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

    • Fabulous! And Loihi grown into an absolute monster

      The summit caldera was result of a Laki Sized drainout ?

    • Well, looks like I made a bit of an elevation error on this map, but other than that it is still detailed…

    • Very nice for soure .. and inspires me to draw monster versions of Hawaii that does not exist on Earth.

      Next of your project coud be more like that .. or make… a Map of a future Laki like event in Iceland

      Very good maps

    • Your Big Island will be a spectacular place with ( 12 climate zones! )

    • Nice map indeed and will be so many climate zones there, and nice blue tropical ocean

  1. I got this one question (like I have always been asking), but what would the African Rift system (ARS) look like in 500,000 years?

    In my sort of opinion, the Afar region would become peninsular as the seas probably flooded the Danakil Depression and in the southern region (though that may happen in the next million years or so) and that explosive eruptions would branch into either the Albert rift or the East rift zone proper, who knows. The northern most of the explosive current activity would become more basaltic than ever.

    I have heard of talks of a flood basalt event where Nyiragongo is, but I have no idea if that is true. If that’s the case, well there’s that, but if not, a new Virunga volcano might pop up southwest of the active ones now. Volcanism will appear downrift of the areas with minor or no volcanism.

    That is my generalization of what might happen in 500,000 years with the ARS, but that is sort of my guess.

    • Don’t expect too much. The lack of active subduction in the Indian ocean means that the rift is not being pulled apart. So little spreading is expected

      • That is what I was thinking about, not too many major changes in half a million years, but a lot of minor changes could be possible. There isn’t a lot to expect from the tectonic/volcanism trend of things, yet a lot to expect from each individual volcano.

        It is kinda a paradox here, like we know what might happen to the rift itself but yet know so little of the other things in the rift itself.

    • The Danakil depression has flooded already apaprently, but there isnt a lot of data on it just that it has happened at least once. I would not be surprised if it floods proeprly for the last time in the next half million years but it could also be a lot longer too, needs a lot more study I think.

      I proposed the future LIP at Virunga. That is something that will take more than half a million years. If the Columbia River LIP is a typical example then these volcanoes live for millions of years and only a short time is in the LIP stage, CRB was active from 18 million years ago to 6 million years ago but most of the volume and big flows were 14-15 million years ago, just before the onset of VEI 8 calderas that leads up to Yellowstone. So if Virunga becomes a LIP it will be in at least a few million years from our point of view, but at a distant point it may appear that the current volcanism is the beginning of such. Or it might not do this at all, but I think there is a better chance here than anywhere else right now.

      I think there will also be a number of VEI 7s in the rift valley, maybe even a VEI 8 or two, and many other eruptions. Basically all of the existing calderas in the Ethiopian section fo rift are either undated or have a date of under half a million years, so seems they are not exactly uncommon on such a timespan.

      I also think it is not impossible that a Laki-type fissure volcano could form in Afar, a massive basaltic caldera with rift zones. Alayta and Dubbi have already got capability to erupt at Holuhraun scale, and have both done so in the last 200 years, Dubbi is actually the 3rd biggest single lava flow in historical time which is a little known fact by most.
      The massive rifting at Manda Hararo in the late 2000s also shows major rifting can happen. All is needed is a big volcano to feed those rifts 🙂

      • There is a flow of Manda Hararo that is really impressive. It is the youngest voluminous flow in that volcano. The eruption was somewhat large, but most remarkable is its intensity, sheet pahoehoe travelled several kilometres from the fissure system on both sides without turning to aa. A second wave of pahoehoe moved over the first one and has a very well defined front. Lava was channelized into a graben and forms a major lava channel that is one the widest in the world. But only once has Manda Hararo done this in recent times, no other flow like it can be seen, and it is nowhere near Laki size, it is probably not even Holuhraun size. Mostly Manda Hararo does few stuff.

        Alayta produces impressive eruptions, some of them with high fountains, which are probably gorgeous to the eye. A typical Alayta eruption might be something like 0.2 km3, going from memory, I once mapped this volcano very thoroughly in Google Earth. But that’s it, Alayta doesn’t do larger than that. The fountains are high but insignificant compared to what Sierra Negra or Grimsvotn could do on a good day. So a powerful basaltic volcano but not particularly remarkable.

        The most remarkable volcano in Afar is certainly Dubbi. Its eruptions often reach Holuhraun size, and without collapsing, it can also do powerful trachytic plinian eruptions. It is one of the most productive, if not the most productive, volcano in Afar. And it regularly outperforms all of its neighbours in the scale of its eruptions. It should not be surprising though. It is part of the northward migrating Nabro chain, Dubbi’s predecessors, Nabro and Mallahle, are the largest calderas in Afar. But other than Dubbi I’d day Afar is overrated. Its silicic calderas are small, you have bigger silicic calderas to the south along the Main Ethiopian Rift. It’s volcanoes are not overly productive or voluminous, Virunga is far more productive, and Afar volcanoes are actually tiny. Its basaltic systems are not too powerful, other than Dubbi you don’t have volcanoes as capable of doing large eruptions similar to those in Galapagos or Hawaii, and even less so capable of a Laki-event.

        The area does have nice monogenetic shield volcanoes, but only a few of them in Afar, other neighbouring volcanic areas are much more remarkable for this style of volcanism. The young floor of the Red Sea is almost everywhere covered in overlapping pancake structures, which are the underwater equivalent of shield volcanoes on land. So the volcanism in the Red Sea is remarkably vigorous compared to most Mid Ocean Ridges. Other than the Red Sea, such large concentrations of monogenetic shield volcanoes along a Mid Ocean Ridge are only seen in Iceland, and possibly the St Paul Rise. A lot of shields also occur in Arabia, the two youngest shield volcanoes in Harrat Khaybar are some of the best preserved in the world, and a possibly historical shield lies in Harrat Ash Shaam.

        • St. Paul rise? You mean the St. Paul’s Rocks offshore of Brazil or something else?

          • I was referring to the island in the Indian Ocean, Île Saint-Paul. It is part of an important oceanic plateau along the Indian Ridge. Amsterdam Island and Boomerang Seamount are also part of this plateau. My own estimates put the eruption rates in the Amsterdam-St.Paul Rise at 0.01 km3/year above a normal mid-ocean ridge, this makes 1 km3 every century, which is a lot. It is probably one of the most intense locations of volcanism in the world, being only 100-200 km across, but because activity happens mostly underwater it goes largely unnoticed.

          • Huh. I did not really know about that. I assume they are storing that magma for a long time until it is time for them to blow and produce massive lava flows or, if in water, produce explosive eruptions.

        • Although looking at it in Google Maps it is very obvious that Dubbi is not a productive volcano. Most of its cones are weathered, its activity has probably increased very recently due to the birth of a central volcano in the middle of the volcanic field, but before that it may not have been that much. Alayta and Alu-Dallafilla have the largest amounts of young lava, and they are probably the most productive in the Afar Region right now.

          • That is quite interesting. There is however, a larger, albeit probably less productive volcano east of the Nabro-Dubbi chain, which is the Assab volcanic field. It looks like it covers a big area but is just simply a series of monogenetic cones that cover a massive area.

          • Assab looks like a series nearby, similarly oriented dike swarms, possibly radial to Nabro and Mallahle. It seems though that its activity has faded recently, lava flows of Assab are ubiquitously eroded by streams of water. Activity in this area has probably shifted to Dubbi volcano and its surrounding Edd volcanic field.

          • There are two volcanoes in the East African Rift that I find very interesting and that are also massive like Assab. In Kenya, there is Marsabit and Nyambeni Hills.

            Marsabit itself is an old volcano that has faded, but to the northeast of it a new volcanic field has recently emerged. Eruptions from this volcanic field are voluminous and long-lived. A typical Marsabit eruption covers something like 400 km2 in lava which depending upon thickness could be something like 4-8 km3. So it is a volcano that erupts very rarely, but when it does its huge, slow, long-lived. The NE of Marsabit volcano will probably turn into a massive shield like Marsabit and Huri Hills. The composition is primitive but varies in alkalinity from basanites to alkali basalts and some samples are straddling the boundary with foidites, I checked in EarthChem.

            Nyambeni Hills is an old volcano but remains active. Its youngest lava flow is 54 km long, and covers 98 km2. It may have a volume somewhere 1-2 km3. it was erupted rapidly as a single sheet. The composition of Nyambeni Hills has set alkalinity but variable evolution, covers the entire spectrum between slighly evolved basanites to phonolites. I think it could be related to the massive phonolitic stratovolcanoes like Mount Kenya or Mount Kilimanjaro.

          • Chyulu Hills is also a curious volcano. Eruptions are not as big as Marsabit or Nyambeni but they are far more frequent. It might very well be the most productive volcano in Kenya-Tanzania. It erupts basanites, and alkali and transitional basalts.

          • When you look at the volcanoes it is clear that Chuyulu Hills has erupted numerous times since the last eruptions of Marsabit and Nyambeni. Last Chyulu Hills eruption was in 1855. There is also a dated eruption in 1470, and there might be other young undated eruptions. So it is not unlikely it may erupt twice or multiple times per milennia.

            Last Marsabit eruption I would guess was at least a few thousand years ago judging from the state of weathering, but of course one Marsabit eruption counts for several Chuyulu Hills eruptions in volume, and with a few Marsabit eruptions you already have a volume as big as a small polygenetic volcano. The “inactive” shields of Marsabit and Huri Hills might be younger than nearby 2.4 Ma old Kulal volcano, which is far more eroded than any Huri or Marsabit lavas. So Marsabit and Huri have grown to enormous scale in ~2 million years, to a clearly bigger size than the axial volcanoes that might be similarly old, and this shows that the unfrequent large eruptions add up to substantial volume per time.

          • https://ibb.co/ZL28yqQ

            Found this image (don’t quite remember where it is from, maybe a paywalled paper) but shows the evolution of a shield volcano (supposedly) but it looks like, where Marsabit and the others may not further evolve unless if there is some stage we don’t know of.

          • Marsabit is at the end of its evolution presumably (it is probably going inactive), the new field to the NE of Marsabit will probably grow into something like Marsabit. I got curious and wanted to estimate the volume of Marsabit, got some topographic contours and measured areas at 100 m intervals. Looks like Marsabit has a volume of 1800 km3, making it likely into one of the largest continental volcanoes in the world. Huri Hills, right next to Marsabit, is nearly identical to it so should be the same size. Together they make 3600 km3. I think at most the volcanoes may have started growing at 2.5 Ma, but could also be younger. So it is not bad at all.

          • Their dormancies are probably on the order of thousands of years though. So the NE of Marsabit field is an unlikely volcano to erupt in our brief human lifetimes.

        • Dubbi is Heklas twin, just in the worlds hottest desert not a place named for how much ice is there 🙂 They even look basically the same…

          The last eruption at Dubbi was actually a lot bigger than Holuhraun. It began with a plinian phase in May 1861, GVP gives it a VEI 3 rating but this is a known massive underestimate as no volume measurements were given for the ash, the descriptions suggest a VEI 4-5 event. The second stage was a lava flow of 1 km3 or more, erupted from the fissure. Then there was a second silicic eruption that was followed by another lava flow as big as the first. My guess is these second and youngest flows are from September of 1861, but there isnt much information, even the best sources still guess…

          3.5 km3 of lava, erupted in a couple months. And maybe 1 km3 of trachytic tephra. The basalts are all slightly evolved but still very fluid with pahoehoe on the mountain, there was probably a massive curtain of fire, possibly twice 🙂 Not a Laki in volume but the intensity was probably very comparable, maybe even more so.

          https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233720542_Largest_known_historical_eruption_in_Africa_Dubbi_volcano_Eritrea_1861

    • You have to be careful with language as an indicator of migration. Neighbouring languages tend to influence each other regardless of actual mixing of populations. For instance, the fact that England uses the word ‘apartheid’ does not mean that the Dutch took it here. Place names can be a better indicator but do not appear as convincing here. For instance, Hekla was named that before it first erupted after the settlement era, so the origin claimed here seems less plausible. There was a significant Irish influx into Iceland, but there were also strong connections between Ireland and Norway (while England was much more connected to Denmark). I would view this with some caution.

  2. It looks like there is going to be some future Aerosol geoengineering to combat ACC, I hope whoever is running these operations knows to start small. The hazardous environmental and unpredictable weather effects make solar dimming an inconducive strategy for dealing with ACC. In my personal opinion, scientists should start with dropping solar irradiance by 3 watts/m2 at the most. The goal shouldn’t be a quick and easy fix, sustainable energy should remain the main focus
    https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/dimming-the-sun-to-cool-the-planet-is-a-desperate-idea-yet-were-inching-toward-it

  3. It’s been a couple of years, hi everyone 👋 Just wondering if there’s a greater probability of earthquakes (of any magnitude) in California with all this rain? Question not in anyway inspired by watching James Bond over Xmas… although I do recall once seeing a documentary once that spoke about this but not sure how good the science was in that.

    I’m making Old Fashioned’s later if anyone wants one?

    • Welcome back! Hope you are not flooded yourself. I strongly doubt that the rain will trigger earthquakes. There was a claim that the Haiti earthquake was related to a flooding 18 months earlier. But it is not clear how that could be related. Injecting water into a deep fault will increase the risk of a quake, because it reduces friction on the fault by lubrication. But rain doesn’t do that: it stays at or near the surface. If it is the extra weight of water, that is rather minor. Even a meter of rain only has the same effect as 50cm of sand. If that made a difference, how about the weight of a city like San Fransisco? The city is heavy enough that it measurably deforms the ground. But how about the other way? There was a claim that strong earthquakes in Tibet are more often followed by rain. The suggestion was made that geothermal heat from the quake induces rain. It seems more likely that if the re is a relation, it would be caused by dust thrown up by the shaking, acting as condensation seeds for rain. The Tibet earthquake rain was said to be mostly light rain. In summary, I think it is best in California to take the environmental catastrophes one at a time. They are independent from each other.

