Volcano World Cup 2018: The Champions

We begin with the real World Cup, and a big congratulations goes to France who were crowned world champions of football 2018 last Sunday after beating Croatia 4-2 in the final at Moscow. We also acknowledge the World Cup runners-up Croatia for giving it their all.

So the Volcano World Cup has now come to an end and the much loved Iceland has been crowned volcano world champions after few weeks of voting.

Iceland are the champions! SOURCE: www.freepik.com

Let’s take a look at how Iceland did it…

Iceland started off in Group D and they were up against Argentina, Croatia, and Nigeria. All Croatia had was a small handful of volcanic remnants which really were no match for countries with actual volcanoes. The west African nation of Nigeria has a couple of volcanic regions with small cones but none been active during historical times. Then there was Argentina, a country which has a handful of volcanoes but only a couple of historical eruptions between them. So the final standings looked like this: 1. Iceland, 2. Argentina, 3. Croatia, 4. Nigeria.

Then in the second round (the knockout stages) Iceland saw off France, a country which actually has it’s active volcanoes in overseas territories. Then Iceland defeated Spain in the quarter finals, a country which has most of it’s volcanism in the Canary Islands. Then in the semi finals, Iceland had it’s toughest match with fellow volcanic powerhouse Japan but managed to overcome them to reach the final. And finally it was Peru, a country with some explosive stratovolcanoes in the Andes south of the country, whom Iceland defeated to win the Volcano World Cup 2018.

Landmannalaugar. SOURCE: floatingmyboat.com

Thanks to all who participated in the polls throughout the duration and I hope you all had fun with it.

RENÉ GOAD

164 thoughts on “Volcano World Cup 2018: The Champions

  1. Well… as the last active manifestation of the North Atlantic Igneous Province (which formed the Thulean Plateau)… it was pretty much a guaranteed win.

  2. After I did all those calculations a while ago I would have been really surprised if Iceland didn’t win. The biggest thermal energy events on earth in the Holocene are the Icelandic flood basalts, the equivalent energy release of a VEI 7 explosive eruption with a tephra volume of 700 km3 (no actual Holocene explosive eruption is anywhere near this), and the fact the ones on that scale happen every 1000 years or so when it takes millennia or much longer for other places to produce a comparable amount of energy is proof in and of itself. Had the USA been in the cup then it would have a true competitor with Hawaii, but that is not how things turned out.

    As I said earlier though I’m surprised it was Peru and not Russia that was in the final with it, Kamchatka is a powerhouse of its own and generally much MUCH more active than Peru, and probably not too far behind Iceland compared to the other places. I guess that is the randomness of a competition like this.

    • I myself expected Russia to beat Peru but somehow, the people have spoken

    • I don’t think the US would have had a chance either. We’ve got what? One monster province that may have had that level of effusive power 20 myr ago and a psychotic Polynesian goddess with anger management issues.

      • Well the ‘angry fire goddess’ is responsible for both the biggest active volcano and the most powerful volcano on earth at the same time so I think that counts for something, even if Hawaii is only part of the USA because no one could say no without a nuke bring ‘air mailed’ to them 😉

        Also if pre Holocene is allowed then there is the whole yellostone hotspot caldera track, snake river plain, San Juan volcanic field (la garita caldera), long valley caldera, valles caldera, cascade range etc… 😉

        • I think the only nuke threat to Hawaii was blowing out the telephone network from the Johnston Island tests. We had a pretty reliable record of underestimating the effects.

      • Well they might stand a small chance if they team up with the rest of the ring of fire, bribe the umpire (the moon?), drug Icelands goalie and use some major steroids… Maybe that is actually what the pacific ring of fire is, a violent and angry barrier around Hawaii to stop it getting to Iceland… 😉

        • Big advantage to the US & Pele, however, in overall impact, in my opinion. Hawaii’s large and sustained subaerial eruptions may have caused far reaching impacts. I think many of Iceland’s eruptions have been subglacial. While unbelievably impressive in scale, subglacial eruptions typically have much less impact outside of the immediate area.

