Volcano twister, 24 July 2023, Litli-Hrútur, Iceland
Whirlwinds come in variations. The weaker category is known as dust devils, and the range extends to full-blown tornadoes – and even hurricanes can in some ways be seen as an outsized members. What they have in common is whirls, winds and heat. You can find them anywhere, from the deserts of Mars to the shores of Earth. They are almost always powered by the Sun, our major source of heat. But there are exceptions.
Whirlwinds have been a fairly frequent feature of recent eruptions in Iceland, in the original Fagradalsfjall events) and Hawai’i, both from Kilauea and Mauna Loa. In these volcanic whirls, the winds are provided by the atmosphere, the heat by the eruption and the whirl by both working together. HVO calls them tephra devils or lava devils, depending on where they occur. They also use the local name puahiohio which really sounds just right: even the whirl is there in the syllabic repetition. At VC, we know better: we have long called them volcanado. (The only problem with this word is that it may be attacked by autocorrect – manual proofreading and brain-software override may be required.)
Many of our readers have interest in both eruptions and weather (it is a natural combination) and these volcanic whirls nicely combine them. There is one regret: they cannot form in vacuum. No volcanadoes on Io. Sorry, Jesper.
Whirling
How do these whirls get themselves into a twist? Two things are needed: rising air and deflected inflow.
Let’s first look at the rising air. We can see this (perhaps) in the shower. If you use a shower curtain, during the event the curtain is pulled inward, but mainly at the bottom. Clearly the air is trying to get in, to join you in the shower and as side benefit cool down your toes. It does so to replace air already with you in the shower. The shower makes the air nicely warm (and moist). This makes the air less dense (as it expands) and therefore the warm air begins to rise. It is this rise that creates space at the bottom for the colder air to flow in. The rise comes from the temperature gradient between the shower-heated air and the colder air above the shower. As the air rises, it cools and cooler air can carry less water vapour. So moisture from the shower condenses and turns back into water. This releases latent heat: it take energy to evaporate water and this energy is returned when it condenses. The latent heat adds warmth back into the rising air and keeps it rising.
In reality, a shower cubicle is a bit small for all this. There is only a meter or two of height available and physics prefers to think a bit bigger. If we replace the shower cubicle with a tropical ocean, everything works much better. The warm, moisture-laden air above the ocean rises many kilometers, in the process condensing out massive amounts of water, and the latent heat of this condensed water keeps the air rising. The clouds can now reach up to the top of the troposphere. A thunderstorm is born.
We still need to spin up the air. If we take the ocean as example, the spin is naturally there from the rotation of the Earth. Air rises up, and this pulls in air from elsewhere to replace the loss. But now there is a problem. The air has to come from elsewhere on the world. And this comes with a different speed. Why? Because air that feels stationary to us is in reality moving with the rotating earth. At 30 degree latitude, this is at a staggering 1400km/hr! But further from the equator, the speed of rotation is less. At 60 degrees, it is ‘only’ 800 km/hr, and at the pole it is not moving at all – while still going around in circles. But if air moves to a different latitudes, it still has its speed from the old latitude- so now it is going too fast – or too slow.
Source: Roger Williams, https://rwu.pressbooks.pub/webboceanography/chapter/8-2-winds-and-the-coriolis-effect/
The picture shows the effect. As viewed by us, nailed to surface of the planet, the air is moving towards us – and is then deflected because of its wrong speed. It is this deflection that causes the air around the budding storm to spin. Air flows in, but does not get to the centre. It is going sideways. A brilliant demonstration of the effect is in the first two minutes of this video.
The end result is a spin – with the storm sitting at its centre. Now we have the storm caught in a twist. A tropical storm is brewing.
This actually doesn’t work near the equator. The reason is that rotation speed of the Earth barely changes until you get some 10-20 degrees away from the equator. And without a change, there is no spin. This is why you don’t see tropical storms in the tropics close to the equator! You get isolated (but severe) thunderstorms but no cyclones. The region is called the ‘doldrums’, the region of the oceans where the normal winds don’t blow and sailing ships could spend weeks trying to catch the winds from the individual storms. The area was feared by the sailors.
Once the air is rising and spinning, the storm is in business. If the water temperature is above around 27C, the latent heat from the water vapour can provide the power the storm needs: the storm is now self-sustaining, and may be on the way towards hurricane status. But although hurricanes and volcanoes can interact (as in the case of Pinatubo), this is not what this post is about. We need to think small again. It is time to get back into the shower.
For the rotation of the Earth to create a vortex, we need the size of a weather system. A few hundred kilometers across will do – but a few meters will not. So how does a small vortex form?