  4. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sPYyMOn19K8

    Is is a video of the 2028 Ambrym eruption. Although it is nothing special, the sound gives you a feeling of the raw power of the eruption.
    *do not get close to an erupting volcano, especially if it could produce ash plumes. The guy was probably very lucky, though.

  5. I got a question: what are the conditions (hypothetically) for komatiites to form today? We did discuss about it in another post, so i think we could discuss it again. I know that the latest true komatiites are around 90 million years ago (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317382845_The_hottest_lavas_of_the_Phanerozoic_and_the_survival_of_deep_Archean_reservoirs), although the latest of the komatiites erupted around 85 million years ago (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235828117_Geochemical_Study_of_Ultramafic_Volcanic_and_Plutonic_Rocks_from_Gorgona_Island_Colombia_the_Plumbing_System_of_an_Oceanic_Plateau).

    What I find interesting is that the Tortugal komatiites is actually found in an ophilite (I.e. oceanic crust exposed on land), maybe suggesting that this formed in a more oceanic setting whereas the Gorgona komatiites are possibly sub-oceanic (as there are tuff, although it is hard to say whether the komatiites erupted on land or not) and both formed during the time that the Caribbean igneous province formed (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325570779_From_incipient_island_arc_to_doubly-vergent_orogen_A_review_of_geodynamic_models_and_sedimentary_basin-fills_of_southern_Central_America)(although it is a debate of where it formed).

    What I have found out is that they could only occur in oceanic or near-oceanic settings (powerful mantle plume under oceanic plates, maybe during oceanic flood basalt episodes), so either that they are subducted or not fully analyzed (like not taking a closer look at some of the oceanic LIP’s).

    • Hawaii is hot enough to do it, but there has still never been true komatiite erupted, although picrite basalt has the same total composition. The percentage of magnesium in the total composition of the primitive melt is not high enough to be ultramafic, so a lava in Hawaii can erupt at 1600 C but it will still be basalt.
      I guess maybe the great mass of the islands actually prevents the mantle completely melting which is what creates komatiite, so it is possible komatiite eruptions on land have always been extremely rare. Maybe an island that is formed as part of an oceanic LIP could do it but that is about it. And most oceanic LIPs are probably not real flood basalts but more like Iceland, making an oceanic plateau where a ridge is particularly active or intersects a plume.

      Along the east pacific rise or Lau basin between Tonga and Fiji where spreading is very fast, those are possible locations, maybe more likely but very difficult to observe for obvious reasons 🙂

    • And really cool timelapse of lava moving across the present-day lava lake of Kilauea:

  6. Could I ask about something. I got quite curious into hotspots lately and I was wondering about it – what would happen if a powerful hotspot (I.e. powerful as Hawaii) transitioned from an oceanic crust environment to a continental crust setting?

    There has been instances in the case of Australia (and perhaps maybe New Zealand… twice), maybe a few more, but is is all speculation. I could imagine that it would transition from oceanic island building to creating massive volcanoes on land with more varied volcanic products than if it were in an oceanic environment, because of a thicker crust. I could be wrong, but that is what I think may happen…

    • Monster Flood basalt woud that result in, I wants to place it under Scandinavia and the whole shield starts to boulge.. and rise a kilometer up

      Then later all hell breaks loose and you gets Siberian Traps 2.0

    • Place it under Baltic Sea and Jesperian scale stuff woud happen, marsian, venusian hell eruptions, Scandinavian Craton is very thick,
      But Hawaii plume Maybe able to hurt it.. being extremely powerful, our litosphere is only 3 times deeper than at Hawaiis location.

      It woud build truely enormous chambers and make Mega intrusions

    • And not forgetting Mars 🙂

      https://deepspace.social/@kevinmgill/109825259028360431

      Kevin M. Gill @kevinmgill

      Here’s a picture of the Sun today that I took in hydrogen alpha. Compare that to a picture taken by NASA’s Perseverance Rover a few hours ago with its Mastcam-Z. Sunspots 3216 (far-left) and 3214 (left) are visible on both. Even relative sizes check out.

      NASA Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Kevin M. Gill

      #Mars #Sun #Astronomy #Space #Science

    • We can’t predict the cycles yet. What you see are extrapolations without understanding. It was clear already autumn ’21 that the forecast wasn’t doing well and I think this surprised no one. Note that you should not extrapolate the current spike either. Burt perhaps the science deniers who tok comfort in a weak sun will now take global heating seriously? Or will they now deny their own past?

      • Yes I know we are not very good at predicting but that doesn’t mean people don’t try and that “predicted” red line is direct from NOAA website. I’m guessing we’re just heading towards another double peaked cycle but we are already pretty much at peak sunspot count and have exceeded peak 10.7cm flux years earlier compared to previous cycle. And I also know we’ve been ahead of “predicted” cycles for a while but the latest monthly update including January I linked above makes it even more obvious. I note though daily values have dropped back a bit in February although 10.7cm was back above 180 yesterday.

        Anyway I hope you are not getting at me about not taking warming seriously. I’ve certainly posted predictions for this cycle from multiple sources before but my worry (as stated then) has been that weak solar cycles *may* correspond with higher probability of temporary anomalous cold winter weather in areas such as Europe and North America – not that the planet overall stops warming, A repeat of the winter of 1963 in the UK for example would be seriously damaging for public support to tackle the issue so I don’t want it to happen but I pay attention to things I don’t want to happen!

        Of course the planet has warmed since 1963 but that doesn’t stop the GFS and ECMWF occasionally coming up with ensemble members that want to try and recreate 63 – the planet hasn’t warmed enough to make it impossible.

        • No, I wasn’t thinking of you! I was thinking of the people who claimed that global warming was just the sun being more active between 1980 and 2000 and who never commented when the warming accelerated after 2000 during the fainter cycles. Science tests its predictions. Pseudoscience avoids testing predictions.

  7. If anyone is is curious on the Suns density by depth this is a very very good depth graph. As Chad say.. most of the sun is rather low in density, you needs to go well into the deeper radiation zone for the solar medium to get as dense as water on Earth. Still the suns interior is not where any person wants to be, much more bad than Jupiters interior

    More massive stars have an even lower avarge density than the sun because they are so bloated up by their fusion. The ginormous R136a1 have only an overall density of 1% of our sun because its so bloated up by its fusion.
    And Red Hypergiants like Stephenson 2 – 18 are basicaly red hot vaccums …
    But the cores of Mega stars are denser than the Suns core.

    The densest stars by overall density Is the smallest Ultracool Red Dwarfs that are 80 Jupiter masses in a volume as small as Saturn. They can have densities much much higher than Osimum.

    What woud happen If a 1 meter cube solid as hot and dense as the suns core coud be keept stable on Earth without vaporising? Woud it sink into Earths center by vaporizing through the mantle ?

    • Vy Canis Majoris and Stephenson 2 – 18 are so insanely low in avarge density that Red Hypergiants really dont impress me, red hot vaccums, you can fly a space – ship through its outer envelope without my problems density wise

      • much problems density wise for correction

        Now try to enter the 2600 C photosphere of an Ultracool red dwarf .. and you are very quickly burned up by reentry and ultra high gas density ..

  8. After the Kilauea conversation earlier, I’ve been in deep thought, and I think I’ve realized something yet again that I didn’t know about Kilauea when I thought I already knew everything. I think this will interest Chad. What if we’ve been looking at the deep rift wrong? What if it is not one of those damn mushes, but actually more like a melt rich magma chamber, but instead of horizontal, vertical, with a cubic kilometer or so of magma flowing into it every decade (varying upon supply)? What if the pit craters do not form due to magma chambers collapsing but due to the deep rift collapsing during deep draining events, with particular spots at the roof of the deep rift which have been cut by dikes just falling into the deep rift as it drains? What if the DI events happen because of platforms of rock which have been separated by sills at the summit sliding into the deep rift and growing a horizontal shallow chamber? And what if the connector’s seismicity is not really due to conduits, but is actually the top of the deep rift acting like a wedge and splitting rock apart, making earthquakes?

    • I had an idea a bit like this, that there is a massive magma system under the rifts of Kilauea and at least the upper part of Mauna Loa. At least down to Heiheiahulu, all the areas that sustained eruptions have happened.

      For an eruption to be sustained it needs an open flow of magma through the volcano. This is easy at the summit and happens at many volcanoes but Kilauea is the only place right now that has done this at a flank vent, where Pu’u O’o was still erupting from only the base supply rate after 2007.

      This idea does also explain some things about 2018. The initial inyrusion began from some older magma storage, probably the same place that erupted in 1955. But to me there is no way that would explain the scale the eruption got to later. It also covers why the south flank moved, being pushed from the side, and then allowing a huge magma volume to drain. In 1975 this happened too, but there was no existing magma transport east of Napau at that time, 75 opened the rift down to above Kalapana, which js indeed where the next eruption happened though 2 years later. This huge volume of magma also just happens to be where Pu’u O’o would later form. The post 2018 south flank quakes now to to Kehena, the ERZ is open further down than before. But that probably also means it will take longer to refill than 1975, that took 8 years so perhaps in excess of 10, and that might only happen when the caldera is filled more too.

      I guess though, the ERZ has contracted for a while and now shows no movement, starting in 2021 with that years eruption. So maybe the ERZ is full, and just waiting for the summit to catch up.

      • The magma system of Kilauea extends from the Kamakaia Hills to Puu Honualua. The 1955 and 1960 eruptions did start from under Puu Honualua/Puna Geothermal Venture, first earthquakes were felt there (the location where the dike initiated growth). So the connection was present back then all the way down. 1955 had two stages, the first stage started from Puu Honualua and rifted down to Kapoho, the second stage started as the first was ending, with a burst of earthquakes near the present-day location of Pu’u’o’o and then extending to Highway 130 (a lot like 2018). But if we picture the deep rift as a dike-like magma chamber, then its width is likely to affect eruption and intrusion processes. If the deep rift is 1 meter wide, it will be harder for magma to travel than if it is 10 meters wide.

        The earthquakes in 2018 moved the flank southward by 2 or 3 meters from Halape to Kalapana. 1975 was probably similar but perhaps with more displacement, and also reaching westward to the Kamakaia Hills and northward a little into Mauna Loa’s flank. A M 6.7 in 1908, and a M 6.4 in 1954 also had similar epicenters, so probably moved the Kalapana section too. And the 1868 earthquake of Mauna Loa, also extended to Kalapana and beyond, with the displacement near Kapoho being larger in 1868 than in 1975 (larger subsidence reported in Pohoiki). All of these earthquakes are likely to have opened up space for the deep rift to widen along the East Rift Zone. Some of them do, in fact, have clear responses in the volcano activity. The 1908 earthquake may have led to the series of East Rift Zone intrusions of 1915, 1916, 1922, 1923 and 1924. The 1954 event was the clear trigger of 1955, given that earthquakes in the LERZ started just after the earthquake and built up to the eventual intrusion and eruption. While 1975 quake likely encouraged flow of magma into the Middle East Rift Zone, with inflation at Heiheiahulu in 1977, and later inflation and episodic intrusions in the present-day Pu’u’o’o area in 1978-1980, while the Southwest Rift Zone activity in 1981 and 1982 may have also been related to the earthquake given the rupture did extend into that area. It remains to be seen if magma transport will also improve in the aftermath of 2018.

        • I guess based on precedents then 2018 should have a significant affect. But then there is the argument that the 2018 eruption itself was that affect, so there might not actually be any space for intrusions, all of the collapse was up at the top. Although even with bulk to DRE the caldera is a bit too small so some drain didnt collapse or was deeper sourced.

          The likely limit is probably still the pressure in the summit. I thought the lake was going to drain soon but if the eruption in January had to create a new dike after only a month then there might not be any cinduit. So far vents have only opened in Halemaumau but if a vent opens at higher elevation the lake could rise much nore. But this depends on how lava returns next.

    • There also hase been a persistebt cluster of quakes next to Hilina pali, south of Mauna Ulu, and just now there was a bigger quake. Bigger is still small in context but larger than most of the other really tiny quakes.

      I guess, like I have hypothesized for a while now, there could be another shield eruption on the ERZ before the summit goes for a real caldera collapse. Based on trend and topography I expect east of Pu’u O’o, but it could be anywhere on that line. Another shoeld up in the UERZ would be unlikely with the summit open but there actually doesnt seem to be a true conduit in Halemaumau like I thought before, so anything is possible. Will have to see how the eruption resumes, quietly would indicate an open path but a seismic start would mean there probably isnt any permanent path and an eruption somewhere else is much more possible a lot sooner.

  9. Comet incoming C/2023 A3

    https://astrodon.social/@giddgvb/109946776151517156

    Gideon van Buitenen @giddgvb@astrodon.social

    Very promising and likely naked-eye #comet confirmed:
    C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)

    It is on a retrograde orbit and will reach perihelion on Sep. 28 of 2024 at 0.39 AU from the sun. It’s likely large enough to survive this passage.

    After that it passes between earth and the sun, reaching an elongation of 3° on Oct.10. Three days later closest approach to earth will occur, and on Oct. 14 earth will pass through the orbital plane of the comet.

    See MPEC 2024-D77 and http://astro.vanbuitenen.nl/comet/2023A3

  10. https://www.deviantart.com/justv23/art/Jupiter-impact-plume-941423906

    https://www.deviantart.com/justv23/art/Shoemaker-levy-9-impact-939540198

    https://www.deviantart.com/justv23/art/Jupiter-impact-first-miliseconds-939938917

    https://www.deviantart.com/justv23/art/Jupiter-impact-atmospheric-entry-939939575

    Some amazingly beautyful art of the 1994 Jupiter Shoemaker Levy 9 Impacts, Jupiter have the most intense avarge impact events in the solar system, beacuse of speed of reentry in Jupiters high gravity well. Each of the Levy 9 fragments exploded in fireballs equal of 600 times the entire worlds weapon arsenal, sending 23 000 C plumes of plasma 3000 km above Jupiters atmosphere, and these where quite small fragments with density of heavy compacted snow. The 2009 Jupiter impactor was only 200 m wide and left a firecloud the size of the pacific ocean.
    So Jovian Impact events are extraodinary powerful with that gravity well,even small fragements makes huge mayhem.

