also very saturated for me: some are saturated to the extreme

          • Some colors are very very saturated for me ( almost to the extreme )

            Polarized Lenses works very well for me

            Sunlight split in a glass crystals can yeild excellent rainbow 🌈 colors for me

            My macula is very full and described as ”very large”

            Evening yeilds much less color

            If a bright light is uncomfortable to look at then You should not look at it .. thats the rule

          • I am not an eye specialist! What you describe sounds like a bit of oversensitivity of the receptors, perhaps because you live in fairly low light levels (in-doors?). It doesn’t sound like there is anything wrong. Use polarised sunglasses, they should work very well for you. But you should get a specialist (not a general doctor) opinion, as MacRoberts suggest.

          • In 2019
            I Did two solar experiments to make soure I have not stared into the sun for any period of time as child

            Two expoure of perhaps 1/10 of a second to the sun and it was uncomfortable

            So any gazing at child been most minial of level
            ( much less than a second )

            The religious sungazers are

            ”quite stupid”

            ending up with macular holes as well as reckless eclipse gazers

            My detail and colourvison is good ( just not seeing well when its very bright outside )

            Use Polarized Glasses to bring out the colors! 👍

          • Polarized lenses works very well indeed they are my New way of life

            Fundus photographs shown nothing more than a really large macular disk

            I will look with an Eye expert for OCT ( But … my sight is good.. specialy in ideal light )

        • As all have said, get it checked out. ‘Night Blindness’ is not normal. A high street optician may be a good start, but not every condition shows obvious signs, and may need an ophthalmologist to check your eyes thoroughly. Don’t rely on a regular doctors opinion, it will probably be useless. A visual field test could be worthwhile. Do you bump into things more? (doorways, people passing in the street etc).

      • The receptors in the eye receive light and fire neurons. Each receptor has a number of cells that are sensitive to different colours and to a different polarization. A firing neuron receptor suppresses the receptors around it. This makes the output less if the full area is very bright, but enhances the contrast if there is a sharp edge to the bright area. That makes us very sensitive to outlines, but much less so to an area. That is why a line drawing is so easy for us to interpret: that is what our eyes see. They see the outline of a face rather than the content.

        The fact that you see very sharp shows that these photoreceptors work fine. The fact that things seem washed out in bright light may indicate that the suppression of neighbouring neurons is quite strong in your case, which may be because the receptors are very sensitive or just get a lot of light in. It indicates that your eyes are very clear (clear lens) and all receptors are working. The pupil may also stay a little more open than it should, but that would make your vision a bit less sharp. Not impossible though. Night vision is different. Our night vision uses different receptors which are located away from the central vision and are much less densely packed. They also have no colour vision. We can’t see nearly as sharp at night and see no colour. The same receptors are used for vision away from the central area. If you look a bit away from something, you will see it is not as clear (you can’t read text while looking to the side, which is why your eyes have to move across the page to read), and we can’t see colour there.

        Questions:
        Are both eyes the same?
        Does it depend on colour? (Use colour filters to check)
        Does it depend on polarization? (rotate the polarizer by 45 and 90 degrees)

        • Colors are very good: specialy in afternoon …or in bright lit ambient room. Or in an overcast summer day it works fine

          Hot metals have excellent orange colors If I heats them

          Same for both eyes

          Polarized glasses works very fine I started to use them everyday. Polarized glasses helps me with increasing my color experience during harsh days

          Night vison seems normal ( evening the colors starts to fade )

          MacRoberts send this information in this commentary to that eye expert

          The fact that my colourvison is normal = No retinopathy?

          My total solar expoure every time at Noon is much Less than a second as child

          And a few seconds at almost after sunset ( orange evening sun thats very easy to look at ) I live in the Arctic above latitude 60

          Fundus Cameras have not shown anything at all

          My macula is extraodinary large acually very much bigger than in Many other internet Photos ( really Big macula disk I have

          Im feeding on a high fat – high protein, high fiber diet Fat fish, dark greens, and moose flesh and lots of carrot like greens that are underground

          • My father-in-law is not an ophthalmologist and suggests you see one, preferably a board-certified retina specialist. All questions you have can then be reliably and easily answered after an eye exam. If you have an ophthalmologist already, start there. Any issues will get you a referral to a retina specialist, likely covered under your medical insurance.