The answer is that in the shower, just as with large weather systems, we begin with the updraft. This removes air, and in response air from outside the cubicle rushes in to replace it. Bur for some reason, there is a deflection. It may be the overlap in the shower curtains which causes the inflow to take a side step. Or it may be a minute disturbance in a bath tub or sink. This deflection gives rise to rotation. A small deflection to the left will give clockwise rotation and to the right give anti-clockwise rotation. (This is not applicable to digital clocks, by the way.)
Shower cubicles do updrafts and a bit of circular air motion, but they do not make twisters or tornadoes. Bathtub sinks are a bit more effective in showing the effect. But it is possible to make a mini-tornado, or at least something that looks like it. All that is need is creating an updraft, introduce rotating air, and make the result visible. An example is shown below. We have a machine that does the same thing but is much smaller and which we can take away for demonstrations.
“In this haunting, interactive artwork by Ned Kahn, an overhead fan draws air upward, imitating the updraft that occurs in the core of a tornado-spawning thunderstorm. Air blowing from the sides of the aluminium tubes starts the updraft spinning, creating an air vortex, a small-scale tornado. A fog machine injects tiny droplets of water that make the airflow visible.” Source: https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/tornado
Visibility
But the twist is not easy to see. Air is largely invisible! Something needs to be added that is not transparent. In the machine above, condensation is used. The air inside is very moist. Polluting droplets are now introduced in the air. These droplets get taken up by the vortex, and they act as condensation nuclei for the moisture. Suddenly a mini-cloud forms, tracing the vortex nicely. The mini-vortex in the machine is not dangerous: velocities are low and something as simple as a sheet of paper will stop it. But it looks just like the right thing.
Tornadoes have the same problem of invisibility. If it is ‘just’ rotating air, even at speeds of 200 km/hr, the tornado can’t be seen. But at this speed, air pressure drops dramatically and just like in the tornado-in-a-box, condensation forms. This happens first near the cloud level, and therefore it seems as if the tornado is growing downward. The condensation cloud is what we see in a tornado.
If the tornado reaches ground level (many don’t), it has another option. Dust can be sucked up from the ground, and this makes the lower level of the tornado visible. But whereas the cloud disappears again when it get too far from the centre, dust remains visible. So the dust cloud may shows a larger area around the tornado than the clouds.
(A large tornado can suck up things much worse than dust. Let’s not go there – this is not an ‘I-love-a-catastrophe’ post.)
Devils
In between the tornado-in-a-box and the real tornados are the dust devils. The name seems appropriate: a whirlwind of dust suddenly whipped up from the ground, disappearing as quickly as it comes. At least, this is how they can appear, especially around towns. The whirlwind is moving along the ground, but when it reaches a dusty place (such as a road), suddenly they become visible. As the whirl moves off into the field, the dust settles down again and the whirl returns to moving invisibly. I remember being caught in one once when sailing along a narrow stretch of water. There was a bit of rustling in the nearby field and suddenly the boat was pushed flat on the water; seconds later the devil had moved off to the field on the opposite side, with only bending of grass to show its path and the boat righted itself again.
These dust devils can start very easily when a surface is heated enough to trigger uprising of the air. (It requires a high enough temperature contrast with the air higher up.) Once in existence, they can travel some distance until a disruption of the airflow or a lack of heat stops the circulation. The Martian dust devils are famous: they can reach heights of up to 10 km in Mars’ rarified atmosphere.
Waterspouts (or water devils) start a bit different, as water does not show heated patches. Some develop from a normal dust devil or tornado which moved from land to water. To form in-situ, the spout develops above, in the air. This can be from a warm layer of air above the (warm) water, but is often from a thunderstorm. Once it touches the water, the vortex sucks up water (and sometimes fish) and a waterspout is born. The water should be warm, and therefore waterspouts are most common over shallow water which heats up faster, and in Europe are generally seen in late summer.
Source: https://www.weather.gov/key/waterspouts
The centre
As an aside, waterspouts, dust devils and tornadoes have no central eye. Only hurricanes have eyes. In hurricanes, the eye is a column of descending air, located within the violent uprising around it. It is an oasis of calm, surrounded by the torrential winds; the clouds are gone, the sun is shining and people come outside the assess the damage – too early. Immediately around the eye are the strongest winds, and thus once the eye passes, the hurricane wind suddenly are back with a vengeance – from the opposite direction as before. But only large hurricanes have such eyes. Smaller ones, tornadoes and devils, do have a centre where the wind is still, but no descending column.