    I can just imagine how powerful an impact event must be on a heavy brown dwarf with much higher acceleration than even Jupiter

    • Hopes we gets to see more impact events on Jupiter soon, so fascinating stuff,

    • https://www.deviantart.com/justv23/art/Jupiter-jet-878274781

      Another fabulus one from the same artist, Jovian thunderstorm sprites in early morning, or late evening with gigantic water rich thunderstorms pushing through the ammonia ice cloud layers.

      https://www.deviantart.com/justv23/art/Jupiter-871433238 And afternoon in the upper jovian cloud layers from same digital artist, looking towards a convective water cumulus belt pushing up through the ammonia cirrus. Ever since a small child I have wanted to roam the clouds of Jupiter, in a huge hot pure hydrogen zeppelin. Wondes what it woud look like, hydrogen scatters blue light so Jupiters upper atmosphere will be blue from the inside, the jovian clouds maybe familiar in apparence to earth clouds, alot of Jupiters clouds seems tó resemeble altostratus sheets, with isolated cumulus pushing up from below, looking at Juno photos, cloud holes appears blue because of raylengt scattering

  11. Might be of interest to Hector

    Very deep and quite strong quakes under Kilaueas summit. 3.1 and 3.2

    • Mantle Fault Zone earthquakes. I don’t think they have much significance for Kilauea’s activity, though; it is probably some small sections of the Mantle Fault Zone rupturing. I don’t understand exactly what this fault is or how it relates to volcanic activity, but the occasional M 3-4 earthquakes are probably episodic strain releases. If there was a flurry of many smaller earthquakes building up in frequency and intensity, that would be more significant for volcanic processes.

  12. I noticed that following the big DI event at Kilauea the tilt went up but has now stopped. However, the summit GPS is still going up, both the cross caldera distance as well as all axis of movement at CRIM and UWEV have reversed. I think the big DI is just a D, the connection to Halemaumau from the main deep chamber has closed off again.

    So the inflation now is from the big chamber, not Halemaumau specifically. The next eruption might be put off for a couple more weeks even months, but its onset is going to be much more powerful than we saw in January. With how thick the crust is there might be some serious fountaining this time around. Or a fissure opens at another location in the caldera, or even the upper rifts, there is eastward movement from AHUP which might suggest inflation along the SWRZ connector although not the ERZ connector interestingly.

    • The deformation across the caldera seems mostly horizontal/extensional right now, rather than vertical/inflational. I think magma is probably building up in the upper part of the deep rift. The deep rift near the summit is probably not vertical, like under the Middle East Rift Zone, but more like a magma slump. The top of the deep rift, I think, is probably the SWRZ connector and continues under the southern side of the caldera, where there is too much magma for it to be seismic. The bottom must be where decollement earthquakes start, which is under Kulanaokuaiki Pali. There must be a ~6 km horizontal offset between the top and the bottom, so that the angle of the deep rift slope would be almost 45º from vertical. So if magma builds in the upper part of the deep rift under the summit, it opens the summit in a trapdoor-like manner, while uplifting and tilting the Koae area seaward.

      When earthquakes in the caldera and upper SWRZ connector area reach an intensity similar to the one they reached before the last eruption, it will mean a new event is likely. I failed to recognize those earthquakes as a precursor last time, while you did warn about them. But the new “deep rift is a magma chamber” paradigm I’m taking up does support the idea that earthquakes in the SWRZ-caldera area mean pressure build-up in that part of the deep rift and likelihood of a fissure eruption, with not any involvement of the ERZ.

      Magma rarely seems to accumulate in the lower portion of the deep rift under the summit. Decollement earthquakes are very rare under Kulanaokuaiki Pali. The 1975 earthquake made a lot of aftershocks in that area. However, they seem to have been mostly absent during the rest of the time. Instead, decollement earthquake activity happens frequently in front of the East Rift, from Pauahi Crater to Kalalua Cone. I wonder if the part under Kulanaokuaiki Pali and in front of the summit/SWRZ has been clogged by masses of rock collapsing from the growing shallow magma chamber under the caldera.

      • Seems like in this scenario then that the eruptions on the ‘seismic SWRZ’ are potentially direct deep rift eruptions, at least those of 1974, and probably Pu’u Koae and Cone Crater which were high fountaining eruptions rather unlike those historically on that rift. Kamakaia as you said is probably interacting with a pocket of stored magma, being similar to fissure 17, although most of the lava at Kamakaia is shiny pahoehoe so the eruptions probably flushed this out eventually.

        I wonder if maybe Kilauea Iki lies on the other end of this structure, skirting the south edge of the caldera going under Keanakako’i and to Iki and the Aila’au vent. 1959 was a mix of magma, but included some extremely hot and primitive stuff as I have mentioned many times before. 1974 also had very mafic magma, although the eruptions at Keanakako’i were stored somewhat.

        it is almost like there are kind of two centers of activity at least for smaller scale stuff. The caldera has very hot lava probably over 1200 C at first (the lake now is almost certainly rather less though), and so does the trend mentioned above. But similarly hot lava erupted in 1968 at Hi’iaka, and at Makaopuhi in 1965, and the lava from Pu’u O’o was quite hot later on too around 1170 C. So it is almost like the deep rift structure rises up a bit more in these areas. But then it is also very clear that magma does move in other ways through the rift, like in shallow dikes or as sills, 2018 showed a perfect connection between Halemaumau and the LERZ even though what I describe above might appear to suggest otherwise.

        Also, the tilt has gone up again, it is about level with the point the initial DI (or whatever it is) began at. There are still shorter DI events so it might take an overshoot to break out but this will probably happen soon 🙂

        • I think the connection from the summit to the East Rift might be through the deep rift itself If the deep rift contains melt with less than 40 vol% crystals then the melt will be fluid and mobile, allowing a good connection between the summit and the rift. I think it is probably stratified, with picrites and growing solid cumulates in the lower part, and crystal poor basalt melts in the upper part. Rock collapse and solidification probably try to destroy the deep rift while magma spreading tries to grow it back.

  13. Some amazingly realistic CGI impressions of the Galileo Atmospheric Probe when it deployed its parachutes at jovian tropopause and heat shield falls off, we will never know what it saw, but these impressions are probaly quite accurate, we know it fell into a dry mostly cloud free downdraft ”hotspot” as the nephelometer instrument found mostly sunny conditions. Very cold in the scene – 160 C But warms up on the way down

    Even in a gas giant, there woud be a horizon and Jupiter woud cast its own shadow on its blue atmosphere just like Earth do at evening.
    Kind of unsettling that there is just a bottomless pit below it.

    The sky color woud change too as the doomed probe sinks deeper going from dark blue to light blue to perhaps even red it was crushed at 22 Bars and 150 C, the discarded carbon phenolic Heat Shield woud be the last stuff to vaporize in the jovian depths capable of enduring 4000 C it coud have survived perhaps to 2000 km below the clouds. After around 6 to 10 hours the whole probe woud have been vaporized in the depths becomming a part of Jupiters gas composition

    The parachute woud melt first, and later the aluminium probe housing becomming a rain of molten metals into Jupiters interior

    • A human woud turn to carbon .. and later to liquid carbon and later vaporization If you fell into Jupiter becomming a part of Jupiters composition, even your bones woud vaporize in the hot depths

      But 20 km below the 5 Bars level there is room temperatures and perhaps rain falling into the darkness

      Not that difftent of falling into the sun, in both cases you gets atom – mized

    • Woud be fun also to inject 1,1 Jupiter extra masses of pure oxygen into Jupiter. Just one ligthing bolt and it turns into a water giant of combustion, the whole mess woud perhaps turn into a hot ocean of super – Ionic water I wonder what that process woud looo like .. ( Jupiter shining of combustion)

    • I wonder what it woud look like to mix 1,1 Jupiter masses of pure oxygen into it .. just one electricial bolt and you combust the planet ( But the compressed liquids further down wont burn )

      • Wouldnt need any electricity just the ajr temperature alone would be enough, the activation energy is quite high (500 C) but it isnt hard to heat up a gas made of 2 protons to that temperature… also, depending on the depth there would still be a powerful reaction, H2O doesnt thermally decompose until it is around 3000 C, which is about the flame temperature of H2 O2 reactions. So anywhere on Jupiter that is less than this, which is probably most or all if the bit that is actually a gas, would react.

        I dont think that matters though because you are smashing together two planets of that size it will liberate vastly more energy, objects moving at orbital velocities have more energy density potential than any chemical reaction. Of course that is only applicable if they hit something… Factor the mass and powerful gravity and this number only gets much larger still.

        Also the O2 planet would be much smaller. Jupiter average density overall is about the same as LOX, a bit higher than water. But Jupiter is compressed and normally H2 is around 16x less dense than O2 (also that much smaller in atomic number, probably not coincidence). A 1 J mass O2 planet would compress too and probably be 1/16 the volume of Jupiter. That turns out to be about 50% bigger volume than Neptune (23 Neptunes fit in Jupiter) so it would be a very compact and dense object. The collision would probably tear the H2 planet apart and then it would engulf the O2 planet, ending with a glowing hot ball of H2O.

      • Yes Althrough I meant only say pumping in O2 at
        un – godly rates rather than smashing an Jupiter sized oxygen giant into Jupiter ( I dont want To ruin IO 🙂

        But yes result is very much the same minus the collision

        Woud be fun to delete Europa and Ganymede and place Neptune and Uranus there instead .. To further increase IO s tidal heating .. but Maybe IO woud be torn apart completely

    • the halos around the sun are definitely different from terrrestrial halos, are those modeled on Hydrogen(?) Methane(?) Ice?

      • CO2 ice, I would guess. There is no methane or hydrogen in the atmosphere. Water ice should act the same as on earth. There are a lot fo cloud types on Mars, mostly water ice. CO2 clouds over low-latitude regions occur at 60-100 km altitude, and over the poles at 10-15 km (winter only).

      • Thats halos of ammonia Ice.. a common sight in Jupiters upper atmosphere

      • Albert its Jupiter so its ammonia Ice

        Water Ice halos coud exist too in Jupiter in tall Cumulunimbus anvils rising towards the tropospause, But most halos will be ammonia Ice

        I have always wondered What the inside of Jupiter woud be like for the human eye

        Jupiter have also cirrostratus and jet stream cirrus in its upper atmosphere and even mackerel clouds. A jovian Mackerel sky sunset woud be an amazing sight

  14. Amazing how violent Jovian Atmospheric Entries are 60 km a second .. The 2009 Jupiter impactor was only 200 m wide ( less wide than the Titanic is long ) and left a firecloud the size of the pacific ocean…
    So Jovian Impact events are extraodinary powerful with that gravity well, even small fragements makes huge mayhem.

    That means that if a 100 m wide small Comet came into Earths atmosphere at 60 a second or more it coud destroy a whole country .. scary

    • Comets can hit Earth at 60 km or more a second being faster than asteorids, even a small Comet the size of a small crusie ship woud cause huge damage ….

  15. 5 Aleutian volcanoes facing unrest, A potential major swarm starting at plugged volcano, a dramatic eruption building in Iceland (Grimsvotn or Katla), and this blog is quieter than a mouse.

    • Does the same signal show in two different stations? Because that is the way of knowing if something is of volcanic/tectonic origin or just local noise.

      But it does look like a swarm of minor quakes. The gradual build-up shows it’s probably volcanic.

        • Tanaga and Takawangha are at orange now. very impressive swarm but chiles-cerro negro is at it again. 2000 earthquakes yesterday and the rate hasn’t changed. I am worried that the plug is being strained Excited about the portents of this year!

          • You may want to put this in the main comment section rather than the bar! It is an interesting development

          • The bar doesn’t get as much love as it used too, I loved the days of juggling 2 different conversations at a time.

  16. Kilauea tilt going up fast now, along with small quakes becoming frequent at the summit again in the past day. Should be lava back at the surface in the next week 🙂

    Also some tremors visible on the RIMD station, not continuous but happening.

    • Ahum. Some very different things here. Debris disks around white dwarfs are not from planets that survived inside the star. They come from destabilization of the planetary system after the star became a white dwarf. Orbital periods change as the star loses mass, and all kind of things are moving on different orbits. You get migration, where interaction between planets throw some to close to the star (and the opposite) and collisions. The debris disks are in cases just from colliding asteroids. That brown dwarfs (and supermassive planets) can survive inside the tenuous envelopes of red giants is well known. This is ‘common envelope’ evolution. But they lose a lot of mass in the process. In some models they remain in ‘grazing’ orbits where they stay at the outer edge as the star contracts to a white dwarf. Finally, when you see a planet in close orbit around a compact star does not mean it had that mass before the interaction. In some cases we know this ‘planet’ is actually the surviving core of a star.

  17. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoJcKHQXcAEhOGK?format=jpg&name=large

    I wonder what a Super IO may look like ( an exomoon thats even much more tidaly heated than IO ). Souch moons coud perhaps be nearly competely molten, basicaly a ” global lava lake moon” souch woud appear black and dark in visible light, as a thin floating skin floats on top of it. In infrared they woud glow strongly

    Writing an two part article on IO anyway now

  18. Something we haven’t seen since the early test flights in 2021. Perseverance records video of Ingenuity during its latest flight.

    https://fosstodon.org/@PaulHammond51/110012293558902601

    Paul Hammond @PaulHammond51@fosstodon.org

    Flight 47 video taken by the Left-eye Mastcam-Z camera

    The full Mastcam-Z video is down of Ingenuity taking off on its 47th flight. This video was taken zoomed out to 34 millimeter and shot at 7.5 frames per second. The total flight was 449.5 meters (1,475 feet) in distance to the southwest, a duration of 146 seconds and a top speed of 12.3 mph. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/James Sorenson
    #perseverance #marshelicopter #Marsrover #space #Nasa #JPL #Caltech

  19. I’ve been thinking about the seismic-deformation episode we just had in Kilauea. To find out more about the nature of the event, I checked for earlier similar events in images which I have saved, and found that there have been at least two other similar occurrences. The following are pictures of the Uwekahuna tilt during each event.