            He said, “Just go!” 🙂

        • Flowers can be insanely colorful for me.. some are so saturated it almost look fake.

          Some colors for me ( many man made ) are saturated to the extreme level

          Leaves are sometimes less so since they are covered in a waxy Layer that scatters light

          Fire looks very saturated in ideal conditions and sometimes washed out

          I think my eyes are healthy But I dont know

          My exposure to sun in Noon is less than a second

          But much longer at winter sunsets
          ( very red sun )

          I dont like solar glare and reflections

          I use Polarized lenses.

          My macula is really large at Fundus Photography

          Overcast summer days is when my colourvison is best

        • Albert

          Another straaange thing

          In the last years my vision seems to have improved .. its a little better now than it was in my teenage years

          Night visions have improved: do you know why that is?
          I can manuver in very dark rooms using the most minimal ammount of light

          Perhaps its the adult development of the brain Thats finished

          My eyes are best in afternoon or in overcast summer days: night vison seems normal

          VC BAR coud be a place to discuss souch things

          Polarized Glasses with a warm tint have solved my day problems

        • But my night vison is Probaly not as good as yours

          I guess I haves more cones than rods dominace

          My eyes and brain mostly likes color
          Im a color addict
          Strongly needs color and ideal ligthing

          My macula area is Probaly mostly cones ( I very good color vision )

          I wish I can find my Fundus photograph and post here ( Big really dark macula )

          Much bigger than brothers macula

  19. Lava river starting to make its way round the base of the hill. Might be a few hours before it gets to try it on with the dam.

    • Didn’t realise I’d wandered into the Bar. First timer, and couldn’t find my way out again.

  20. Mt. Ny etc ‘kicked off’, lava heading for Goma, evacuation begun.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-57215690

    “A new fracture opened up on the volcano, enabling lava to flow south towards Goma and reach the airport, on the eastern edge of the city. Electricity was out across large areas, and one highway that connects Goma with the city of Beni had already been engulfed by the lava.”

  21. Moving this to the bar.

    Albert, I understand where you are coming from but surely high resolution 3D maps of the future path for Perseverance are highly useful? Perhaps NASA will soon announce that part of the reason Percy covered the distance it has done recently was because of higher confidence in longer drives thanks to Ingenuity data. Or perhaps not of course 🙂

    Northrop Grumman also seem to think it is a really good flying anemometer which is how it came into discussion about the upcoming sample return mission with Perseverance’s flasks.

    • I think the main thing NASA gets out of it is debugging the system. The rover has cameras that I think reach up to 2 meters, have higher resolution, and can see forward. The helicopter can only see down, from some 5 meters. It does not add that much. The main goal of the rover is the high cliff and I thought perhaps the ‘copter could get pictures of higher layers that the rover may not reach. But I think it can’t see forward so that would not work. I would stop the flights now. But I may not see the full picture!

    • IMHO, the drone is mostly ‘proof of concept’, as previously thought Martian atmosphere was too thin to fly practicable helos. Shows how far mini-motor tech and batteries have evolved in last decade, plus the on-board sensors & software to maintain stable flight autonomously…

    • Here’s a bit more on some unexpected findings.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01537-3

      Mars helicopter kicks up ‘cool’ dust clouds — and unexpected science

      Ingenuity, NASA’s pint-sized Mars helicopter, has kicked up some surprising science on its flights over the red planet. When whizzing through the Martian air, its blades sometimes stir up a dust cloud that envelops and travels along with the tiny chopper.

      In several videos of Ingenuity’s flights, planetary scientists have seen dust whirling beneath the helicopter’s rotors — even when Ingenuity is flying as high as 5 metres above the Martian surface. That suggests that dust can get lifted and transported in the thin Martian air more easily than researchers had suspected.

      “It’s really cool,” says Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado
      “There’s an unanticipated atmospheric science experiment coming out of this,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe.”

      …It was Ingenuity’s fourth flight, on 30 April, that really intrigued scientists. A video, recorded by Perseverance from a vantage point nearby, shows the helicopter rise, disappear from view, and then re-appear while enveloped in an enormous cloud of dust following a 133-metre flight.