The rotating winds can not reach the very centre. This is because of angular momentum. As a packet of rotating air moves close to the centre, it has to speed up. This can be considerable. Take a bit of air moving sideways at 1 m/s, 100 meters from the centre. As it reached 10 meters from the centre, it is now rotating at 10 m/s, and at 1 meter, 100 ms. (This ignores turbulence and friction – reality is sometimes not as exciting as it could be.) At the centre, it would need to go at infinite speed (in theory..). But the speed it can reach is limited by the available energy. The higher the energy (heat), the closer in the rotation can get and the faster it can go. It is all bout heat.
Firenado
So these are twisters. All that is needed, really, is air and heat. Obviously, more heat is better. Forest fires are a good example. They are hot, and they are large. The rising air above a forest fire can form cumulus clouds (pyrocumulonimbi). So naturally, they can also form twisters. Smaller ones are called fire devils, larger ones are known as fire twisters or firenadoes. A large one was seen during the bushfires in Canberra in 2003, the famous fires which destroyed the Mount Stromlo Observatory. It reached wind speeds over 200 km/hr and was caught on video.
(If you are wondering, the commentator does speak English. The tall spikes are on the goals on the nearby sports field.)
Volcanado
A volcanic eruption is also a major source of heat. Naturally, they too form twisters of varying sizes. As in forest fires, no thunderstorm is required: volcanoes can make those themselves quite nicely, but they are not essential. The lava is hot enough.
Here at VC, we saw a surprising dust devil during the early phase of the 2021 Geldingadalir eruption – a valley that no longer exists (we had to change the name fo the eruption several times) and an eruption that in various phases would continue until (at least) 2025. The surprise was to see a twister in Iceland (a country not known for its heat). There was one in 2018 which caused some damage – which was so unusual that it became world news. The second surprise was that it was seen during a snow storm.
This one had formed over the lava fields, and once formed, moved off the lava and there became visible by picking up dust, which in this case will have included some tephra.
Here is an even better one, from the same eruption but now forming at the heart of the action, above the freshly erupted lava. This is a true lavanado! The prosaic name lava twister is probably more appropriate, but lavanado has a nice ring to it.
Kilauea-nado
During the current Kilauea episodes, we have seen some nice phenomena, including fire jets and rainbows. We have also seen several twisters, which form in the wind rushing in towards the lava fountain. It is sidetracked by the cone, and ends up above the hot tephra. All ingredients for a tephra devil are now in place.
In the most recent episode, such a devil formed, and as usual, moved around a bit trying to find its feet. At first the rotation was fairly wide; I estimate the winds at some 15 m/s. But it lasted unusually long and became impressive. It contracted and rotated much faster, perhaps 40 m/s. (It is hard to estimate at this point.) Finally, it made a wrong move and disintegrated. Here is the view from the HVO V3 camera. (For V1, the twister was hiding all the time behind the lava fountain!) Get a coffee and take your time: the video lasts as long as the twister did.
It is interesting that this twister did not start above the fresh lava. The lava stream was perhaps too narrow. The rotation may have come from the shape of the surrounding caldera. If you are curious, I would recommend against going inside this one. The dust you see is burning hot tephra, the air is hot from the lava fountains and your survival time would be a battle between the heat and the sulphur. In fact, I would not recommend going inside a dust devil either, knowing of one person who did so out of curiosity, got his car overturned in one and his passenger killed. I just mention it.
Litla Rhút-nado
Have we seen better? Not often, I think. However, there was one in Iceland which was not as clear as this one, but in my opinion more spectacular.
It was during the July 2023 eruption at Litla Rhút, the last of the Fagradalsfjall events. The video shows a very large vortex which split up into several distinct vortices, all rotating around a common centre. It formed at the borderline of the lava flow. People who were watching the eruption rathe close to the lava flow, found themselves in the forming volcanado and as the twister strengthened, quickly dispersed to watch from a safer distance.
This is a volcanic version of the dance of the seven veils. What a world we live in.
And finally, the video from which the image at the top of this post is taken.
Albert, June 2026
Just a small extra comment on weather systems. For years as a child I could never really understand how weather systems worked. Not helped my teachers (it turned out) not understanding it either. It made no sense. Air over really hot areas (like baking deserts) which should be less dense and rising, actually had falling air from above, and cold wet areas (like Britain) had rising air. It made no sense.
Then it dawned on me. Its all to do with something that has huge amounts of energy, latent heat of fusion of water. There are two columns of air in rough balance, one over deserts and one over (say) tropical jungle. One, the tropical one, has a hidden power source, latent heat of evaporation of water vapour. As this wet column rises it cools, this is because air pressure is less and the rising air expands, cooling it so it stays in equilibrium. This drops the temperature below the dew point and water precipitates (and falls to earth, cold from the altitude), this heats the air which is not in equilibrium, its to hit for its altitude so it rises, and the sequence continues to the top of the weather atmosphere (troposphere?, I forget). The now dry and cold air then moves at altitude to an area of low pressure AT THAT ALTITUDE which is typically above deserts (the air circulates, so somewhere it must fall) where you now have a column of cold dry air which falls because the bottom is sucked into the bottom of the ascending wet column, a thousand miles away. Now it all makes perfect sense, as does the comment of meteorologists discussing hurricanes talking about high level outflows above the system as important.