    The first event was on 15 March 2020:

    This event consisted of a rapid deflation at first, presumably magma draining to somewhere. Then a M 3 earthquake hits where there is a rapid spike downward in the tilt, and after the earthquake the tilt is higher. We saw this sudden rise in tilt after an earthquake when the collapse events happened in 2018, so it is probably similar on a much smaller scale. Occasional M 3 earthquakes that have taken place on the Uwekahuna side of the caldera since 2018 have also produced this sudden tilt jump, which also includes the M 3 of 15 March 2020. So I think is a tiny collapse on a particular point of the 2018 ring fault. The spike downwards, I think, might be an down and up sloshing of the magma chamber. When the roof falls on the chamber, it pushes some magma out into the deep rift or other deep storage areas. This generates the downward spike. Then some magma rises back up into the chamber producing a smaller upward spike in tilt, and these oscillations continue until they are not distinguisable, this is known as a very long period earthquake. After this mini-collapse, the tilt started rising, which would have rapidly undone the earlier deflation before the earthquake, presumably a re-pressurization of the chamber. Afterwards, pressure continues to rise, producing a positive cumulative inflation of ~2 microradians for the whole thing. This final rise is very slow, taking several hours.

    The second event was on 30 November 2020, preceding the 2 December dike:

    Only part of the event is visible at the end of the image, but I have a lower resolution monthly tilt image showing there was no cumulative deformation during the event. First, there were two major rock fracturing swarms. The first had no deformation, I think. The second rock fracturing swarm ended with a M3 and was associated to deformation. There is an extremely fast short-lived deflation. Then a M 3 striked which produced the same marked down and up spike as that of 15 March 2020. Back then I downloaded the data from a seismic station which shower the slow oscillation of the ground visible as a spike in the tiltmeter, one of the captures I saved ground deformed in a slow wave, I think the period of the downward and then upward wave was about 2.5 minutes. The earthquake resulted in no positive cumulative change in tilt, which is expected since it happened away from Uwekahuna. After the earthquake, deflation continued for a little, then reversed to inflation, which undid all of the previous deflation.

    The third time it happened was two days ago, on 11 March:

    Unlike the others, which only involved only one cycle, the 11 March event involved three rapid deflation-inflation cycles, and very little to no cumulative change in the Uwekahuna tiltmeter. A M 3 earthquake also hit this time producing the down and up spike in the tilt.

    • I will call the three events above UEs, Unidentified Events. All UEs made volcano-tectonic earthquakes in the caldera area. Here, I compare the seismic response of UEs to summit dikes and sills since 2018. Only the rootless sill of last year is not included, because it wouldn’t fit into the image:

      The events of 2020 are interesting. While the two dikes of that year made earthquakes mostly on the southern ring fault of the 2018 caldera, the UEs made earthquakes on the northern ring fault of the caldera. It is worth noting that the deformation of the 2 December 2020 dike, on Uwekahuna, was more than ten times larger than the deformation of the 30 November UE in this same place. Despite that, the 30 November event triggered a lot more earthquakes on the northern ring fault of the caldera. That means intense localized deformation must have taken place in or around that part of the ring fault. And with no dike swarm there, the most reasonable explanation is that the ring fault itself was intruded. This could also explain some other things. If a small portion of caldera ring fault was intruded, this may have set off the localized M 3 collapse events. Magma rushing into the ring fault would have produced deflation, but if the magma chamber roof sinks a little due to the intrusion separating it from the surrouding rock, it might push away the magma and restore some of the pressure in the chamber. That could be the reason why in these events the deflation and inflation seem to cancel each other out.

      If the ring fault has been intruded during the UEs, it might be dangerous. Some prehistoric explosive eruptions of Kilauea seem to have come from the ring faults. The Golden Pumice and Eastern Pumice came from locations along the southern caldera rim, although there do exist dike swarms here too. The 1500 explosive event, though, issued from many vents along the north caldera rim, where no dikes occur, and clearly the ring fault must have been involved. If magma intrudes the 2018 fault, reduces friction between the downdropped block and the encircling rock, and causes the block to collapse, it might induce explosive activity. It is also worth noting that the DI events might be weakening the structure too, I speculated in the past these might be internal collapses, although I pictured them as coming from the sides of the storage in a horizontally expanding chamber, but if they came from the roof instead, they might eventually bring it down. I don’t know if this will happen or not, an external factor might be needed, like a large flank eruption, or maybe it won’t lead anywhere, but just in case it will be very worth keeping an eye on the UEs, the DI events, and any other sign of activity in the 2018 ring fault.

      • Were there any similar fast deflation/inflation events without an associated M3 earthquake?

        All three seemed to start as a ‘U’ shaped DI, i.e. with a fast deflation. Immediately after the onset, the trouble starts. So my question is whether these are DI events where the sudden deflation triggers a tectonic failure, or a tectonic earthquake with a slow onset! My feeling is that the former may be more likely.

        • I’m not sure, the ones I could find about where these three, and all are associated with M 3 earthquakes.

          There is a fundamental difference with DI events though. The earthquakes. DI events have never triggered volcano-tectonic earthquakes, as far as I know. A very few DI events have had long period earthquakes at the start, but long period earthquakes are likely associated with gas processes rather than fault rupture. DI events regularly lead to much larger drops in pressure than UEs, but don’t make earthquakes that I’ve noticed. So I don’t think they could be normal DI events. The UEs, instead, generate an intense swarm with frequent volcano-tectonic earthquakes that merge into a continuous shaking, similar to the way it happens during dike intrusions. You need a very intense strain that forces the rock to break. This is the 30 November 2020 UE, the M 3 earthquake strikes at the end of the intense shaking, this particular event also started well before the deflation kicked in:

      • It could be interesting to try and find out what tbe cumulative volume of all the DI events is. If it is assumed (big if) that they represent wall rock falling in and basically being replaced by magma, it can give an idea of how fast these chambers grow. It is probably impossible to practically find the full data of all these events though.

        One if my early speculations for what would happen at Kilauea after 2018 was eruptions on the ring fault of the 2018 caldera. These were also of rather prolific scale… mostly because I had used the comparison to 1959 and its lava/reticulite ratio to extrapolate about 0.5 km3 of lava was probably erupted in the Golden Pumice eruption, with similar for the other layers (and over 1 km3 for the 1500 eruption…) But now seeing these tephra layers as mostly gas eruptions bringing up some lava would make this volume unlikely although probably some lava was still erupted.
        Im my scenario basically all of the caldera rim southwest of Kilauea Iki was probably going to be rendered as a moonscape by mid century. Well, more of a moonscape than it already is 🙂

        I guess we will need to wait and find out what all this means. HVO has all the data and still doesnt have a solid explaination for the DIs. But the fact they only become common after a persistent eruption lasting over a decade occurred, and then even more so after a caldera collapse, it probably has a significant implication for the volcano as a whole. Kilauea now is not the same volcano it was in the 50s, if it was then there would have been a caldera collapse in 1955 or 1960, but there wasnt. Or Mauna Ulu would have erupted until 2005, but it didnt.

        And while there is a precedent if a collapse in the past, that also doesnt mean the buildup is the same each time. The lava underneath the Observatory flows is all a’a, all the way to the ocean. There were evidently some massive fissure eruptions somewhere in the summit, something that has not happened there in the past millennium. Mauna Loa once did long slow shield building, 1500 years ago, now it does rifting fissure eruptions of extreme intensity. And not to mention that only in the past 1000 years has Kilauea made ERZ shields, yet in that time there have been at least 4, possibly as many as 7, and 2 in just the past century. All goes to show how much the volcanoes can change their behavior.

        The concept of the rift connectors being pressure zones exerted by the top if the deep rift also leaces open the question. Will they eventually just erupt? Not as rift oriented fissures on dikes, but directly, like a summit vent, creating a shield at the start of the ERZ. Or to the SWRZ for that matter. Kilauea Iki is in some ways a similar structure just not a rift zone, and has both powerful paroxysmal fountaining and persistent activity in its history.

        • The idea of DI events being collapses of the walls of the magma chamber is that magma intrudes into rock and starts to separate a piece. The initial intrusion compresses the rock and causes the deflation, like any normal intrusion does, but then, as the rocks approaches its final detachment, it shifts back to its relaxed shape and pushes the magma away, and the magma chamber back to its pressure. Then the rock sinks into the deep rift or something. So it would not be a straightforward way of knowing how much space has been created.

          • Other ideas about the origin of DI events would be for overturning events of dense magma sinking into the deep rift and light magma rising up. I prefer the collapse ideas because they explain where Hawaiian magma chamber come from. Otherwise Kilauea and Mauna Loa would have to grow magma chambers magically out of thin rock, because they have no cumulative large scale inflation that could accommodate such bodies.

          • Plus, DI events are getting too complicated for a simple overturning scenario. Nowadays, a lot of DI events come with two separate deflation phases, or two separate inflations. I don’t think this happened before 2018. We are having another large double deflation right now, similar to the one that happened nearly a month ago and kept the volcano deflated for three whole weeks.

          • Different magma chambers might be responsible for each event. The common smaller ones might come from Halemaumau while these seemingly new much larger ones could be from the south caldera chamber, or whatever structure that is. Which could be quite significant, if it indicates expansion of that chamber then it might be ultimately a warning of something big in the future.

    • For comparison, this is what a normal intrusion looks like in the Uwekahuna tiltmeter. I think this was the rootless sill. A fast, large, simple inflation signal:

      And this is the 2 December 2020 dike, which followed a DI event and happened in two pulses:

    • A lot of action at Kilauea, now we have an ongoing swarm of long-period earthquakes. They have a very gradual emergence in the seismograms and some are a bit tremor-like. There were a few big ones 12 hours ago, now we are having many smaller ones. It is a shame that almost none of the summit seismic stations are working on the main page of Kilauea. Only RIMD and WRM are working. RIMD shows them better. WRM only shows some of them.

      • Looks like an eruption startup that was interupted by the latest DI, things might move very fast when the I part starts, probably in the next day.

  20. Well the GPS went up a lot more than I expected, now more than recovered from the last eruption… And the I part of the DI has just begun, it could be quite a spectacular opening so best keep watch of the livestream today 🙂

    • I personally don’t think it is going to erupt so soon. But let’s see what happens.

  21. HVO was finally able to send people to the tephra island in Halemaumau, to get samples of it before presumably it is buried.

    I dont know if any sort of complete hypothesis on its formation exists, but I always imagined it being basically a pseudocrater, only that because the eruption boiled all the water away it was then floated up and deformed. There arent any clear views of it forming but the size of the steam plume would suggest more than just passive evaporation was going on down there 🙂

    https://www.volcanocafe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/multimediaFile-3806.jpeg

    Image deleted because of excessive size and replaced with low-res version. For HVO images, it may be better to link the thumbnail versions – admin

  22. Very weird earthquake on Kilauea. Shallow mag 3 directly under Makaopuhi crater just now. But nothing showing on the nearby seismometers…

    If this was a swarm it would be obvious why but just a single quake, that is strange to happen within the rift zone.

    • There is a very odd signature that shows in the seismic stations of the East Rift. Around 7:09 HST. It might be that M3 that the automatic system has picked up. But it doesn’t have clear wave arrivals, it may not be easy to locate. The automatic system may have gotten it wrong. When it gets reviewed, it will show in the main map of Kilauea. It’s really odd looking, could be anything as far as I know.

      Also, the SWRZ connector starting to show up, maybe the next dike intrusion isn’t as far away as I thought.

      • Slide on the side of the Pu’u’O’o crater? That is where the signal is strongest and the signal looks like a landslide (or lahar) would

        • It is very possible. It could also be a landslide in the walls of Makaopuhi Crater.

      • Is the SWRZ more closely related to summit eruptions than the ERZ? There were some upper SWRZ eruptions which occured relatively near to the summit caldera (f.e. 1971, 1974). 1982 had a caldera rim eruption which sent lava towards the SWRZ. Also the long lasting eruption 1919-1920 of the SWRZ started on the summit and migrated towards the SWRZ, a bit like Mauna Loa’s typical eruptions do migrate.

        • There are sort of two ways that eruptions on the SWRZ happen, HVO calls this the ‘volcanic SWRZ’ and ‘seismic SWRZ’. The seismic SWRZ is the same as the SWRZ connector, and is directly analogous to the ERZ in structure, the volcanic SWRZ is directly fed at a shallow depth by lava in the caldera, it is where the eruptions in 1971, 1919 and 1868 happened which were all associated with eruptions in Halemaumau. The only observed eruption on the seismic SWRZ is the eruption in 1974, but a quick look will show that eruptions on the seismic SWRZ are common just episodic, a lot like the ERZ.

          Eruptions that are further southwest than the Kamakaia hills (like in 1823) are probably fed from both sources equally, 1823 was a drainout of a lava lake in the caldera but some fissures nearby have formed promnent cones and lava fountains, which would need gas rich magma that is from deeper sources.

          I think there will be an eruption on the SWRZ in the near future, with how much the connector reacts it is more connected to the magma pressure than the ERZ is right now.

          • After the event of 1790 SWRZ was until 1823 very active, while the ERZ was quiet. Did the blockage after the collapse 1790 shift the path of dikes to the southwest?

            The collapse 2018 was in dimension similar to 1790. The summit lava lake since 2020 was not as open towards the magma chamber as the 2008-2018 lava lake. If the channel really is blocked now, magma dikes may again try to find alternative ways. Lower altitudes make it sometimes easier to erupt than higher ones.

          • Actually, the 1790 collapse was a lot bigger than 2018, about 5 km3 collapse vs 1 km3 in 2018. There was also strong connection to the ERZ after 2018, a sill formed near the highway 130 as late as February 2020, and the ERZ connector was active before summit intrusions up to August 2021. The SWRZ connector became activated in that month, with a new sill in the south of the caldera and quakes going all the way down the connector as far as 8 km to the southwest.