  3. https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/multimedia_uploads/multimediaFile-2455.mp4

    A video of the lava flowing out of pu’u 8 (someone should really give it a proper name, its definitely not just a fissure anymore and hasn’t been for months).
    It is very interesting that it looks like there was a period when the lava completely stopped erupting at all and some of it was even backflowing into the vent while there was a lot of spattering. It also looks like there is more of a vigorously overflowing lava lake than an actual fountain now, like what happened with holuhraun. Maybe this is actually pretty normal for sustained high eruption rates during hawaiian eruptions, and sustained high lava fountains are atypical and only happen when eruptions are episodic.

    • Well, it started as a fissure cone… how about “Hekla” … no, wait, that’s taken.

      … but, you are correct. They need to get off their arse or we will just give it whatever comes to mind… much like we did for Bob.

      They would really look silly with an Icelandic style name in the middle of their island. Imagine trying to stick something like “kjúklingur hæð” in their advertising flyers and trying to equate that to their cultural history. “Oh, we sat on our ass and some volcano aficionados scattered across the globe gave it the name…

      • Naming things in Hawaii is complicated. The names should be native Hawaiian and go through committees where the natives have their say. Informally, we can use any name we want. How about Eva? ‘Eight’ in Hawaiian is Ewalu – we shouldn’t allocate native names but can go for something that sounds similar.

        I am happy it wasn’t fissure 22 that came to dominate – apparently that is Iwakaluakumamalua in Hawaiian which doesn’t quite roll of the tongue if you don’t know the language.

        And it would be somewhat appropriate but politically incorrect to call it ‘Donald’ or ‘Boris’ – every time one of them opens his mouth, something gets damaged by the fall-out.

  4. I finally found a number for the volume of the mauna ulu eruption, it is actually a lot smaller than I thought, ‘only’ 0.35 km3. This eruption is now at least 50% bigger in 1/20 of the duration… I doubt it will overtake pu’u o’o but still this is way bigger than anyone could have predicted, and I think this has gone far beyond the point of being a ‘typical’ east rift eruption. The longer this has gone on the more confident I am of my predictions.

    There are a lot of comments on videos talking about how this is just the start and there is going to be an even bigger flow when mauna loa erupts, but realistically I doubt it will actually be anywhere near as big as the eruption now and is way less likely to affect inhabited areas as much as this.

    • For Mauna Loa to erupt, there needs to be a source of magma feeding it. Currently, the Kilauea→East Rift is the dominant path… with the East Rift seeming to be taking all of the inflow to the system. I have no idea if this route will become the overall dominant flow route, but unless there are indications that Mauna Loa is receiving fresh material, I seriously doubt that it will do much of anything.

      • Currently the hotspot is feeding 95% to kilauea and the other 5% to mauna loa so it has a very low supply rate (for Hawaii, it’s actually quite high by world standards) but still receives some magma. Just like in 1984 when mauna loa had accumulated enough magma after 1950 to have a substantial eruption again despite being starved of magma by kilauea, the current situation would allow a similar or maybe even somewhat bigger eruption to occur. After that it would likely go mostly dormant again and stay in a period of low activity until the source under kilauea is depleted which might take decades.

        I think that mauna loa didn’t erupt at all between 1843 and some point before 1790, so the current period of dormancy is probably not actually unusual just not historically recorded.

    • King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.
      Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
      Arthur: Be quiet!
      Dennis the Peasant: You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”

      • Almost as dry as a dust bowl here too, walked through the New Forest yesterday and got blackened by the dust like I had not washed for a year!
        Longest drought since 1976 here.

        • Warning: off-topic and parochial…

          1975 was also pretty dry and there was little rain over 75/6 winter so when 1976 came the effects were very dramatic in the worst affected areas.

          So if 2019 is also dry ….

          • The thought did cross my mind, the harvest of animal fodder is not doing too well at the moment either.
            Food and water are going to be talked about in a different more expensive manner no doubt…
            Not to mention the usual “Biblical rains” when its finally all over.

    • The vegetation die off is also quite striking.
      As is the water cloudy clear/separation.
      Being in the actual system when the volcano makes its own weather must be on a few storm chasers to do lists by now, likewise the twisters as seen fissure 8 and Holuhraun.

      • All the grass is yellow here. And still no sign of this damn heatwave ending! (Though maybe this is the new normal, 26 instead of 21 up ‘ere in t’ north and 30 in the south….)