In passing, and one day (will likely die first), I would like to model a solar life-support system. This is a (very) large tower with a hollow core (think huge power station cooling towers) perhaps 2 to 3 kn high taking in moist hot air at the bottom and producing internal freshwater rain, and enough wind to power wind turbines. Set around the bast with a mix of saltwater evaporators and greenhouses for food are polytunnel like devices moistening desert air and feeding it to the tower, Free food and electricity, all solar powered and self-sustaining, what’s not to like?
Rant over.
Yes, it is not easy to understand! Water is a significant part of it but it would work without it as well. Hot air rises, but as it does it expands and cools. The air already there is also colder than that on the ground: that is the normal temperature gradient of roughly 1C/100 meter altitude. If the rising air cools slower with altitude than the surrounding air, it keeps rising. There is a minimum temperature gradient: if the temperature difference between low and high altitude is larger than this minimum, the air is unstable and you will get rising bubbles: thermals, or convection. This will often give rise to clouds but many thermals are not visible. Birds can find them: look for the birds of prey or vultures circling high in the sky. As you say, if clouds form, the latent heat is an additional source of power and the convection can go much higher and become much more vigorous.
There are low pressure and high pressure systems. Air will flow from high to low pressure. These systems are at low altitude, and the air flow is the ground level wind. In a high pressure system, air flows out at ground level, and this must be replaced from above. Is you get descending air and as this warms up as it descend, you get low humidity. The Coriolis force can close off the high pressure system, leaving the air captive and still. Temperatures can go to extremes (either way!).
Trouble that argument would make air rise above really hot deserts and fall on cold areas. Its the argument my school teachers made, completely missing the point that over hot deserts the air column is falling and cooler tropics its rising, the opposite of what the naive argument would conclude.
Note the air rises and falls in blocks tens or hundreds of km across, its in adiabatic equilibrium, it does not heat or cool adjacent air (ie no energy flows sideways, or even out of any packet of air, **other than as rain**).
The effects of coriolis force and rotation on the rising column are another interesting point but the fact that these are more localised (that is low pressure areas rising are smaller and more unstable) has many interesting features but at its core its a higher energy-dense and this faster and more turbulent subsystem, the descending block is pretty much just falling under its own weight.
Its not that complex, but its not trivial, which is why its fun.
No, not really! Air rises because of the temperature gradient, not the actual temperature. In a desert, the ground gets much hotter than the air above it. So you get convection (dust devils) but they don’t rise high enough to affect the weather.
Correct, but why, – compared to humid tropics?
Bigger temperature gradient across desert vertical axis smaller over tropics. Air rises stratospherically over tropics but is falling over deserts. Doesn’t make sense, until you consider the actual energy transfer dominated by latent heat. The water falls out of the volume, the heat remains. Its a heat engine. The higher it goes, the cooler it gets and the more heat is dumped in as the water precipitates out. The more heat that is dumped in, the more out of equilibrium the air mass becomes. So it goes on rising. Surprise!
Please look carefully at what I wrote and consider the physics of a rising damp adiabatic air mass, whilst not complex, its not trivial as your suggestion is.
Sure, water is part of it and re-inforces the pattern. In the tropics, the rain follows the sun: the rainy seasons are typically when the sun is overhead. They cause more heat, convection, evaporation, clouds and rain. An ice age with cool climates is much dryer. The rising air has to go somewhere, and ends up coming down in the subtropics. The descending air suppresses convection, and inhibits rain.
I have spend a fair amount of my life in deserts. Convection can happen year-round, as evidenced by dust devils. But these cells of rising air only get as far as the inversion layer – another characteristic of deserts. During the day time, clouds may form at the level of the inversion layer but they don’t grow: these are fair-weather clouds. At night, convection stops, clouds suddenly disappear, and the sky becomes clear. The inversion layer caps the dust and turbulence. At night the inversion layer drops. I have often seen poor conditions at observatories during day time, and at sunset the inversion layer drops below the top of the mountain and everything clears. One place had a humid season in summer, and during that time, the convection cells would grow much higher and produce thunderstorms – that is the latent heat you refer to. Of course, the fact that it doesn’t work well under descending air (which also causes the inversion layer) is the reason these places become deserts!