            So I think maybe there has been some sort of shift deep down that has caused the SWRZ to be favored over the ERZ, just that the caldera has not filled up enough to favor flank eruptions yet. But then the last eruption didnt last very long, and the lake surface is at 900 meters elevation, which is about the same elevation as the summit of Mauna Iki, so it might not take too much to trigger a small intrusion there now. Whether that would cause an eruption is another matter but the more active the rift gets the more likely eruptions occur and the larger they become too.

            Still, there seems to be an eruption in the works now but it will probably be at the summit again, within the 2018 caldera.

        • This following map of mine shows the paths followed by dike intrusions. The circles represent the starting points of the intrusions. While the lines are the paths followed by dikes from the circles. Only the Volcanic SWRZ dikes (red) start from the real summit, Halema’uma’u. The rest of the dikes originate from the connectors and sill complexes of the rift zones. At the time I made this map, though, I didn’t consider that some intrusions start as sills and only rotate into dikes later downrift. Which happens often. Also, some of the dike swarms are inclined, so they start from a position more to the south of the surface expression of the dike swarm.

          And this is a capture from the InSAR viewer of the University of Miami. It shows the main areas of deflation during the 2018 eruption. First, an area of magma storage at the summit but which extends into the Southwest Rift too. Then a relatively independent area of magma storage under the East Rift Zone, centered near Pu’u’o’o. So yes, the SWRZ is related to the summit, while the ERZ is more indepedent, but is still connected to and feeding from it.

          • Thank-you for the maps which show very well the relation of the summit to SWRZ and the different situation in the ERZ. The ERZ is a chain of volcanoes which rival the summit sometimes. The SWRZ rather appears like a part of the summit volcano.
            The active period 1790 to 1823 at the SWRZ were at low altitudes which allowed the lava flows to enter the ocean. Did a blockage of the summit caldera divert rising magma towards the southwest?

          • A quick map I made of some relative elevations. The blue line is 1 km elevation, which is about where the overflowing lake was before 2018 (technically 1030m, but still). The yellow line is 900 m, which is where the lake surface is at right now according to the last map.

            The pink line is where the bottom of the caldera was after 2018, before the water filled in and before more eruptions resumed. It was at about 515 m elevation. The 2018 vents are added for comparison.

            Even though the 2018 caldera is only about 20% full being generous, it has filled in about 80% of the elevation. The question still remains if flank eruptions are triggered by elevation of the lake or its total volume. If it is volume controlled then nothing should be expected for another 8-9 years. But if it is more affected by the depth of the lake regardless of the volume then it might be much sooner, possibly even before years end.

      • Well it has been a good while now and the quake is still showing up, seems this signal is real after all. Landslide in one of the nearby craters seems a sensible option here. It is weird that a relatively large quake has happened here without being part of a swarm though.

    • The cross caldera GPS is going up rapidly, 10 cm in a month, and rising tilt that has already exceeded when the last little intrusion happened. Really, could be any time now.

      I wonder if the lava lakes of the 19th century were more like this sort of episodic activity than true co tinuous lava effusion. If the supply was similar to now it wouldnt really make sense to be able to keep such huge areas of open lava. Maybe Ellis just got there right as a new breakout started and flooded the floor of the caldera.

      • The CRIM and BYL GPS movements are impressive. They don’t go up much but are moving sideways at a speed fast enough to get ticketed. Triangulation puts the centre of the movement directly at the CALS instrument – which is off-line. The lack of ‘up’ suggests the activity is quite shallow – perhaps 1-2 km.

        • The large displacement at BYRL is interesting. The up component shows more of a jump that a gradual change. It is probably the March 11th event where magma was liekly intruded near CALS, close to the location of the M 3. But inflation has continued afterwards too. UWEV, which was not moved during the intrusion, no cumulative change in the tiltmeter in that same location, is rapidly shifting northwards, at comparable rates to the build-up of previous lava outbreaks in Halema’uma’u.

        • Although note that a lot of stations at some distance from the summit: PUHI, AHUP, MANE, DEVL, and GOPM. Are showing the same southward displacement as CRIM. This displacement is strongest near the caldera and almost completely fades by the time you reach GOPM. A deep, dike-like body under the summit must be pushing the whole area southwards..

          • Might be coincidence but right now the 1 week quake graph does show a pretty linear line going from Keanakako’i and the southern edge of the caldera, down to the SWRZ connector. Which is exactly the sort of thing I would expect a dike-like magma body to create.

            If the ERZ really is cut off right now, then there might be some years or even decades of SWRZ activity ahead. Perhaps this shouldnt be surprising, given what happened between 1790 and 1823. But then the confusing thing is the ERZ conduit survived just fine through a caldera collapse and through the first eruption afterwards, but was killed by a seemingly common small intrusion to the southwest…

            But, if the SWRZ connector does become active more I can see most of the south caldera area potentially being buried. Unlike the ERZ connector, and like the rift connectors of Mauna Loa, the SWRZ connector actually follows the axis of spreading mostly, so an eruption could theoretically just rupture it, that might have happened to explain the intensity if the 1974 flow, I can see something like that happening again.

          • Same as at fissure 17 in 2018, that is the far end of the SWRZ storage so presumably is not frequently active. That together with it being a bit of a zone of accumulation that HVO mention in their article. This place has had many eruptions going back probably at least 1000 years, although only the eruptions in the early 19th century have been dated roughly.

            Fissure 17 started as silicic andesite but turned to more basaltic andesite once it started high fountaining. That stage is probably exactly what Kamakaia was like, only it seems the Kamakaia eruption lasted for longer and then began erupting normal pahoehoe at a more downrift segment, probably for at least a couple weeks to months by analogy to Pu’u O’o.

            Depending on how things go there could soon be another eruption in these hills, if the SWRZ does activate.

          • Do we know which is the most evolved magma on Big Island? If Fissure 17 Pahala 2018 had andesitic magma and the SWRZ in andesitic basalt, is there more that we haven’t seen yet?

          • The most evolved in Hawaii would be the 100,000-year-old trachytes of Hualalai, which erupted from Puu Waawa and formed a very thick lava flow field known as Puu Anahulu.

      • There is also a pretty obvious stack of quakes below Kilaueas summit going to about 8 km deep on the 1 week quake graph. Seems something is building big time.

        • For me it is still mysterious why the eruption stopped recently. If there was no blockage before, why should there now be one? Or has the reservoir emptied? Then the next eruption could have a different magma chamber which is still accumulating magma from the Pahala system.

          • It might be that the pressure is too high at the bottom abd so instead of rising the lava forces itself into the surroundings. There was a sill emplaced in September last year, the lake kept flowing for another two months but no actual accunulation of lava happened until January. Even at that, the accumulation seemed low even though the eruption rate was high. Might also be why the recent intrusion failed.

  23. Avian Eyesight have always fascinated me

    Yes Thats right human beings have one of the best eyesight in the animal kingdom, we are the only mammas togther with higher primates that see color and see in high resolution.

    But Birds do it even better .. some can have as many as 5 color channels, allowing them to see perhaps 500 million more combinations still, birds also have oil drops in every photoreceptor that filters the suns light, and further increases color and contrast and darkens stuff too. Some diurnal birds can have up to 98% cones in eyes with much more photorecptor density than a human even.

    Woud a volcanic eruption be even more vivid with souch keen avian eyesight ?

    • Leilani eruption must have been really candy for the local Raptors Hawaiian hawks

      With their insane cone density in their eyes must have been a wonderful sight

      But If you are an Hawaiian ʻio then looking for small birds is the priority rather than watching the eruption I guess 🙂

    • Chad You are the biology/ dinosaurs Guy

      What does lava look like for an Eagle ? 🙂 none knows I guess

      • I would guess basically the same as we see it but maybe with slightly more detail at a distance than we see it. Birds have fantastic eyesight but I think the degree to which it is better than our own is a bit exaggerated in ability. Lava isnt going to look like some sort of extreme oversaturated orange to a bird, just as animals that are colourblind actually can usually see some colour just not a great variety.

        There is also the physical fact that bigger eyes let you see further. Our eyes are pretty large for a mammal, although a lot of birds have very big eyes for their size (an eagle has eyes the same size as ours roughly), but a bird that has eyes that are less than 1/6 the volume (which I would take a guess is the majority, birds arent big typically) even with 6x relative resolution will have worse vision is my take.
        Then some birds just have bad eyesight to begin with, like kiwis, and also the Aepyornithidae elephant birds that were related to kiwis, and very large. Not all birds have vision with 6x our resolution, eagles and most other raptors are predators who hunt on the wing, it is necesary for them, but I would have a lot of doubts that applies to the average bird that is not a carnivore hunting from high altitude.

        But really, all of this is just a very rough assumption, probably better to ask an actual ornithologist about this 🙂

        As a side note, there is a strong case to be made that large theropods, especially Tyrannosaurus, probably had the most powerful eyesight of any land animal. T rex had eyes with the physical volume of an orange, and being an active and apparently very intelligent apex predator with acute binocular vision it is not unreasonable to assume it had similarly sharp vision to modern raptors. Even going on the very flawed idea that it was a dedicated scavenger, vultures have just as strong eyesight as raptors that hunt. A Rex could probably see you easily from 10 km away…

        Not to mention that tyrannosaurs in general were basically natures perfect predator. It is a bit cliche but it is basically true. Teenage rexes were proportioned like an emu but were easily the size of the largest ever mammalian carnivores by mass by only 5 years old, and as they reached adulthood they became very robust creatures, but still having long and powerful legs, at all stages of life these animals were highly cursorial, whether by sprinting after their prey or chasing it to death over long distance.

        Really, I think we need to look at evolution as non-progressive in some cases. Dinosaurs had 160 million years on top, a T rex could have seen a fossil of a Stegosaurus or Allosaurus that was 85 million years old, older than a rex fossil appears to us today, just the Cretaceous period on its own was longer than the entire Cenozoic… If things are to be compared fairly, assuming a start at the beginning of the Jurassic when dinosaurs became dominant, then 65 million years after is 135 million years ago, in the Valanginian era of the early Cretaceous. Everything from 135 million to 65 million years ago was extra time that dinosaurs had to evolve that is beyond what mammals in the Cenozoic have had so far… That is, a T rex or Triceratops had an additional 70 million years of evolution to perfect their design than we have. To be honest, I have no doubt that some dinosaurs would have been as smart as modern animals, if not approaching our own levels.

        Big tangent, but something I have been wanting to post for a long time 🙂

        • I always think of the biomass on earth that must’ve been required to sustain animals the size of large dinosaurs for millions and millions of years. Not even just the carnivorous ones, it boggles my mind that Sauropods grew to their maximum size extent just eating trees and plants. The world at the time must’ve been absolutely jam packed with flora and fauna.

          • Not sure there was any more than there is now, just that we have had such a huge impact on the environment that what we see today is not really the natural look of a place. I can imagine any large dinosaur would have ample food if it lived in a forest, average size of a herbivorous dinosaur was about the same size as a large elephant. It is also not impossible that grass was a part of the diet of some dinosaurs, it was around in the late Cretaceous though I dont think it was common, but in the early Cenozoic the climate warmed and the climate of grasslands was rare.

            Being realistic though, giant sauropods as animals were probably very rare, and individuals would have probably been highly nomadic, and definitely not hearding animals at that stage of their life although I would imagine smaller individuals and other dinosaurs following them around everywhere for protection. Probably they favored the edge of forests, open spaces would have been the preferred habitat otherwise, I cant imagine such a hige animal being able to move in a forest. It is a bit of an incorrect view that giant sauropods didnt have predators, 99% of them were probably killed in their early years and supported a whole ecosystem, but even the largest theropods would be asking for a death sentence trying to attack an adult giant sauropod, a Tyrannosaurus attacking an Alamosaurus is similar to a lone lion attacking an adult elephant in size comparison, which is not a thing, and certainly not the easiest option. At that size probably they were more in danger from each other, but only when still able to breed and had reason for conflict, after that those animals probably lived as long as whales do now which is can be up to 200 years. Sauropods were probably not smart animals but something that big able to co-ordinate itself effectively is probably smarter than we tend to give credit, a brain the size of a tennis ball is not physically a small object. Often dinosaurs were considered intelligent whether they had birdlike brains (coeleurosaur theropods) or reptilian brains (all the rest) except now we know many lizards as well as crocodiles, are able to count and plan things, so that argument sort of falls dead…

            Other dinosaurs were not nearly as large as sauropods, ornithischian dinosaurs didnt have hollow bones, their bones were more mammal like. Perhaps this is why tyrannosaurs have mostly crushing dentition rather than blade like teeth of most other giant theropods, and not unlike the crushing teeth of things like hyenas that eat bones. Sauropods had solid legs but all of their other bones were as hollow as a hummingbird, probably maxed out at 70 tons, perhaps 100t in the extremes. But that maybe only applies of they dont grow throughout their lives, maniraptoran theropods (basically birds and things like them) stopped growing as adults, but I think trying to extrapolate this to other sorts of dinosaurs is flawed, it would be like trying to reconstruct an elephant from a bat 🙂

            A while back I almost wrote an article about how the K/Pg extinction might have been a worst hit to life than the P/T, given the diversity of life at the time compared to the end of the Permian. I dont actually think that is true now, the Permian was a fascinating world, and one which was more like today than we think in a lot of ways, but still. There is really just still a pervasive view that extinct life was somehow different to life now, and that extinct life was just a filed experiment leading to today. To link to the volcano connection, this all came from looking at Kilauea, how it was so active in 2018, then collapsed, drained out, and now must recharge for a long time to do something like that again, it is evolution in a different medium but still the same continuous change through time. It sort of outlines that evolution in all forms is not necessarily linearly forward, or that everything just keeps going on, there are dead ends, and that it is possible for a past to be more advanced than the present. I think that really, in a lot of ways, the world today still has not recovered to the level it was at 66 million years ago.