        • Yellow here and just in time for the school holidays, thank god there are hardly any cigarette smokers around any more, too many fires already this Summer and there is still over a month left, if it carries on until September we will be loosing more than a few trees and hay fields.

    • Echo tops from the local NexRad. Animation run made from College of DuPage Weather Site {Note: Typically NexRad can not detect ash clouds. Doppler weather radar usually “sees” water in the form of precipitation or clouds. Ash, which is mostly silica, is transparent at the frequencies of Doppler Radar. In fact, antenna protective structures such as radomes are typically made from fiberglass because it is transparent to radar.} What you are seeing in this breif animated gif are the tops of the pyrocumulus clouds. 2000 to 6000 feet high. With a few making it to the 6000 to 10000 foot range probably due to additional uplift from the terrain effects.

  5. somewhat volcano related: got so into reading plots that i went to sip my morning shake and encountered the straw that i had forgotten. Results not pretty. Stay alert out there….. Best!motsfo

  6. The lava channel seems to be overflowing again. But the earthquake hasn’t yet happened (although it should be shortly).

  7. Looking at the quake map from Vatnajökull on the IMO site, aside from the protagonists Askja, Herdubreid and Orae our friend Greip seems to have gotten a new intrusion. (I wanted to add a screenshot from the IMO site, but I can’t find out how to do that on my mobile)

  8. the surge is on and right on time… 2 hours after the 3.mumblemuble….

    • Humans being what they are, don’t remember the rock fall not too long ago that hit the ground with such force that trees were toppled from the shock wave of the air blast from the impact. The Park service doesn’t want a repeat of that carnage.

      • That makes me think, that if enough rock falls far enough at high velocity, not only will there be a powerful shock wave, but also lightning just like when a volcano does its stuff. Sounds right, not sure though.

      • If it causes charge separation and transport, yeah, I could see it. Also, quartz is a peizoelectric crystal, to that could go quite a ways in generating moving electrons.

    • One might have guessed the Daily Fail and it’s sister roll of toilet paper known as the Express would be involved in the rumours. How stupid can these fools be in these papers?

      • Maybe someone should buy them some blocks of sulfur, it is yellow and can technically be considered a stone 😉

      • There really is no excuse these days for professional journalists to be so ill informed about volcanoes and Yellostone, yet it seems rinse and repeat brain cells is the norm.
        Lemming journalism. Or sheep…

      • Speaking of toilet paper rolls. In the Sensuround movie “Earthquake” I distinctly remember a scene where an underground passageway is being over-run by a torrent of water from the dam bursting. In front of the huge surge of water, a roll of toilet paper was skittering along in the central trough towards the camera.

  9. https://m.facebook.com/100001276351017/posts/1892994577419736?ref=m_notif&deeplink_fb=1&refid=17&notif_t=live_video&_ft_=top_level_post_id.1892994577419736%3Atl_objid.1892994577419736%3Athrowback_story_fbid.1892994577419736%3Aphoto_id.1892994577419736%3Athid.100001276351017%3A306061129499414%3A54%3A0%3A1533106799%3A6345260130944015019&__tn__=H-R

    In the middle of this there is a very interesting part about how the pele/hi’iaka chant has actually been translated several times, and one of the more detailed and recent translations has it describe a lot more than just the summit collapse. I’m not sure exactly when the events in question happened, but this longer version describes a very similar eruption to the one now, even down to the location (“the fires coming from puulena”, one of those big craters just south of pu’u 8). Possibly this is describing the pu’u kaliu eruption and if so then this could be a massive piece of confimation for the theories I have had about what this eruption could mean for the future.

    • Hawaiian legends are very interesting a lot or them have obviously been inspired in volcanic processes and offer clues about the eruptive history of Kilauea. When William Ellis arrived to the island in 1823 he was told from different communities mainly three different stories. The most legend-like tells how Tamapuaa, half man half hog, engaged combat with Pele pouring the water of the sea into the crater until it was almost filled and nearly extingished the fires. Pele and her sisters drank up all the water and Tamapuaa was driven to the sea followed by lightning, thunder and showers of large stones. This legend seems to be inspired by a crater-lake triggered explosive eruption that must have taken before 1790, maybe around 1500? or maybe even earlier to the last of the Uwekahuna tephra?