      The video confirms that Ingenuity was flying along with the 3.5-metre-per-second wind, says Håvard Grip, the helicopter’s chief pilot at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The dust was getting carried beneath us,” he says.

      That’s obviously Ingenuity’s stealth attack drone mode they’ve discovered, where it repeatedly drags and drops clouds of dust over the solar panels of hostile landers 🙂

      • No, IIRC, that’s ‘re-ingestion’, a problem that dogs helos with too high a disk-loading, and VTOLs such as the Harrier ‘jump jet’…

        Shows how ‘near the edge’ it is flying…

  22. https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1407211503397183488

    @NASAJPL
    Another successful flight for Ingenuity! The
    #MarsHelicopter completed its 8th flight on Monday. It flew for 77.4 seconds and traveled 160 meters to a new landing spot about 133.5 meters from @NASAPersevere
    , capturing its own shadow in this image.

    There are now a total of 468 images taken by Ingenuity on the Perseverance raw server, including 32 colour. No colour images from flight 8 yet but these don’t usually come down straight away if it was used.

  23. Is everyone just going to ignore the growing evidence for covid-19 being born in a lab? Scientists are taking this pretty seriously. If this pandemic has man-made origins then there need to be severe consequences for whoever is responsible for the death of countless people.

    • Unlikely to the extreme. This was (is) the third SARS virus in 20 years. It is an animal virus that slowly has been acquiring a few mutations that made it possible to jump to humans. It was a matter of time. Neither will this be the last SARS virus, although it may turn out that immunity to this version works against the next incursions as well. This has happened before (flu, measles) and will happen again. The only real uncertainty is the intermediate carrier. We know it came from bats, but it infected us through another animal, possibly feline. SARS-2 had camels as intermediary.

      Did you know that governments make up these conspiracy theories to draw attention away from what they really are doing..?

    • I’m not going to go into this but it really is astonishing nature chose to launch this virus right next to the lab well known for studying its close relations.

      Maybe nature just doesn’t like us though.

  24. https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/308/flight-8-success-software-updates-and-next-steps/

    Flight 8 Success, Software Updates, and Next Steps

    The Ingenuity team is proud to say that last week we completed a flight software update of the Flight Controller microcontrollers on the helicopter, with the intent of permanently fixing the watchdog issue. This patch provides much needed reliability in the operations demonstration, ensuring that the heli and rover teams can plan for successful flights in the future. Following a 50 rpm slow-speed spin regression test on June 18, 2021, or Sol 116, Flight 8 confirmed that the FC flight software update was a success and that Ingenuity is ready to proceed with confidence into the next flights of the ops demo.

    Next Steps

    Up next for the Ingenuity team is to tackle the only remaining flight software update, which will update a large portion of the Ingenuity’s navigation-computer software. This update will address the Flight 6 anomaly, where image timing delays manifested into aircraft estimation and control challenges.

    During the course of analyzing the Flight 6 anomaly, the team determined that the process of capturing color RTE camera images may have been inducing the imaging pipeline glitch, which resulted in the instability encountered during Flight # 6.

  25. Spot the helicopter competition! Another drive for Perseverance brings Ingenuity back into view of the front navigation cameras.

    NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its onboard Left Navigation Camera (Navcam). The camera is located high on the rover’s mast and aids in driving.

    This image was acquired on Jun. 26, 2021 (Sol 124) at the local mean solar time of 14:31:06.

    All going well additional software updates to the navigation system are planned before flight 9 to fix the camera timing issue and high resolution colour imagery is planned for that flight. No word yet on whether it will be a scouting mission or whether they might just do a simpler flight perhaps taking loads of colour pics just to test the camera fix.

    If you can’t spot Ingenuity, this tweet points it out https://twitter.com/65dbNoise/status/1408772846445342720

  26. Not forgetting China…

    CCTV Video News Agency

    The China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Sunday released new photos and videos captured by China’s Mars probe Tianwen-1 during the country’s first landing and roving exploration on the red planet.

    • And it appears Ingenuity completed Flight 9 with landing sequence images from the navcam just starting to appear on the raw server!

      https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

      Mars Helicopter Sol 133: Navigation Camera

      NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired this image using its navigation camera. This camera is mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight.