    • Yes T Rex apparently had insane eyesight capacity the size of that eyewall allows for more photoreceptors to be crammed in

      Best Eyesight in the modern animal world is Large Diurnal Eagles and largest Falcons ( exceeds humans )

      They also see richer and darker shades than us, with these oil drops in each photoreceptor

      But yes humans are very strong sighted: I Myself can see the pixle points on my oled ultra – retina display from near reading distance, and none of my relatives can see that. So I have alot of photoreceptors as well. Best eyesight among humans are Native Australians that comes close to some kinds eagles having higher resolution than other groups

    • Birds also have 4 to 5 diffrent cones in the eyes far extending their visual color capacity in difftent shades .. so They see alot more color shades that we cannot see when UV cone is mixed in. They see our colors, But also see color shades that we cannot see

      Hummingbirds Maybe the best in colors But their small eyes means are rather low resolution

    • The best eyesight currently is the largest diurnal eagles and falcons, they have around 1 million photoreceptors per sqaure milimeter! mm3 humans have 200 000 per mm3
      Still humans are strong sighted

      Add in that eagles also have one to two more extra color channels that we cannot see and they mix that in with our three color channels as well Tetrachromatic vision or even Pentachromacy 🙂

      The Eagle can also controll its eye lens to zoom and zoom out

      • I saw a video about teteachromatic people, they apparently dont see colour any differently because the extra light cabcels out with an existing receptor. Also that it is extremely rare and can only occur in women, and that their sons will be colourblind.

        Also, we can see in ultraviolet, but our lense filters it out. A lot of other mammals have lesser degrees of filtering and see it properly, abd the degree of visibility into the UV spectrum is variable in people. Also, people who get cataract surgery and the lense removed gain the ability to see ultraviolet completely, probably the best example is Claude Monet, because his art shows what he saw 🙂

      • Birds are probaly diffrent as well as they have a working uv cone as well

        Humans without natural uv blocking lenses cant process UV in same way as birds do, as we dont have a UV cone

        But not soure If concetta antico uv cones are not working .. But most persons with that genes dont have working uv cones

    • I Myself have insane eyesight as the doctors telled me .. calls me hawk eyed as I can read almost the very smallest letters possible on an eye exam ( more than normal )

      Perhaps genetics my macula are very dark on fundus so lots of pigment

      An keen eyesight have faulty optics as Im being very near sighted

    • Then there is Mantis Shrimps and some Butterflys that can have up to 15 color receptor channels to combine!

      But being compund eyed, they see everything pixelated, each facett is one pixel. I dont think even a dragonfly have very high resolution as its not a camera eye. Althrough dragonflies have much higher resolution than any other insect.

      Best invertebrate vison is probaly jumping spiders that have invertebrate version of camera eyes

        • Cephalopods have very similar eyes to vertebrate eyes. Although, they are colourblind but have sharp resolution in low light. It is a great example of convergent evolution.

    • Not soure what bird that have best colorvison its perhaps either pigeons, hummingbirds that perhaps coud have 5 color channels to combine

      But because a hummingbirds eye is so small they probaly see worse at long distance than humans But I read that hummingbirds have a crazy nerve – photoreceptor connections meaning each Photos receptor Is individualy vired to the brain so they probaly see quite sharp despite their dimute size

      They see many many many more colors than you and me Will ever see
      https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/06/15/wild-hummingbirds-see-broad-range-colors-humans-can-only-imagine https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a33322346/hummingbird-vision-see-new-colors/

      • Hummingbirds coud be the winner in color preception as they have evolved with colorful flowers and finding their way around in that

        We humans are pretty colorblind compared to a Pentachromatic pigeon or Hummingbirds

    • Lava for a Golden Eagle as example probaly will look little diffrent perhaps than ours, as they have intergrated UV system in all their other color perception that we can see as well

      Lava itself dont emitt UV light but any visible red color gets mixed with a broader visual color spectrum that we cannot see so perhaps probaly appears more vivid.
      The eruption will also look darker yet human vivid, yet less bright than it does for us as they have in – evolved Polarized sunglasses in each photoreceptor

      • They have working UV – Visible light cone system so see combinations of red that we cannot see

        Pretty odd

        But looking for those elusive rodents will always be priorty number one than chasing the Holuhraun eruption

      • Seabirds cannot see UV as they dont have an UV cone

        So there the Surtsey eruption will look very human like

        But seabirds have their eye cells jammed with oil drops so they see like in Polarized glasses darker shades yet vivid and No glare

        Mammals have lost these oil drops in the photoreceptors during the meozoic nocturnal phase

        So No birds have a true simple higher primate vison

      • For birds, color has four or even five dimensions. They can see a richness multitude of different colors that we humans cannot see or even imagine…

  24. Etna is quiet now, but it can suddenly switch to surprise eruptions. Were large flanke ruptions preceded by many seismic signs or other significant events?

    • Large flank eruptions been a historical common there as often as every 5 th year before 1900 s and yes probaly will be something soon again, been alot of summit stuff in 1900 s and ongoing 2000 s

      • There are many (monogenetic) cinder cones on the low flanks of Etna which historically were active. They can easily put out a lot of effusive lava which floods villages and fields at short distance.

        The narrative of the eruption march 1983 (4km south of summit) shows that two days before the flank eruption a series of strong earthquakes happened. The eruption started with a fissure which put out lava, but also had weak explosive events. https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=211060#bgvn_198303
        The lava chemistry was alkali basalt. Does this mean that the magma rises fast from mantle or does it evolve somewhat in a magma chamber?

        • Etna doesnt have a shallow chamber, if it did then the lava would be way more fluid as the crystals could settle out, abd with more extensive degassing the summit eruptions would be less powerful. It is possible this us what happened before the eruption if 1669, the first lava to erupt that year was very fluid a lot like lava in Hawaii, later on becoming a bit more viscous as the crystal rich lava began to erupt more. A few eruptions at Etna have erupted very viscous lava like the eruption on the west flank in 1974, but that was probably a separate monogenetic vent that didnt have much to do with the main stratovolcano if Etna. The lava in 1669 had on average, 49% SiO2, 8% FeO, 6.5% MgO, 4% Na2O, and 1.5% K2O. So actually less SiO2 than Kilauea, but also less Fe and Mg and much more Na+K.

          The magma of Etna basically goes straight up from 30 km deep to the surface, though with such persistent activity the conduit is probably pretty wide by now. But there is probably a lot of magma stored in random pockets amd intrusions down there, not all the flank cones are associated with massive lava flows like the 1669 eruption, they might be monogenetic separate volcanoes.

          • This (Italian) video shows the development of the lava 1669. The visualization alone helps to understand the path of lava even without Italian language skills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzeSX8RXjhE

            1669 Catania had City Walls. It was an eruption which tested the ability of City Walls to protect a city/town against lava. That’s very unlike present eruptions when cities are unprotected. The City Walls 1669 first helped a lot and diverted the lava flow towards the sea; but afterwards lava overcame the Walls both from seaside and from mountain’s side.
            The eruptive style of Etna reminds a bit to La Palma in the way that on low altitudes Etna does effusive lava flows and on high altitudes strombolian bomb/ash eruptions. Sometimes the summit eruptions are a combination of lava fountains and ash columns.
            The lack of a magma chamber and a straight path from 30km towards the surface reminds to Hawaii’s postshield volcanoes (f.e. Hualalai), but the activity of Etna is very much higher. Etna is always busy, and when it is silent, it may prepare the next noisy eruption. How much gas is in alkali basalt compared to Tholeiitic basalt? It would explain the more explosive behaviour towards the summit.

  25. Having a little fun with Mauna Loa’s crazy inflation rate. The MSLP GPS that is shown in the Mauna Loa page hasn’t updated in over two months. So I went to the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory page and downloaded data for the other caldera rim GPS of Mauna Loa, MOKP, where data extends to 10 days ago. I projected the data in a northwest component that should be radial to the magma chamber of Mauna Loa. Up is inflation. Unit is in meters. It shows the scale of the present inflation episode, and more than the scale, the speed. The speed of inflation completely dwarfs anything seen in the 20 years before. And I have checked in the Miami InSAR Viewer that the source involved is the same as in other previous events. Although it is good to remember that the reason it took so long for Mauna Loa to erupt after 1984 is that inflation was intermittent and slow. So far, the expansion rate doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Tiltmeter is happily going up as of today. Both Kilauea and Mauna Loa are inflating at top speed right now.

    • Interesting blitz study! Sometimes both volanoes can – as we see – correlate positive. Do we see a move of Mauna Loa to a more active period?

      After the last two upper NERZ eruptions (towards Mauna Kea) it took 4 years until the next eruption happened. If the inflation on Mauna Loa continues, it should be ready to do something in that timespan. That would be around 2027.

    • Will be interesting to see what this means. Kilauea clearly has got robust supply from the plume, it was inflating as soon as 2018 ended in some areas, and filled in nearly 400 meters of the collapse. But then this response from Mauna Loa is very string, I was under the impression that it was similar to that seen after 1984 but it is much faster, magma is flowing in at least as fast as to Kilauea

      Only thing I can take a guess at is that Mauna Loa is drawing from its voluminous deep storage, it does go down 50 km after all. So technically the plume is drip feeding it but that doesnt really matter. Kilauea is going to be the star of the show for long time yet but Mauna Loa might not need the plume supply to erupt in a big way…

      I keep going back to those huge shield eruptions that Mauna Loa has. If one of those happens it would probably become one of the biggest effusive eruptions in recorded history, Pu’u O Keokeo was probably around 10 km3 erupted in as many years, not a flood eruption but still significantly more than Pu’u O’o was doing. If the effusion rate is higher than a plume fed eruption too then the air quality in Kona might end up being very hazardous long term leading to that side of the island being temporarily abandoned, which would be a big deal. Not that this is the most likely outcome but then not many volcanoes inflate this rapidly after throwing what is the equivalent of a mid sized VEI 4…

      • It is hard to see how this can be movement from deep storage. It seems too fast for that. Shallower magma redistribution may be an option. It may be moving along sills due to relaxation after the loss of pressure in the upper rift. Speculation alert..

        • Not necessarily really deep storage, more magma storage that is deeper than the actual magma chamber or whatever the upper level storage is (seems it is more dike-like than anything else). Stuff that is too deep to collapse into a caldera but shallow enough to be involved with eruptions directly. I guess maybe 5-10 km down. There is probably much more deeper in the volcano, it goes down 50 km, Kilauea goes down about 30, I would attribute Mauna Loas depth to its age and mass pushing the crust down.

          Of course this is all speculation. If this does result in an eruption directly then the magma chamistry should resolve.

        • The source is deep dike-like, as usual for Mauna Loa. However, before the eruption, it seems like the inflation source was deeper and centered in the upper Southwest Rift Zone. After the eruption, the inflation seems somewhat shallower and centered in the caldera. That could contribute somewhat to the greater inflation rates, since deformation is more concentrated. Even so, I think the supply is still much higher than usual.

          Interferograms of Hawaiian volcanoes up to February can be viewed here:

          https://insarmaps.miami.edu/

          Mauna Loa is a very clear butterfly pattern. Where inflation happens on a dike-like body, and the ground moves up and away greatest along a perpendicular line to the inflating body.

      • Mauna Loa often did short-term eruptions (up to 40 days), but sometimes did long-term eruptions (more than 100 days). How can Mauna Loa’s magma system sustain one of those long-term eruptions? The deep structure must look different to short-term eruptions.

        Long-term eruptions usually have smaller rates than short-term eruptions. 1940 and 1949 they also had much smaller volume than short-term eruptions. F.e. the 164 days lasting eruption 1940 erupted 50% of the volume of the 1984 eruption (22 days).

  26. Interesting, was not aware an insar existed. Maybe it is the same sort of idea as in 2018 where magma that was still flowing into the ERZ after the eruption ended was forced to build up in the rift under the highway and at progressively more westward locations thereafter. Only at Mauna Loa now it is vertical not horizontal.

    I am starting to think Mauna Loa actually doesnt have a classical magma chamber at all, perhaps it did before 1868, or at least before 1700 when Mokuaweoweo formed. But at least going back as far as the 30s and orobably back to the 19th century almost every Mauna Loa summit eruption has gone through a single polygenetic fissure, including last year almost to the meter. Only eruption in that time to originate from somewhere else in the caldera was in 1942. In this regard Mauna Loa kind of behaves a lot like Hekla, apparently including in not giving any substantial warning of erupting until an hour before…
    This also gives a very simple reason why 1950 was not a caldera collapse. At first I had co sidered maybe 1950 was a very shallow event but the data isnt consistent with that at all, nor is the magma composition. There was 0.35 km3 of lava erupted mostly in 1 day and at least 2x that volume of intrusions that were emplaced in only a couple hours max, crazy stuff. Total volume leaving the summit might be over 1 km3, if there was a magma chamber there either it is more than 20x that large so 1 km3 doesnt drain beyond the limit, or much more likely is no such chamber exists at all… a flattened vertical magma body might create some pits but if deeper it would just fall together rather than truely collapse.

    Mauna Loa is more like a shield shaped rifting fissure volcano, than it is a proper shield volcano.

  27. G4 geomagnetic storms from a crack in the Earth’s magnetic field today. Has this ever happened before? I know these cracks happen but I’ve never knew they could cause a G4 storm.

  28. There was a bit of a swarm of quakes on Reykjanes, just a bit west of Thorlakshofn. Is part of the Brennisteinsfjoll/Blafjoll fissure swarm. Many quakes are not fully verified yet though, but seems like things might be building in the area again 🙂

  29. Some tremor today at Kilauea. Most of the seismometers dont really work, but it was dtected at RIMD and WRM stations

    RIMD is on the south end of the caldera about 1 km west of Keanakako’i and the main viewing area. WRM in on the western side of the caldera southwest of the old HVO building about 3 km or so. The stations are on opposite sides of the caldera. None of the other stations at the summit work clearly though, including all 3 on the caldera floor itself 🙁

    Based on the intensity, assuming it is not a callibration difference, the tremor appears to be much closer to RIMD. The earthwuake map does show the southern edge of the caldera, right underneath RIMD, has been very active recently. It would not entirely surprise me if there was an eruption somewhere in the area, something like the 1971/1974 or the 1982 eruptions, although something larger might also be possible, like 1959. But definitely this area should be watched, perhaps Keanakako’i is not the best place to be to view anymore…

    • At those hours, the signal is probably human-made noise. If the shape of the signals doesn’t match perfectly between different stations (a little hard to check right now) then it is probably not volcanic.