      Native hawaiian also described how Kilauea used to overflow (probably referring to the Aila’au and Observatory flows) in the past but that for many kings reign’s past it remained under the surrounding plains extending its surface and depth (the current caldera complex) and occasionally going trough explosions, it had also comed out of the flanks close to the sea multiple times. They also described the 1790 explosion: Pele was angry with Keoua who was in the middle of a war with Tamehameha and had camped close to the crater, a sudden explosion ocurred that was seen as a dense black column of smoke then followed by a fountain of fire, inmense rocks where thrown high into the air. Many people were killed by the falling rocks or buried under the mass of ashes and lava.

      This were the ones told to Ellis several times so I guess they are reliable but I am sure there are many other I havent read, some things I have seen mentioned are about Aila’au living in Kilauea before Pele arrived, or a long fissure openning up at Lower Puna but I dont know much about these.

      • Its the same here like the comparatively(laki) recent volcanic bit.

        Talk and remembering, the written word, with a pen or the mouth.

        Pele is God, she will do it.

        My mouse is horrified…

      • “in the middle of a war with Tamehameha” Some ancient tales equate monster storms with war/conflict. Could this have possibly been a land-falling Hurricane or other tropical system? Pinatubo had it’s most energetic phase during the middle of Tropical system.

        • That one specifically is not very ancient, not ancient enough to become myth, it happened in 1790 so maybe it was still in the memory of some of the people William Ellis met. The war between Kamekameha and Keoua was a historical conflict caused by some kind of succesion problem and Kilauea intefered.

          • I saw a study that found the majority of footprints were actually from elderly people, women and children, and not from men in the age group they would likely to be warriors (16-30). So while there was a march to war it was apparently also a mass migration to the southwest.
            I wonder if the 1790 rift eruption had anything to do with it, it wasn’t much smaller than the current eruption, and most of lower puna, especially downwind of the lava, will probably be almost uninhabitable for decades after this.

            The fact they also decided to risk walking past the crater also indicates that the eruption was probably not a single event at that point, and could have been episodic and maybe separated by significant time. An individual person could probably walk past the caldera in a few hours but a group of hundreds or thousands of people would take a very long time and as a general rule people also walk slower in a group, so the eruption was most likely very episodic if Keoua was willing to risk walking such a big group within the danger zone. I guess maybe they just got unlucky though and got hit by the first big blast.

  10. When Pu’u 8 finally stops, will the lava river channel remain evident? I did some searching for something similar but wasn’t successful. Also, going back to Albert’s excellent articles on the effect of weight in volcanoes.. does the huge mass of Mauna Loa have an effect on the amount of magma that is “squeezed” up into Kilauea? Are the primary force mechanisms of the hotspot understood?

    • I think the greatest effect of Mauna Loa’s mass is “don’t come this way.” The mass of the edifice increases the lithostatic load of the underlying rock, effectively increasing it’s tensile strength. Unless there is an easily breached previous route, dike propagation will go somewhere weaker.

      • Yes I think Mauna Loa is an obstacle and because of this one of the reasons driving the southward relocation of Kilauea, Also intrusions into Mauna Loa’s rift zones would cause dilatation there would and equal to compression of Kilauea’s southwest rift zone and maybe summit area. The south flank of Mauna Loa is slumping but I am not sure how this would impact Kilauea.

        • It is known that mauna loa can influence kilaueas eruptions indirectly. In 2002 it was inflating and caused the mothers day flow on pu’u o’o through indirect pressurisation of kilaueas magma chamber. A more significant example is the activity in 1868, when a large volume of new magma rose into mauna loa and pressurised kilauea so much it caused it to briefly return to the high activity of the start of that century, the entire caldera became a lava lake and eruptions happened at kilauea iki and on the southwest rift. When the really big quake happened this all immediately stopped because the pressure was released. At that time kilauea was playing second place to mauna loa in dominance of the hotspot so it didn’t really do anything afterwards while mauna loa had a big eruption a few days later.