      This image was acquired on Jul. 5, 2021 (Sol 133 of the Perseverance rover mission) at the local mean solar time of 12:35:46.

  27. And this is a “guesstimate” landing position based on the limited number of navcam images received so far and aligning with HiRise imagery. This would put Ingenuity more than 500 metres away from Perseverance and seems comms are still good.

    https://twitter.com/dejasu/status/1412108153752281091

    @dejasu
    This is the only likely image/map match I have found so far, but it is definitely a guesstimate, not a known entity! : )

    Since it went so far the scale is very large and you may need to open in a separate tab

    LZ8 near top right, possible LZ9 match near bottom left, both in blue

  28. M5.1 near the pitcairns today. Can’t quite work out if it’s a fracture zone or not, but it was 500 miles west of the easter island microplate/mess. Don’t usually get them there.

  29. Okay, I need to have a rant. Why is there no good numbers on total fatalities from historic volcanic winters?! You’d think that a dramatic explosion causing starvation and crises across the globe would get more attention but I have not found any good numbers anywhere! Let’s start with 1816, one of, if not the most well researched volcanic winter that happened pretty recently. What number do we have? More then 65,000. For a global famine, that’s not too bad, I have not seen anyone breakdown the approximate number of deaths for India or China but I am sure that doesn’t matter! It’s not like those places had deaths too. I don’t think this number is accurate but it’s something.
    What about Laki? We have some much better numbers but only because the famines were well researched and known before they were associated with a volcano! I dare you to try find some numbers on Samalas, 1108, Eldja, and Kuwae.
    The 536 event has no numbers at all, we just know it was bad, I am looking at other historical events and seeing numbers but for some strange reason when volcanoes are thrown into the mix, we get “People died” like that is actually clear on the magnitude of the event!

    • How do you propose to get those numbers? Remember that some people in the US are still arguing about the covid death toll! There are three measures, the number of death certificates mentioning covid (an underestimate), the number of people dying after a covid diagnosis (similar but not identical) and the excess death (which gives a higher number). People juts pick the one that fits their facebook persuasion or if none sound acceptable, attack the scientists. Now go back to a time when we hardly know how many people were alive and death certificates did not exist. The Tambora toll of 65,000 is the local population only, most perished in the eruption and others in the following months. No numbers exist elsewhere. In Europe, it would be hard to separate the toll from that of the devastation of the Napoleonic wars which ended at the same time that Tambora erupted. For Laki, the numbers come from the change in population of Iceland (we don’t actually know whether the lost people died or migrated) and excess death in the UK country side – where we don’t know how many died of sulphur poisoning and how many from the hot summer which may or may not be volcano related. The biggest death toll is often ascribed to Huaynaputina, by assuming that the number of people who died in the Russian famines (estimated from cemeteries around Moskou) should have that volcano on their death certificates. But the poor weather that caused the famine started before the volcano erupted. In archaeology, the default assumption is that events do not have a single cause. That is too simplistic in some cases (I think the Justinian plague singlehandedly caused the failure of the new Roman empire) but in this blog too we have argued that the biggest volcanic crises come when a volcano makes an already existing situation much worse.

      • I have looked at several other historic famines such as kanki famine and 1690s famines and seen some decent numbers, maybe my expectations are too high but it’s so frustrating having not much of a way to discern the magnitude of these events compared to others

  30. Also the nights before the Chicxulub Asteorid hit.. must have been creepy

    What woud the dinosaurs see?

    Woud it be some shooting stars shower that meant something was wrong ? I imagines shooting meteors .. raining down .. habringers of certain doom

  31. After the impact The Reentering Chicxlulub ejecta woud be an awsome sight!

    Many tens of thousands of km3 of rock melt droplets .. vaporized droplets sent on ballistic Reentry Trajectories.

    It woud also look like trillions of mini shooting stars 70 km up. So many that the skies becomes white hot. So hot that the clouds below evaporate. And forests on the ground bursts into flames. Skies perhaps glowed like a blast furnace, First one shooting Star .. then trillions fills the skies for a few hours after the impact.. making the skies white hot

    Most of the ejecta burns up high above
    But the atmosphere gets very very very very hot by this infalling ejecta from Chicxlulub
    Forest Fires on every continent..