As recent as a few thousand years ago, the deserts of the Sahara and Arabia were much wetter, with even a major river in Saudi Arabia. That was because the Atlantic moisture penetrated much further at that time. Local conditions can change. But the general circulation pattern with high pressure in the subtropics suppressing convection and rain, persists.
In my experience, temperature gradient are not larger over deserts. The descending air forms a warm cap, the inversion layer. The sun heats the ground but that heat does not transfer easily to the air because of the low humidity. So you get a huge gradient close to the ground but a much lower one a bit higher up, and it goes to zero at the inversion layer.
This is a fun discussion. Forces me to think.
I will not argue further, you are either not reading what I say, or have a gap in your knowledge here. I have made clear the actual physical situation, and its often mentioned similarly if you read the NOAA hurricane reports (to be fair the only other place I have seen this mechanism taken for granted). Your view makes no sense when air is falling over hot deserts and rising over cooler (due transpiratonal cooling) tropics. Only when you consider the entire vertical air column is the low pressure (at ground level) lighter than the descending column over MUCH hotter deserts. Its powered by latent heat of evaporation reheating the low pressure rising column, its a standard heat engine. The top of the low pressure area is at a higher relative pressure (its rising, right) than the top of the high pressure area (its falling, right). I’m quite surprised you cannot see it, when I have explained this to other physicists who had been taught wrongly (as I had) they immediately grasped the mechanism.
I am sorry to have upset you!
How did the rainforests surivive the ice ages? in isolated wet refugias?
I spend most of my time watching weather.
You can see diurnal changes in the flow off the gulf. (Nexrad)
Pcola itself tends to have nasty weather go around us. Heat island? Probably not. We aren’t that big.
However…. most successful tornadoes here are water spout remnants adjusting to landfall.
So what happens when a massive fire ignites in an area known for erratic winds and convective storm formation?
On July 26, 2018, it was a very hot day in Redding, Calif, with temps exceeding 110F and reaching 113F on local Wx stations (at my place it was 109F about 20 miles to the SE). Given that Redding is in the far northern tip of the Sacramento Valley, it is surrounded on three sides by mountains (the Coast Range/Trinity’s to the west, the Cascades to the north and the northern Sierra to the ESE). As the heat of day increases, thermal low pressure over the Valley develops, and by late afternoon/eve, the low gets strong enough to draw in air coming through the San Francisco Bay Delta to the south. The incoming air (i.e. Delta Breeze) comes from the WSW then hits the western slopes of the N-S trending Sierra and gets deflected northward then NW up the gut of the Valley. Meanwhile, a second flow of air gets drawn in from the WNW coming over the Trinity mountains and due to orographic gaps in the mountain range/Shasta Bolly, gets funnelled directly over Redding. When/where the two flows (Delta Breeze + Trinity downslope) collide, a convergence sets up that can trigger severe thunderstorms to develop when enough water and the air column temperature gradient is favorable. On this day, such a convergence was present with super-hot air below, and smallish cumulus clouds developed over the nascent convergence zone just west of Redding. Then, late in the afternoon, an unlucky vacationer lost a tire from their trailer as it passed the Carr Powerhouse in the foothills along hiway 299. Sparks from the wheel’s rim then ignited a fire in the adjacent grasses. With winds screaming through the 299 gap, the fire exploded in a matter of minutes into an inferno and began spreading eastward towards Redding. As the fire reached the western edge of town, the westerly winds were met by Delta Breeze winds coming up from the south, which automatically set up an erratic wind field that at times were gusting to over 25 mph. As the fire spread, it moved into a lush zone of fuel and exploded in intensity strong enough to create a pyroCb along with a fire whirl getting spun up. Given the airmass was already unstable inside the convergence zone, the fire whirl transitioned into a bonafide tornado (firenado) under a developing thunderstorm that reached nearly 40,000′ high. The firenado/tornado lasted nearly 30 minutes…far beyond what a typical fire-whirl produces or a dust devil. At it’s peak, the tornado hit west Redding with winds to 154mph (i.e. ~F3 on the enhanced Fujita scale), and killed 4 people including a dozer operator who caught directly under the tornado that overran his dozer. Many homes and structures were damaged/destroyed from the winds and also greatly hampered resources trying to reach the fire zone, thus making things even worse. Since the tornado was now part of a big thunderstorm, it remained intact even after it cleared the immediate fire zone and progressed NNE into the foothills of the Cascades where it finally dissipated. There were even reports of hail and ground scouring that occurred away from the immediate fire zone which confirms the tornado was being sustained by factors other than directly over flames.
Though officially the NWS has classified the tornado as a “fire whirl”, I have pictures of a convergence line of clouds that were firing up before the fire..and given the eventual duration and intensity of the winds, most local experts believe the firenado did indeed transition to tornado status given the antecedent conditions (thunderstorm), ground reports and radar imagery confirming the tornado reached 18,000′ in height.