          It is possible that the current activity was partly caused by mauna loa inflating slowly, and maybe that big surge of magma into kilaueas summit that I have predicted might be enough to trigger an eruption on mauna loa in the next few years?

          • The way I see it inflation of one of them could temporarily pressurize the magma chamber of the other one causing some of it to erupt upwards or when there is a conduit open to the lateral of the magma chamber to release pressure trough there (2002), but this compression should not be very good for new magma supply to the volcano or for the rifts being intruded, except for Kilauea’s east rift zone which isnt directly resting on Mauna Loa’s south flank. The strong deflation of Kilauea may influence Mauna Loa activity in future decades?

          • More the idea I had is that this deflation now will lessen pressure on mauna loa so the risk of a large eruption now is very low. But when inflation resumes on kilauea probably within the next year, it will add new pressure to mauna loa and make it erupt. New magma moving into mauna loa now might be inclined to seep into its rift zones but when kilauea pushes from the side it might cause an eruption to start there and it could just completely go out on its own there. This idea could have caused the 1984 eruption, the 1975 eruption was small because kilauea deflated when magma had to fill the void made by the recent big quake, and this allowed a weak spot to form on mauna loa and some lava escaped but had no real force behind it. When kilauea was completely recovered in 1984 there was a lot more pressure and it caused that magma in mauna loa to erupt. Before 1950 the roles were reversed.

    • Yes some of it will, the channels in the older flows from fissure 22 are very visible.

    • Leilani was build on a ridge that runs along the length of Puna. I am wondering whether this ridge was a conglomeration of such lava beds. At some point a lava tube may form, and lava will push its way underneath the solidified surface. That will broaden the bed and make it look more like a ridge.

      Kilauea and Mauna Loa have separate magma storage, and it seems that magma underneath Mauna Loa does not go towards Kilauea. Kilauea is not a parasitic volcano. A volcano is a site of overpressure, and it is difficult for magma to push in from the outside. It will go around, finding the route of least resistance. I think the dominant effect in this area is the southward slumping. This cases lines of weakness that run roughly southwest-northeast-east, and the magma seems to travel along those. For Mauna Loa, that correspond to its main rift zone. For Kilauea, this line has become the east rift zone. The cause of the slumping is the growing bulk of Mauna Loa.

      Saying that, it does seem that the magma chambers respond to the pressure from each other. But exactly how that happens I don’t know.

    • There is an old “slide” above the Sheraton and they have a place there describing them sliding down the hill at very high speeds. Maybe a steep perched channel.

    • Taken from the document →; “Given this volume and the sustained withdrawal of magma from the summit reservoir without appreciable deformation in the lower East Rift Zone, it is most likely that the LERZ eruption may continue for months to years.

      → GL Edit side note; You can make an arrow with left[ALT] 2 6 on the numeric keypad.

      • It has already lasted months, but I would give this an absolute maximum of a year. If it lasts for longer than just the summit draining phase (reaches equilibrium), then I think that rather than slowly flowing continuously like pu’u o’o it would become episodic and alternate between nothing at all and vigorous fountaining and flows. The magma also has some difficulty maintaining a stable long conduit for that distance, the lowest shield (which need a stable open conduit) is heiheiahulu which is closer to pu’u o’o and uprift of highway 130.

        This eruption is probably going to play out similar to the pu’u kaliu eruption 700 years ago. That eruption is not well studied but the lava flows to the sea on the south and those are large distinct a’a flows indicative of episodic activity. The earlier stages of that eruption probably included the puulena craters and while it has been buried since then it is likely that flows went to the Kapoho area too, while pu’u kaliu is maybe slightly younger and constructed out of that episodic behaviour. The surges happening now could be related to that idea.

        • And no, I’m not gonna be posting a long winded diatribe about arcane stuff. Moderation is key.

        • If something can be said for sure it is that the effusion rate would have to lower considerably for the eruption to last more than a few months. Kilauea just doesnt have enough magma stored and at this rate the resupply cant keep up. Other eruptions in the same area of the rift do not show to have produced any pahoehoe flows, just aa, so were probably high rage throughout all the eruption, some of these very voluminous: Puu Kaliu, 490 BP and 1790 could maybe have caused large collapses at the summit and the ERZ similar to the current situation. I dont think the eruption with last much more than a few months, time will tell, it seems though that with this eruption patience is needed as it will probably remain more or less stable for some time.