      • The signal at 10:45 does show between them, the rest I agree is probably outside noise but there is something common to both.

  30. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PO2-3v-6cfk

    Nightmare scenario But luckly Impossible
    Needs a water protoplanet to add on Earth for this to happen.

    But many habitable exoplanets Maybe as flooded as this scenario is, Earth is pretty good not too much ocean and enough land. But many other exoplanets maybe entirely oceanic. Even in this scenario Hawaii woud poke well over 2 km above the ocean

  31. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/3zmrc1/the_biomes_of_a_tilted_earth_oc_1204x840/

    Fun map with Earths continents with alternative spinn: woud be fun To have Europe as the equator so we gets rid of the stinky shitty cold winter rains. Here the Earth is tilted

    In this scenario Iceland woud end up in the latitude 30 s transforming itself into a wonderful oceanic subtropical paradise. Rest Scandinavia looks like it will become like Paris in this fun scenario.

    Mediterranean here becomes a cold Alaskan looking taiga quite fun and perhaps like Northen Europe

    In this map the poor Hawaii becomes a cold oceanic frozen ugly hell with a majority of Big Island and the other Islands Ice – capped.

    • Ops looks like Alberts home got colder in this scenario than today and Hectors home became a freezing Taiga 🙂

      • I think this may violate the VC rule: ‘be nice’.. Freezing Hector is definitely not nice!

        • I think that’s what I get for calling Jesper’s home a freezing taiga once. 🙂

    • Just happens in that scenario
      Sad to see Nyiragongo dissapear under miles of Ice as well …

      I wonder if the climate zones are correct here ?

      Hector is one of my best friends

    • Seapole woud transform Alberts home into a humid jungle mess ( and a 10 m long anaconda breaks through your drains )

      While winters in most of Scandinavia are quite mild, woud be nice to eliminate the winters competely

      • Ooo Seapole means that Scandinavia woud become Scandiapore

        I woud not like 10 m snakes in my backyard so cancel that

    • Defentivly nothing else is as boring as Northen Scandinavia, dull and dead and icey

      South Scandinavia also have dog poop weather with freezing rain and wetness for a whole winter Half year

      🙂

      Chose one of the world alternatives below for the best Spain scenario 🙂

    • And Im stuck in the worlds most depressing country, nothing is fun here: No volcanoes, No beautyful landscapes nothing is fun .. Im bored to my own atoms really

      And the modernist concrete lump architecture is forgettable .. I call them
      ”stalin lumps” quite depressing in a rainy day. In other worlds nothing is fun here. Grey and boring at least close to me

      A New high school built here and it is becomming one huge gray cement
      ”albert speer atillery cement box” quite an odd choice of architectute, so I guess the kids will feel very gloomy. The architects in Sweden and Finland have competely lost the ability to think beautyful. 🙂 Infact I find Sweden so dull I compare it to the early Dark Ages .. or perhaps Im stuck in a mental middle age,

      Iceland woud suit me much better Infact it woud suit me perfectly to move there, but not soure what to work with, its very easy for me to move there with a Nordic Citizenship. Iceland is insane really so the urge to move their is insane now for me

      At current Im writing two Volcanocafe articles so I dont get too bored and depressed

      But it is good that someone else acually likes this country that Im stuck in, so not everyone finds it drap

      • You might need to work in a fish factory if you move there. Speaking from personal experience there is no amount of free eruption viewing that would make me do that again but it is pretty easy when you do it more than a year. Plus, if an eruption begins on Reykjanes you are right there already 🙂

        Although if you have any formal qualification in anything then finding a job would likely not be the hardest part of the move.

      • VC Albert should also move to Iceland should be possible being a professor perhaps you can work from there or they may have a position on an institution there … perhaps

        I knows you like Iceland alot just like I do

        And its not that cold in Reykjanes warmed by the Gulf Stream and its oceanic location, means winters are not that bad, often sits well above freezing in mid – winter, but 2022-2023 have been much colder than unusual in Iceland.
        But the cool rainy summers maybe not that fun I guess for you even If they have warm geothermal homes

        But there is always that unique geology

      • Yes .. Chad looking for skills for that and Im 28 now just there is so much to chose from

        Woud you too like to live in Iceland? Or is the dreary oceanic subpolar climate too crappy?

      • Summers in South Scandinavia can be awful because of the humidity, that makes 26 C feels like 100 C
        So high summers in Denmark for example have a humid and tropical feel

        Even If Tropics are generaly much warmer still

        In Northen Scandinavia summers are mild pleasant But all too short

        • Try Auckland. Nice climate, only three months of slightly cooler weather, frost-free and you would be living inside a volcano. What more could you want!

          • Auckland is not Big enough for me as a volcano 🙂

            I wants Ionian … 😉 Pele and Loki, Amirani are very tastey for me

        • Auckland togther with Azores and Madiera Maybe the worlds best climate
          Oceanic Subtropical

          Rare type of climate Thats always comfortable

          Still South Scandinavia is not that bad its mild winters too

      • Yes Auckland is togther with Azores and Madeira the worlds best climate Oceanic – Subtropical always pleasant and never too hot or too cold alot, will be alot more comfortable than Kailua Konas furnace thats for soure

        Is Chad going to Taupo and Mount Doom as well? Hopes we gets some small pheratomagmatic eruption in Tongario complex when you are there 🙂

        • Taupo yes, there is a supercharger there so probably a necessity at some point. Electric rental car 🙂

          Tongariro is a long way south of there, it is 450 km south of Auckland on the road I will drive on, which is probably about 4-5 hours just driving. But I would like to see it. But to actually go there up close it a full day hike with about 50 km round trip of walking, so I will stick with a distant view.

          🙂

      • Winter in South Scandinavia is a terrible terrible rotten mess, wind and rain and
        wet snow and dark wet bare ground and skeletal trees can it get more depressing?

        The more Arctic Northen Scandinavia gets a real winter and the white snow makes it alot brigther outside too .. But winter is all too long where many of my relatives live up in Lapland

      • Years ago I loved the wooden houses, and all the things in the dpt. stores in Copenhagen and Stockholm were nice. It changed for the worse it seems. The wooden houses are beautiful, and Ikea was a great success.
        Poor Jesper.

        • Stockholm is an incredibley pretty place in summer specialy so in the inner old parts! The stylish architecture and canals and greenery reminds me so much about Naboo in star wars

          Althrough Mediterranean Italy is perhaps an even better analouge to Naboo / Theed

          Sad that Stockholm is becomming cluttered by modernist architecture, the politicans have to stop that, pepole dont want modernist box buildings in old and pretty Stockholm

        • https://www.arkitekturupproret.se/2021/04/26/darfor-blev-nya-liljevalchs-sa-fult/comment-page-1/

          Here is the New Art museum in old town stockholm – djurgården area, and yes the fascade is finished like that: I find it an utterly disgrace and fall from heavens, it really is that ugly. How can something like that be allowed in souch an old and historical enviroment like djurgården?.

          I can only slopply almost comicaly call it the “Führerbunker” or the “Wolfsschanze” its one big brutal cement lump, and it caused outrage when it was revealed in Stockholm in 2021. Pretty boring lump that does not fir into the enviroment…better they demolish it. Its almost a comedy thats how ugly that building is hahaha

          • This is Guggenheim Bilbao (hope it doesn’t come in too large conc. pixels) which proves that one can do better:

            from wikimedia commons

            Really ugly, the Stockholm Museum.

            In Paris they converted a train station into a museum:

            This is beautiful.

            Thinking of Rome: What wasn’t stolen is still standing like Pont du Gard and extremely beautiful. What we are building from concrete collapses like that bridge in Genova a few years ago and is ugly like hell.

          • It is called Musée d’Orsay btw and gives the right frame to the famous impressionist paintings who were in Jeu de Paume, a side part of the Louvre before.

            La Grenouillère, Auguste Renoir

            La Grenoullière, Claude Monet

            They were painting together, both extremely poor and unsuccessful for many hard years to come, before an American painter, Mary Cassett, made them instantly famous in the US.
            Today, we have another problem: They are sold for million sums and dissapear in some safe. They should be not for sale, but for culture.

          • Summary: Some beauty to cheer you up. Where I live it is also snowing again.
            Looking forward to your IO-articles.

    • Overall the Nordic Countries like Sweden are the best ones to live in cost free education and healthcare and excellent living standard

      Sweden have plentiful of nature and trees Infact there is forest everywhere even inside the cities there grows forest and wild animals are often seen inside the streets of example Stockholm: In most European Countries there is nothing like that, as all forests been cut down

      So perhaps not that boring
      Its just that I craves volcanoes and Icelands landscapes like mad

      • Scandinavia is also well ahead of most of the rest of the world on electric cars, Norway was 80% EVs new sales in 2022, Sweden was only a few percent behind. Australia is 6% in 2022… cheapest new EV where I am is model 3, but still 65k AUD, long range is 80k… But this is still early days and these ramps are exponential.
        There are old nissan leafs from 2012 that are about 15k here but anything less tends to get snatched immediately, and those old cars are very dated now compared to new EVs. There was a surge of model 3s on the used market last year when the model y came out and people got those instead, but because teslas are basically indestructible the used ones from 2-4 years ago are like brand new so still an expensive car 🙁

        Carl’s Mercedes EQS is a very nice car but here it costs over 300k AUD… perhaps unsurprisingly I have only seen one on the road before. Maybe it is much less in Sweden 🙂
        generally European cars of any sort are stupidly expensive where I am, not really good value in my opinion. Australia after 2017 is basically the land of Toyota, reliability is legendary and 20+ years experience in hybrids but they dont want to make actual EVs for some reason 🙁

        Iceland would be a perfect place for an EV. Unless you want to drive the whole ring road there is literally nothing that is actually far enough away that you can drive out of range from Reykjavik, and all clean renewable energy. And all cars are expensive in Iceland anyway so no particular bias against EVS.

      • Would definitely like to see Iceland, and also Sweden too, I am 1/32nd Swedish 🙂

        But it looks like a very nice place in the world. Not the heavily populated cities of Germany and France but still the same living standard. Australia has a lot in common with the operating system and economy structure of Scandinavia but unfortunately decided to also incorporate some American absolute capitalism into it, education is not free although healthcare is. But houses are basically unaffordable 🙁

      • Iceland is wonderful only place I wants to be in now

        You will probaly find Sweden gloomy, but unlike Germany and France we have more forests since agiculture have not gone into the taiga yet Althrough South Sweden is alot more like Germany than Northen one

        Yes Nordic Countries are the best ones to live in its capitalism But with Public acessible healthcare and education and a basic social sequirty net

        But Sweden, Finland and Denmark are rather dull in feel and crime is high and sadely pepoles mental health is zero here

        South Scandinavia have awful winters with rains and wet snow for Half of the year rains for months in winter so an Oceanic Winter can be awful

        In Northen Scandinavia you gets a real winter

          • I prefer the speed limits we have in Australia though, 120 is too fast. Our limits are usually 100 km/hr, sometimes 110, but often long roads of 60-90. Probably at that speed and with out usually mild dry weather there are already 1000 km range EVs 🙂

      • I wants To tilt the Earth do Scandinavia cross over the Equator .. But on other hand I woud not want Scandinavia to become like Scandiapore…

        Beacuse I woud not tollerate the heat and humidity

        But having us at latitude 34 or 40 woud be nice

        But in real world winters are not that bad in South Scandinavia beacuse we are warmed by the Gulf Stream so it tends to rain in Iceland, Denmark and Norway and South Sweden rather than snow. But 2 C outside and fast wind and high humidity is not fun at all
        Plus in Iceland you have the crap with No warm summer

        In Northen Scandinavia its a real – 13 c or lower .. winter but its too long simply to be fun

  32. Not sure if anyone has seen or mentioned this recently, but a brand new paper suggests the 1808/9 mystery eruption was a combination of moderately large eruptions in short succession from Indonesian, Alaskan, and an Antarctic source. Would still have to be a combination of fairly large events to produce a spike nearly as big as a VEI 7, but IMO this would help explain the lack of evidence for a large volcanic eruption around this time. Three smaller eruptions would be much easier to “hide.”

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379122005674

    • Can’t read that. What do they mean with “moderately large?”
      After what I’ve learnt here on the honorable sheep site is, that 4+5+4 wouldn’t add up to one 6 or 7, as the ash – we could see that two years ago with the eruption of Soufrière St.Vincent – would only reach the stratosphere with at least a VEI 6.
      The same goes for earthquakes. One 8-9 can do a whole lot of damage, several 5 might just move some glasses out of their shelves.

      So, if they don’t find a culprit it may have done a collapse somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and disappeared without a trace. Ghosted us, sort of.

    • This is more plausible:
      “The only likely source for this would be a tropical volcano, most likely located in the southern hemisphere but not likely further than 20 degrees south latitude.

      The south-western Pacific Ocean between Indonesia and Tonga is an area in the tropics to the west of Colombia and Peru with candidate volcanoes and with little reporting at that time. This area had no European settlements at the time, and most of the reporting on its volcanic activity goes back only to the mid-19th century, apart from the occasional sighting by passing European explorers.
      The region includes the Rabaul area, which has had VEI 6 eruptions, as well as the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai area which had a VEI 5–6 eruption in 2022. The oral histories of the indigenous populations of these areas report eruptions, but these could not be dated with any degree of certainty.”
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1808_mystery_eruption

      Lost in the then sparsely populated realm of the Pacific Ocean.
      Ships:
      The cross indicates where the Essex was sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. They then decided to not turn west with their remaining boats as there were stories about cannibals on the Marquesas and PItcairn which micht tell us that the eruption was further west than most whalers liked to go. Ironically they ended up practising cannibalism themselves, confessed by Captain Pollock at his local church.