I have often wondered what could happen if Mt. Shasta were to erupt during a time when a convergence was present…but perish the thought. The implications are beyond the scope of anything we’ve ever seen on a normal basis.
One thing else to consider from fire or volcano triggered storms (pyro Cb’s) is how storms can expand the fire by first triggering new fires from lightning far away from the fire itself, then downbursts/outflow winds (not unlike the winds that support pyroclastic flows) then hit the fire with gale force winds that turns the forest fire into a blowtorch. When this happens, the increased heat (more oxygen) can reach temps such that the ground becomes literally sterilized (scorched earth). I just saw this phenomena last week on a side-trip along the east slopes of Mt. Lassen in the aftermath of the devastating Dixie fire (nearly 1 million acres) in 2021. Now nearly 5 years later, the ground still looks like the fire happened last week. Nothing but dark rock and soil as far as the eye could see. The slopes around Lassen were some of the densest forests in all of California..and when a sudden wind shift (from winds circling around the volcano) hit the fire, the fire reached such intensity that the ground was laid to waste devoid even fungi at depth. In time it will recover, as it did following the 1917 eruption, but in the meantime, the effects will be there for generations.
These fires can reach 1000C. It is as bad as lava. nothin organic would be left at the surface
Exactly correct! our May Scandinavian / UK bonfires can reach 15 meters high flames that we haves in our forest backyard: if you haves a good draft air sucked in in the burn pile you can reach about 1140 c maybe and thats about as hot as many basaltic lava flows, the bigger the pile the stronger the air updrafts and the hotter the fire. You often reach 800 to 1000 c with these fires its a radiant heat thats hard to describe.
We have had 16 souch may fires ( burnings ) on our backyard in the last 34 years on the same spot. I guess the lawn grass and soil is 100% completely stone dead now 🙂 looks like hirishoma ground zero
Imagine how a wildfire woud burn on an alien Super Earth with 2earth atmospheres of pressure
The ground below there is now as dead as the ground below the tsar bomba was hours after the detonation. Nothing hav ever grown since there inside this spot area in our backyard there is no organic matter for life left.
The crazy old neighbur just beside our summerhouse also haves huge fires 🙂 the smell in winter from the wood stove ( kamin ) of burnt rubber, burned plastic, burned fish, burned food, burned waste at night at winter hahah. Its common in scandinavia to use wood stoves as illegal waste incenirators with wood as accelerant : 0 : D
“volcanado”
No. Incorrect.
Correct is “volnado.” Much more resonant with both root words. Got a nice ring to it, too. Almost poetic sounding.
I give it to you for what it cost me to think it up, just now. Nothing at all.
The word volnado can readily be found and has been used before. But ‘vol’ is insufficient to identify ‘volcano’. The obvious meaning would be ‘voluminous’ which would make it a wide tornado. So Volcanado it is with equal stress on the 1st and 3rd syllable, making it a nice round term
Horse Latitudes can be fun!… on a cruise ship …
but not quite as bad as the doldrums
Oooo daydreams of the ITCZ the stuck in pacific doldrums just below Hawaii: the seawater is as addictive blue as dark sapphire and as clear as air! the tropical sun shines down on the boat – deck with souch an intensity that you can fry your eggs on it every afternoon. Sailboat cabin becomes an awfuly hot sultry sweaty and stinky experience in the Equator!
OT, but a potentially interesting one from USGS earthquake reports:
M 5.0 – Kermadec Islands, New Zealand 2026-06-21 23:14:39 (UTC)
M5s along the Kermadecs are a dime a dozen, but this one is shallow and according to the USGS map is centered only 1 km east of Curtis Island, which looks to be part of a larger caldera system.
Back in 2012 a short distance further to the south the Havre Seamount erupted and formed enormous pumice rafts. So if the M5 is volcanic rather than tectonic we could get some fun. Fortunately it’s so far from anywhere that even a tsunami from a Hunga Tonga style eruption would be unlikely to do much damage.
As someone who regularly relocates Kermadec earthquakes, I’d seriously question the significance of that localisation.
“1 km east” means nothing without the associated uncertainty ellipse – and in the case of Kermadec events, that ellipse will be large!
Yes, that’s why I mentioned Havre. Another eruption there would be more likely that at Curtis, and the 2012 eruption was rather large, albeit at depth.
Scientist Autopsy the Aftermath of the Largest Underwater Volcanic Eruption of the Last Century (Smithsonian mag, 2018)
Look at the map:
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000sv1m/region-info
It’s an entirely typical regional earthquake, indistinguishable from thousands of others in that area. A focal mechanism would be nice but at that magnitude we probably won’t get one.