          • That is exactly the same as what I think will happen too, the lower east rift only seems to do fairly large high volume fast eruptions. I know there was apparently a lot more eruptions there in the first half of the last millennium but after observing this eruption now it is very probable that most of these are vents on a long fissure rather than individual eruptions in their own right. The 1790 eruption will probably look like at least 4 separate eruptions after the current eruption is faded beyond memory, because a lot of the lower stretches of that eruption are buried now.

            If that version of the chant in the video is recalling the pu’u kaliu eruption then it is probable that eruption was very similar to this one and in which case there could still be a lot more to come before the current eruption stops.
            Earlier on this was being compared to 1955, but now it is very obvious this is a much larger and more exotic event, one that is probably just as rare as the sustained satellite shield eruptions that coincidently also precede the two most recent well exposed examples…

            It is notable that the chant describes the summit behaving in a very similar way to what it is doing now, suggesting a caldera collapse and explosive eruptions. Pu’u kaliu predates the extensive summit overflows so this indicates a lot of lava was erupted over the time between when kane nui o hamo started and when the caldera formed, probably about 20 km3 in total between 1200 AD and 1500 AD. So far about 7 km3 has erupted outside the caldera and 5 km3 inside the caldera since 1790 AD so there is probably still a lot more that could potentially erupt, maybe as much as 8 km3, and if it happens through the summit then things are definitely going to be very different there in not that long.

          • Rough volumes of eruptions between 1200 and 1500.

            Aila’au
            ~6 km3
            Observatory shield: ~7 km3
            Pu’u kaliu + puulena craters:
            ~1 km3?
            Kane nui o hamo:
            ~3 km3
            Other flank eruptions:
            1 km3?
            Caldera fill: 4 km3?
            Total = 22 km3

            Volume of magma in historical time.

            Leilani:
            >0.5 km3+
            Pu’u o’o:
            ~4.5 km3
            Mauna ulu:
            0.35 km3
            1960:
            0.15 km3
            1840:
            0.2 km3
            Other flank eruptions:
            0.3 km3
            Caldera fill:
            5 km3
            Total = 12 km3

            Clearly there is the potential for a lot more lava to erupt than has currently done so, enough to easily overflow the summit caldera many times over. The volume of all of those earlier eruptions is not exactly known but I think those are reasonable numbers. The caldera fill of that period could be quite off though, it might be a lot bigger or smaller depending on the size of that caldera.

          • Actually looking back at this a day later, I am actually very surprised no-one at all anywhere has really noticed just how much magma has moved into kilauea in the last 1000 years before.

            So far since 1000 AD it has erupted at least 34 km3 and possibly a lot more if some earlier calderas were filled and collapsed again before overflowing, the average caldera probably takes about 4 km3 to fill but if a large amount of that is removed by another collapse then you can double the amount of lava erupted there but not see most of it. Depending on how the summit looked between 1000 (when it was definitely a caldera) and 1400 (when it was definitely a lava shield) it could have collapsed and refilled several times and that equates to a LOT of extra lava that is not left in the geological record. It could even get above 40 km3 in that situation.

            In addition, the south flank apparently moves about 6 cm per year on average so in the last 1000 years it has moved at least 6000 cm, 60 meters… A box that is 60 meters wide, 5 km high and 85 km long (approximate length of active rift through kilauea) has a volume of 25.5 km3, and because the summit sort of forms the top of a triangle of rifting with the koae fault as the southern face, this area contains about another 10 km of potential space, making about 35 km3 total. Even if only half of that space can actualy fill with magma, there is still at least another 17 km3 of magma that stays underground forever and so kilauea has received at least 55 km3 of magma in the last 1000 years and possibly as much as 80 km3. This is still quite small compared to Iceland, but Iceland is way bigger than kilauea and nearly all of its magma never surfaces, while twice as much of kilaueas magma ends up on its surface as what stays underground.