      • I’m familiar with the traditional thinking on location and size, and I wouldn’t be thinking multiple 4’s and borderline 5. They would still have to be mid 5 and up more or less. You don’t need a 6 to hit the stratosphere with sulfate.

        El Chichon did it just fine, and that was what, 2-3km3? Off the top of my head.

        • They’re suggesting they found traces of ash from three different sources for the marker of 1808/9.

          That would be tough to explain if it were one single large event.

          Just sharing the info as I came across it, I have no skin in the game.

          • Ah no worries, yeah it’s a dense article. Actually this was paraphrased in the updated Wikipedia entry for the Mystery eruption of 1808, which is how I found out about it.

            Even if it were due to three separate events, they’d still have to be pretty large and that would still be highly anomalous to occur around the same exact time.

            Whether it was one enormous event right before Tambora or three separate moderately large events, it’s still crazy fascinating, you know? What a stretch of activity!

          • Three different sources plus possibly a main source for the famine, a volcano that died in the South Atlantic later: Napoleon. That meant ship blockades everywhere, less trade. Maybe the Napoleonic wars are underestimated in this context.

            I still remember from reports of my elders about the First and also the Second WW how food first went to the armies. This being helped by volcanic eruptions would explain e.th.
            Here the effect in Spain spreading to the colonies:

            https://nephist.wordpress.com/2018/05/29/the-economic-consequences-of-the-napoleonic-wars/

            Goya, muerta de hambre, 1812

            But then this report from Korea:
            https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03480-w#Sec2

            The cold definitely wasn’t caused by Napoleon. On the contrary, it damaged Napoleon’s armies in the East.
            Considering the reports by two eye-witnesses in Colombia and Peru, the volcano might have been in Ecuador and not noticed very much due to the Napoleonic War and the reorganization of the colonies.

      • Its amazing just how very hot the lee side of Big Island of Hawaii gets even in depths of mid winter. Despite being at latitude 20 They haves over 30 C in noon daily, was in Kailua Kona in december 2016 and we had 31 to 32 C in shadow daily, and thats even hotter than many pure equatorial locations

        I guess the warm ocean and sinking air over the oceans at Hawaii latitudes explains why it gets so warm

        So Hawaii defentivly is hot all year around at sealevel and there is also 12 climate zones To chose from on the Big Island 2016 was one of my many lava trips there

        Its so hot at sealevel that I woud not be able to stand that weather

        • This is why, of the two, I vastly prefer Iceland. Wife and I have been there four times (I’ve been to Hawaii once in the early 2000’s as a teenager).

          I’m a cold lover at heart, I would gladly live in Sweden Jesper, I know you’re not fond of the climate. I’m in the northeast US but our winters can be both colder and warmer than you, depending upon the teleconnection patterns that winter. I would prefer the more consistent cool weather your area gets, and I would love the easy access to gorgeous fjords and snowcovered mountains across parts of the Scandinavian peninsula.

          But Iceland is definitely my favorite place on earth. My wife and I would love to move there someday, we’ve even discussed how we’d do it. Spent some effort to begin learning the fascinating Old Norse derived language. At this point we can drive the island like the back of our hand.

          We went this past November up to Akureyri and that was an absolute adventure and a half, going near the Myvatn area and Dettifoss waterfall which was essentially polar and a giant sheet of compacted snow and ice (before they had a warmup briefly prior to the very cold December). It was a heck of an experience and very right up my alley.

          But we’re well versed in outdoor winter activity, I grew up in snow and ice all my life and am very confident driving in it.

        • Will be Iceland for me as well: wants To be nowherelse now

          Sweden is too boring its one Big cement clump

          Luckly Scandinavian winters are not that cold thanks To
          The Gulf Stream and Iceland is quite mild

          • Iceland is only mild relative to its latitude. The weather is actually pretty crazy, and it can be absolutely frigid there. -20C or colder isn’t unreasonable in the north after November.

            The area around Reykjavik is much warmer, on average, but it’s not exactly the UK either. They can and do slip into colder patterns, and it’s very important for people traveling there outside the summer months to be well prepared with lots of warm layers and a good hard shell.

          • Would make that more like -15C. I sometimes get the conversion of fahrenheit to celcius wrong in my head.

            Side note, when is the US going to join the rest of humanity on the metric system? It’s frustrating.

        • Most of Scandinavia is pretty mild there are even some hardier Palm trees that you can grow in in Coastal Norway and Denmark and mildest parts of South Sweden.

          So its much more like seattle than it is like fairbanks.

          But Northen Scandinavia is much more arctic Canada in general and is what most persons think most of Scandinavia is like.

          Winters in Northen Scandinavia is almost better than the rainy mess in the sourthen

          • Sometimes eastern Scandinavia (Sweden, Finmark, Åland) and Finland have the best summer weather of Europe. Stable high pressure weather, midnight sun and comfortable temperatures.

  33. Noticed that in the past week there have been quakes marking out the rift of Hengill, between the mountain and Thingvallavatn. Would be quite exiting if this was the next place t oerupt, it didnt last cycle.
    Might also be dangerous as it could destroy Hellishieldi. But it seems like Hengill mountain has mostly blocked any Holocene eruptions from going that way in large volume.

    The last two eruptions from Hengill were from the same fissure, and both were about 1 km3 in volume, curtains of fire and large fast moving lava flows. So rather a lot larger than the fissure eruptions at Svartsengi or Krysuvik, and about the same as Brennisteinsfjoll eruptions but much much faster. Potentially, if all of the eruption is along a short length of fissure next to Hellishieldi then the lava would probably reach Reykjavik but this is a very unlikely.

    Nothing imminent but still it is interesting, might mean there is some strain in the rift.

  34. Just show an amazing video from a camera placed on one of the Space X re usable rockets fairings as it Reentered the atmosphere. Woud be a dream for me to surf one back into the atmosphere inside a fireball, so lets call them Hypersonic Surfboards in hell

  35. Thats right saturated fat does
    Not cause heart disease … its the
    sugar inflammation and insulin that does

    Good reason to replace refined carbohydrates sugars with healthy natural saturated fats:

    Sugar damages your body through a process called glycation , sugar basicaly oxidises and rusts your body tissues in a process called glyciation. Sugar glyciation is the driver behind heart disease and dementia and alot of other problems. High levels of glucose carmellize your body

    Its called sugar glycation, where glucose binds to proteins. This process produces free radicals and inflammation, which are markers of Alzheimer’s plaques and cause of Artery clogging plaques. It is quite easy to do a test and see if you have this happening in your body. If your Hemoglobin A1c is high, it increases free radicals by fifty-fold. Studies show that this is a marker for the progression of atrophy of the brain.

    Natural fats are healthy
    Fat Ketones aren’t just fuel for our body, but they are also great for our brain. They provide substrates to help repair damaged neurons and membranes. This is why I really push a high-fat and low-carb diet for clients who suffer from Alzheimer’s (referred to as type 3 diabetes

    Fat Ketones are non-glycating, which is to say that they don’t have a caramelizing aging effect on your body. The mitochondria are the “powerhouse” energy-producing factories of our cells.

    Human body and brain is well evolved to burn natural fats, thats biologicaly our main fuel source

    So Im going on a Paleo – Diet quitting all Refined Carbohydrates

    • I imagined you in Iceland with no eruption for three years and had to laugh.

      It is all relative, you know. You have a great summer up there with lots of light. Between 30° and 40°C you would end up south of Naples. When we visited the Amalfi coast in September my daughter wanted to go to the temples in Paestum. I declined as the temperature glued me to the hotel pool. In winter it can be ugly as well, cold and dry and grey or rainy, just not that often.

      You found the solution: Azores, Madeira. Plus Canary Islands btw. But it is all relative. The Canary Islands can also be boring and sometimes a burden when sand comes in from the Sahara. This can go on for a week.

    • Will be Iceland

      I mean tipping Earth so Scandinavia ends up on latitude 40 or 30 🙂 relative to a New Equator

    • Definitely some intereating stuff going on there. Seems any chance of the last eruption just resuming passively are pretty dead now. It might be a while, weeks, maybe a few mobths even, before lava returns. But after so long the next eruption is going to have a spectacular start, and might nit necessarily be in Halemaumau either if the current earthquake distribytion is indicating anything. Before the last few eruptions the quakes built up within the 2018 caldera, now they are swarming below the south caldera platform west if Keanakako’i, and going a short distance down to the southwest.

      There is also a curious swarm of shallow wuakes at the end of the SWRZ, southwest if the Kamakaia hills, it is directly at the northern edfe if the Pahala swarm but obviously separated. Probably these are south flank quakes but to have them here without an obvious SWRZ intrusion is unusual and I am not aware of any good comparisons.

      And there have been numerous deep quakes around the summit of Kilauea since the start if the year, much more than I can remember any other time recently. They are at the bottom of the crust. There were somewhat similar deep quakes in the 1950s, which lead to the 1959 and 1960 eruptions, as well as probably the very rapid increase in supply following. There was a LERZ eruption in 1955, perhaps these induce a deep dredging of magma going down to the source itself, possibly with huge surge of magma, I mean Kilauea has filled a caldera created by what is basically a VEI 5 volume equivalent about 1/3 of the way in 5 years after spending nearly 40 years leaking lava, and its last LERZ eruption in 1960, of similar intensity, was the beginning of 60 years ongoing of hyperactivity. Kilauea erupts about 1/10 of the worlds lava right now, out of over 1000 active volcanoes, its a bit mind blowing really. The fact Mauna Loa seems to be doing something sinilar now is very interesting

      • Kilauea appears to do DI gymnastics now, up and down all the time. It can be the quiet before the next intrusion with unknown end. Historically Kilauea also did long breaks. F.e. 1977 to 1979 two years without eruption. Unbelievable long in our inpatient digital age. But recently Kilauea didn’t look like to tolerate long breaks.

        • Didnt erupt for a bit over 2 years after 2018 too, felt like decades to me, I always liked reading the updates and watching the laca on the webcams 🙂

          Although there is definitely something going on because the filling rate from December 2020- September 2022 was pretty much equal to the deep supply, but the eruption earlier in the year didnt catch up, magma is building underground. So Halemaumau might not be as easy of an outlet as before, and other places viable again. Hector has hypothesized the caldera ring fault formed in 2018 might be getting intruded. I think magma will erupt somewhere south of the lava lake.

    • Lucky I cannot controll Kilauea woud then transform it into my dreams.. If chad know what Im talking about

      Still Kilauea is a monster volcano really, almost jesperian in scale in real life 🙂 and I been on it many times

      • No volcano is too small for me really, I bet there are ”Mega Earth” exoplanets out there with volcanic systems as large as Scandinavia itself

        The bigger they are the better .. 🙂

          • I do like it, but must point out that it is not my usual avatar.

          • It is part of a series of posts on the echoes of the Tethys ocean. In the future we may do a post on the entire Tethys but that would be a challenging one.

          • Oh yes.
            Challenging, but interesting to no end. Left us the Dolomites and other Coral Reefs. Possibly also the Colorado Plateau and similar structures in China. Had table mountains.
            There might have been a beautiful water world where the Himalayas have been built up. And the Himalayas and the Dolomites are extraordinarily pretty.
            So when I think Tethys, I think beauty – leaving the Mososaur out of my thaught 😉 . And it is kind of intriguing that it still exists close to what is called the birthplace of Zeus.

            “Originally Oceanus’ consort, at a later time Tethys came to be identified with the sea, and in Hellenistic and Roman poetry Tethys’ name came to be used as a poetic term for the sea.”

            Originally Antioch, Turkey

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_(mythology)

          • There were two of them, it seems, which merged. What we see near the the Bitlis–Zagros Fold and Thrust Belt is the remnant of the Eastern part, aka Neo-Tethys.
            The western part might have left us the Sahara and the Atlas mountains and led to the collision of Marocco with North Africa.

            The tectonic valley dating back to the Triassic, filled with this lake, might have a story with the ocean as well (beauty):

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walchensee

            And Botticelli, when he painted the “Birth of Venus” had an idea.

          • It is Jesper’s habitat isn’t it as it ran roughly parallel to the equator between the equator and about 30° north with bends and side arms and bays of course. Jesper could have lived there without the Swedish nasty coldness. On some island.
            Hear, hear, Jesper.

          • Recently I had an idea that has its origin in s.th. you explained once about those deep forces and convection and subduction in the Pacific Ocean.

            There was this lump, Pangaea. this lump couldn’t just come apart even not with CAMP. There must have been a strong force. And the only place where it could have happened is the East Coast of what is now Japan, Siberia, China, Korea.
            Izinagi, Phoenix.

            They must have pulled on Pangaea, but it was too big and heavy to move over, so there must have been a huge area of extension which must have been the birth of CAMP, NAIP and Paranà-Etendeka. Over the millions of years, of course. And then the rift opened and the continents split up, and the middle was filled with the water of the Atlantic Ocean we know today.

            Tethys was there before and stayed for a while, possibly with a few remnants until today.

            But the beginning of the process must have been a probably steep subduction zone on the western coast of Panthalassa, the Pacific Ocean.

            Without subduction it would have staid the lump it was. Of course there would have been some mantle plumes, but they would create volcanoes like on Mars minus erosion. So the starting point, I assume, was Far East, and to stress this huge lump, it must be enormous forces.

          • For a small volcano at home I’d recommend a bottle with sparkling wine. When you pull the cork, you get a small volcanic explosion. It is the same process as in volcanoes and the driving carbon dioxide is one of the gasses, which also fuels explosive volcanoes.

      • I mean No volcanoes is too Big .. 🙂

        Wrote wrong word

        Tor Zawar is a joke almost how small it is like the little pile left from the neighburs miniatyre pinschers

        I wants Ionian 🙂

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