Yes, M5s are common along the Kermadecs. What I should do is look at your drums when one of these occurs. I didn’t think to at the time.
But mainly I was hoping to give a quick heads up in case something significant was happening. I regularly keep an eye on your excellent webcams and activity reports, but haven’t been checking the drums.
https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=17&lat=-1.41111&lng=29.20552&themeId=DEFAULT-THEME&visualizationUrl=U2FsdGVkX19XlNqkgKBPR7Y3sNWj%2Bt%2BezV8hjOHxdur2utu9jdeBFOs%2FTaN8DEBRPGigHHvheSqJCcr1o8UjuHvez3FG32WAMf3IxvPVhwojQ94xtMVdx7Jo0ySK%2FaD7&datasetId=S2_L2A_CDAS&fromTime=2026-06-20T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&toTime=2026-06-20T23%3A59%3A59.999Z&layerId=1_TRUE_COLOR&demSource3D=%22MAPZEN%22&cloudCoverage=30&dateMode=SINGLE
https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=17&lat=-1.41111&lng=29.20552&themeId=DEFAULT-THEME&visualizationUrl=U2FsdGVkX19fTApV2%2FT7HrLQOQvYrPzmbWGcSDibf49OpPdUDU4%2FgBM2a%2FEbJInBrsZ0qMCabXlyJK9MJPndtHUmMkf9cqgvmRmZ6CJHjy92GK034s7DiXdlWxSGANlW&datasetId=S2_L2A_CDAS&fromTime=2026-06-20T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&toTime=2026-06-20T23%3A59%3A59.999Z&layerId=6-SWIR&demSource3D=%22MAPZEN%22&cloudCoverage=30&dateMode=SINGLE
Nyiramuragiras huge lava lake remains active its nearly 400 meters long over 300 meters. Nyiragongo also hosts a smaller lava lake
Something is happening in Loto…
If you go to NASA’s FIRMS website, there are large hotspots all along the shore; it looks like it has erupted.
I don’t know how to put an image.
It is not uncommon. FIRMS often shows hotspots on the beaches there. I don’t know why – maybe people are having barbecues? If I understand the site correctly, the hot spots were seen in the local evening
Distinct eruption plume from 07:40am onwards, looks to be coming from the north/northeast
Actually circling back a little looks like there were eruptions yesterday but from the west side. The eruption plume looks pretty substantial throughout today
Hi Albert and Andry, thank you very much for your reply.
Andy, where can you see it from? A webcam?
The site Andy listed is a weather satellite cloud map. It is a good way to look for eruption clouds, by just clicking the up / down arrow on the time. I did not note any: the clouds that popped seemed the normal rain storms to me
https://zoom.earth/maps/satellite/#view=24.646661,141.283442,9.27z/date=2026-06-25,10:00,+1
Was mainly 21st to 24th Albert:
https://zoom.earth/maps/satellite-hd/#view=24.792449,141.324921,11z/date=2026-06-23,am/overlays=fires
Difficult to judge but looks like Ioto produced an eruption:
https://zoom.earth/maps/satellite/#view=24.7381,141.319,7z
Not really sure on the dynamics of clouds but worth ticking along the 10 minute until now time.
It does make it look like some sort of dramatic eruption but it’s probably the storm.
Thanks Albert! I always enjoy an article with a twist.
Just a small spell check. The July 2023 Icelandic eruption happened near Litli-Hrútur. Litli is the masculine form of little (litla being the feminine form) and Hrútur means ram.
That multi-vortex twister was really impressive.
I was for more than two weeks on a voyage, so couldn’t participate in Volcanocafé. But I discovered a Swedish mountain with a volcanic past: Kinnekulle. Diabas covered sediments below and protected them against erosion. This created table/plateau mountains above the usual Swedish craton landscape. https://www.platabergensgeopark.se/en/the-geology/
With much of Europe sweltering under record setting heat…especially in France where 40 are reported dead with 110F+ temps, my hopes are that thousands/millions of people don’t experience the same urban fire conditions that we’ve experienced here during similar heat waves (BTW, 110F is rather mundane at my place where seasonal hi temps usually peak around 113F-115F).
In today’s climate regime, wind-driven fires have grown to such intensity that they’ve migrated out of the wildlands and entered 100% urbanized areas where the fires torched entire neighborhoods (and some entire cities). Just in the last 10 years, the massive/catastrophic fires in southern California in Jan 2024, the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, the Dixie fire that wiped the small town of Greenville off the map and the infamous Camp fire that roared through Paradise all used man-made structures/materials as fuel; were all examples of urban firestorms. But not just in California…urban firestorms in Hawaii (Lahaina), Canada (Lyton and Ft. McHenry: note Lyton is/was north of 50N latitude and logged the highest temp ever recorded anywhere on Earth that far north at 122F) and Colorado (near Boulder) saw towns either completely destroyed or suffering major damage and thousands of life’s lost.