    America was hit paticulary hard by this infalling high ejecta due to close proximity to Chixlulub

  32. Minutes after the Chixlulub impact …
    The sea began to sourge .. into the crater.. crashing over the Impact Melt sheet.. the Impact itself vaporized many tens of thousands of km3 of rock and generated ground zero plume temperatures as high 18 000 to perhaps
    25 000 C. The newly formed crater was thousands of degrees C .. left an impact melt sheet with a volume of 20 000 km3 around 6 km thick.

    Some spectacular steam explosions must have happened as the displaced ocean .. rushed back into the newborn crater. In drill cores There is lots of shattered impact melt, suggesting thats what happened. Some researchers even think ”Hypercanes” woud form over the very hot water in the newly formed Chixlulub impact structure.. must have been a boiling sea there for months.

    Long after the impact .. the melt rock sheet supplyed geothermal – hydrothermal features in Chixlulub perhaps even black smokers. Its thougth that the crater took quite a while to loose the heat. Big impacts on Mars as example coud form .. warm geothermal systems that last around a million years

  33. Enjoy the Perseid meteor showers

    Earths passing through Swift Tuttles dust trail
    That comet is one of the very largest of Earth crossing objects.. These shooting stars are the dust from the massive comet Swift Tuttle… as Earth move through its dust trails

    A collision woud be insanely bad
    We all be ruined If its put on Earth collision course in the far far future ..

  34. How can a screen print saved as a .pdf or .jpg file in a personal computer be inserted into a comment?

    • You need to put the image somewhere where it can be linked, and put the link in the comment. postimg.cc is used by some

      • Thanks for the information. I was hoping to avoid a third party site; but, if that is not possible, postimages.org (which is where Google directed my search) appears to be easy to use.

  35. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0EotGHchWVA good old video

    Galapagos is the 3 th most powerful hotspot in the world after Hawaii and Iceland ( perhaps as poweful as Iceland? )

    Galapagos polygenetic shields are unique on Earth! With their deep large calderas and complete lack of rift zones .. Galapagonian shields are almost competely made of ring fault eruptions. These eruptions are often short lived and explains the steep slopes of the Galapagos shields as well as their round shape.

    Seeing a Galapagoian giant ring – fault eruption can be an extraodinary sight.. often thousands of cubic a second at start! But they are short lived too lasting mostly days, longer lived events can form flank cones like 1998, 2009, and 2018

    ”Long lived Pahoehoe shield building” have not been seen historicaly in Galapagos, But pahoehoe is very common in Galapagos.

    Galapagos is very productive erupting perhaps as often as every 2 to 4 years ( 2 times in 2017 )
    ( 2 in 2018 ) and one in 2020 and many before that

      • Tortoises can move a bit faster than you think, can quite easily avoid the lava on flat ground. Steeper areas though not so much, but probably neither would any other animal.

        Maybe that is why the tortoises dont live near the active volcanoes as much,

      • I seen burnt out tortoise shells on many older Galapagos Aa flows

        The calcinifyed remains Only thing Thats left .. must been an awful death.. as reptiles dies much more slowly than mammals .. less need for oxygen

        But reptiles are also tough they can surivive months without water and food and its why they got to Galapagos in the first place

    • The 7.0 is a bit smaller than estimated elsewhere. There is about one such eruption per 300 to 500 years. Tephra from Rinjani has been found in the Greenland ice

  36. Massive gold hoard found by metal detectorist in Denmark, “on a scale from 1-10 then this find is 12” it is dated to about 1500 years ago. They are playing with the idea that it was buried as a sacrifice in response to the extreme weather events/volcanic eruption in 536.
    Lots of pretty pics of the gold https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/webfeature/guld

    • Well designed website, too. Thanks Bjarki.

      Around here a metal detector would find smashed aluminum beer cans… in 1500 years they’ll call it the Budweiser Horde.

      .

  37. I notice some (sorry for using the word) “supervolcano” interest has been doing the rounds. This Nature article may be of interest to folks here: “Resurgence initiation and subsolidus eruption of cold carapace of warm magma at Toba Caldera, Sumatra.”
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00260-1
    Happily, Open Access!

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