            Just for fun I did some more maths :).
            80 km3 of basalt magma cooling from 1150 C to 25 C releases the thermal energy equivalent of 56000 megatons of TNT, the equivalent of 1000 tsar bombas, 2333 mt st helens 1980 eruptions (24 megatons), or an eruption of about 2400 km3 of tephra, a toba sized eruption every 1000 years… Considering it takes actual supervolcanoes 100s of times as long as that to actually have successive VEI 8s I think this shows how powerful the hawaiian hotspot is, especially because it also does about 80% of that again for mauna loa during the same time frame, effectively almost doubling everything I just said. And to top it off, the magma might even be significantly hotter underground (1300 C or more) and so contain even more energy, cooling from 1300 C would add another 7.5% onto that number, which adds another 4200 megatons.
            Maybe not every millenium is this productive, but it would take kilauea ‘only’ 2500 years of its current eruptive activity to equal the energy release of the biggest explosive eruption we know of in the geological record, its basically the one place on earth where there is a semi-continuous VEI 5, and a theoretical VEI 6 every two years… Just when I thought I couldn’t be any more convinced that kilauea is my favorite volcano… 🙂

            I wish I was able to do this maths 2 years ago, it would have really helped at school. Maybe I was just born 2 years too early… 😉

          • Well, for a collapse to happen, there needs to be magma withdrawn and moved somewhere else, either as an eruption, or as an intrusion that expands the rift. In other words, collapse/refill cycles does not mean extra invisible magma 😉

          • Yes but magma still moves into the system at the same rate even when a collapse is happening, so there is still more magma than there was before. In any case this probably wouldn’t take much off the total number anyway.

  11. sorry to be a bother… is everyone’s deformation tilt graphs frozen? or is it just me? Best!motsfo

    • It has been frozen for more than a day now. The cameras are still updating but the GPS and seismographs are not.

    • And as usual, HVO quickly obliges. Normal service has resumed.

  12. Let’s see where we are. Two months after the eruption began in earnest, much of the east coast of Puna an some of the south coast has been destroyed. One town is partially and another is completely gone. A tree-covered paradise is now a continuous stretch of rough tarmac, many meters deep. Over 700 homes are no more. Two people were seriously injured, some have minor injuries, and many more will have difficulties coping with material loss. HVO has lost its home as well, although it still standing. Pu’u’O’o is now history. Kilauea is being remodelled and will need a lot of new names for features. Tourism on Hawaii is decimated. All that in just 10 weeks!

    And now HVO has pointed out the risk that this eruption could continue for another 2 months up to two years. In that time, it is unlikely the lava would stick to its current path. More destruction is likely, with even the remaining town, Nanawale, under some threat (although it is less at risk than many other places). When it ends, very little of Puna will be untouched, and the entire coastline could be gone. It makes you realize that the green paradise there had grown up only because so much time had passed since the last major eruption. Green forest is perhaps not the normal state of here. Volcanic rifts can never be taken for granted.

    This has of course happened before. Something similar has happened on Iceland, but we have forgotten. When the Vikings came, the south coast of Iceland was its own green paradise with trees and fertile soil. But Eldgja came and destroyed much. (Overfarming did not help either.) The south coast never really recovered.

    It seems to me that the collapse at Kilauea is slowing down although still continuing. With two months or more, the entire area of the caldera could go down. The lava flow rate at Leilani to my eye seems a bit less than a month ago, but not much. The biggest risk is that the lava river is perched so high, that any collapse of the bed will send the lava into very different directions. Anything could happen.

    HVO may have released the risk analysis because of the boat accident. HVO had already said that 300 meters was the minimum safe distance. This was relaxed by the authorities for economic reasons. This analysis is a warning signal that safety must take into account all the risks, not just the past events. If the lava moves out of its bed, people could easily find themselves trapped. An erupting volcano is not a toy.

    • I played around a bit with the quake data today to try and spot any trends. I took the M2.5+ data set from USGS and focused on the area around the caldera. The cumulative seismic moment plot is slowing down a bit, but not as much as I thought in the beginning of July.

      Fitting a curve is still very sensitive to data selection. Starting from June 15 gives a very different end date than starting from June 20. Depending on the chosen data set, the extrapolation gives an end date for the collapse somewhere between the end of August and the middle of November. When I did the same exercise two weeks ago, I got end dates ranging from July to September.