Historically, fire’s have destroyed many towns and cities worldwide, so urban fires are certainly not unique to today’s world…just that in the past, these urban firestorm events occurred once in a decade or even longer in between, while now it seems like every year or so, there’s a fire somewhere that grows to magnitudes unknown in modern times.
And lastly, what about all the smoke/ash and carbon and other urban poison air that gets hoisted high in the atmosphere from pyroCb activity? Not all the crap gets washed out since PyroCb’s can reach the tropopause, and in rare circumstances, even go beyond where the Junge layer resides. While a lot of attention is being paid to El Nino and/or AGHG emissions, I am of the opinion that long-residence-time residuals from all the wildfires starting around 2018 are playing a significant role in some of the synoptic weather patterns we’re seeing today…primarily by cooling the stratosphere which in turn results in a subsiding air column that supports increasingly massive High Pressure cells leading to increased compressional (adiabatic) heating (like what’s over Europe now).
Just got a Quake alert. Minor swaying at my place from est. M5.6 about 100 miles SW of my place near the town of WIllits near the Maacama Fault zone (which runs parallel to the San Andreas). It’s been quite active recently with lots of M2’s and a few M3’s in the last couple of years or so. Oblique faulting showing up on moment tensor. With all the recent activity to the NW of the epicenter along/near the Mendocino Triple Junction, some stress transfer may have helped trigger today’s shock? So far, no notable aftershocks.
Venezuela just got hit hard by two major earthquakes. First a 7.2, then a 7.5 just seconds later.
The Earth is restless today. Also, an M6.9 off the north coast of Honshu. Could be an aftershock from the Tohoku megathrust, even though that was nearly 15 years ago…or it could be a oneoffer…or it could be a sign that the locked section of fault off Hokkaido is continuing to get ready to let loose (lots of nearby seismicity recently within a couple hundred miles of today’s quake). Interesting there has been only one aftershock per USGS.
This looks terrible.
I saw the USGS estimates on causalities soon after the event. I hope they are wrong.
Mac
It looks really bad. What would a 7.2 plus 7.5 be if they were counted as one earthquake? A minute apart the impact is almost cumulative.
That adds up to slightly less than M7.6. First covert to seismic moment in Nm, then add the values and finally convert back to moment magnitude scale.
That means the M7.2 is more or less within the uncertainty of the M7.5. That’s how huge the difference can be between quakes with magnitudes that to the human mind seem very similar.
Thanks. Shows how significant the log scale is. Not easy to get the relativity unless familiar! So cumulatively not that much bigger, but still two big earthquakes within a minute of each other. And in a region where building are not designed to withstand I guess.
I didn’t have in my mind that Venezuela participates in the Andes tectonics and can have strong earthquakes. I did rather associate the famous table mountains (tepui) with Venezuela, where there is the highest water fall of the earth: Salto Ángel.
Langjökull is currently Iceland’s swarm hotspot: https://skjalftalisa.vedur.is/?from=2026-05-31T22%3A00%3A00.000Z&to=2026-06-26T09%3A48%3A01.346Z&split=EQWwhgDsQ&lat=64.57190061362857&lng=-20.748559640368057&zoom=9.95062006588514
The earthquake swarms occur in Prestahnukur’s fissure swarm that is one of two volcanic systems in and around Langjökull glacier.
Europe is reeling from an enormous heatwave, see https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/heat-dome-europe-excessive-historic-heatwave-june-july-summer-2026-mk/ “Europe’s Excessive Heat Warning: Record June Heat Dome Spikes France to 45°C, UK Eyes 40 °C”.
I think that several VEI6 eruptions are needed to cool down the climate, otherwise the the global warming will be much worse in the years ahead.
I’d expect that after the reduction of CO2 emissions to pre-industrial levels (18th century) we’ll have to wait for at least 400 years to get a normal climate back. Some greenhouse effects work in the longrun, so they haven’t unfolded yet.
Volcanic VEI6 to 8 eruption may cause a shorterm climate cooling, but won’t eliminate the CO2 and methan gasses in the atmosphere. In these cases after a short phase of “volcanic winter”, the climate would bounce back to the current path of global warming.
Currently Kilauea’s two vents are taking turns pretending to be Roman Candles.
looking good for the fountaining!
little lava visible n v1 cam
New post is up! The Venezuela earthquakes
https://www.volcanocafe.org/the-2026-venezuela-earthquakes/