      [Speculation alert] Two more months with similar eruptive rates seems likely. After that, if the collapse has stopped, it is possible that the normally high magma supply rate into Kilauea could still sustain the eruption for a (long) while, much like with Pu’u’O’o. Unless the pressure becomes too low and the dike slams shut. This is assuming that the collapse stops because it has reached equilibrium (much as Holuhraun did). If instead it stops because the magma storage (or the path towards the dike) is completely destroyed then the eruption can stop more abruptly and we would basically have the TBM scenario.

      • Somewhere in about 2 months is where I would put it starting from now, and I think that towards the end of the eruption the flow rate, vigour of the fountain and the direction of flow could all be very uncertain and far less predictable than now. I think the similarities to holuhraun might only work to a certain point because kilauea is a far more active volcano than bardarbunga and its magma is probably more fluid. The prediction paper said the fact the eruption is still occurring from several vents within the cone is probably why it is relatively passive, if it pauses and allows the vent to form to a single small hole then high fountaining could occur still despite it being months into the eruption. The other vents have also typically had strombolian activity after their main eruptions so this one probably isn’t going to be an exception and this could last for a long time.

        Also pu’u o’o is still a big wild card, the conduit between there and the eruption on the LERZ is still a vertical dike considering it is less than 3 months old, but the rift conduit leading to pu’u o’o is a larger feature that is completely open and has been open since at least 1969 and possibly since 1950. If the dike slams shut but the east rift is still accessible then it is actually possible that pu’u o’o could reactivate, despite how dead it looks now. That would most likely cause concurrent summit activity to be passive and in equilibrium with the east rift again which is rather different from the idea I originally had.

        I still stand with my original idea strongly though, things have changed way too much, and I think HVO might have been significantly underestimating the size of a few of those other eruptions in that paper. 1790 was probably at least 0.35 km3 and could have been more, pu’u kaliu is likely to be a similar size to the current eruption and the flows on the east and north have been buried. Historically this is gigantic (bigger than 1840, 1955 and 1960 combined) but eruptions like this have happened before, in my opinion they should get their own classification if this eruption now does actually fall into my prediction. I will call them terminator eruptions, for being the termination of a long period of rift rift dominated activity.

        I think I have talked about that enough by now though 😉

    • Google translation.

      Despite this natural disaster where nature has regained its rights and the material losses caused, a positive thing comes out. This volcano was predictable and specialists of all kinds, including vulcanologists, were ready.

      They are better equipped today and are able to study how and why better. All this will be useful in the future and could even help to understand the past.

  13. And the next collapse. The live video showed two events, one at 9:40:120 and one at 9:43:40 or so, both of which showed rock falls on the far cliff. Now waiting for the overflows to happen.

    • That would be Quaesitor Dinosaurus. There were many early members of the Quaesitor species with vastly differing features. Quaesitor Geologis, for example, would not be seen dead in a waistcoat and all fossils found to date have carried a hammer with one square end and one pointy end instead of a pocket watch. Quaesitor Vulcanus was an early volcano researcher, a subspecies of Geologis. Quaesitor Vulcanus was distinguished by having very thick soles on their feet, probably for walking on sharp and often hot lava.

  14. Somehow I hope the lack of eruptions in Iceland lead to some interesting ones, maybe even a black swan. Besides of the WC posts, the post activity here, or like its Iceland counterpart ‘lack thereof’, leads to reading and re-reading older pieces. Just finished the Snake River post and re-read Greip. Those were some of the best and most intriguing reads to date for me. When is Carl continuing his Iceland Mammoth Guide? Or part 2 of Roberto’s post of Japan?

    • Actually the average recurral time of eruptions in Iceland is 3 years, holuhraun ended about 3.5 years ago so its not really unusual yet. At the very least there will be an eruption at oraefajokull within the next decade at the rate its going now, and grimsvotn will almost certainly erupt before then, and there is a fair chance hekla will too although that is basically unpredictable. I also have a feeling holuhraun isn’t going to be the biggest eruption in this ongoing hotspot surge but that is also for the future to decide.

      Really it is a very exiting time to be alive, the most powerful single volcano on earth is currently having its biggest eruption in at least 700 years, and the most prolific area of volcanism in the past 10 million years are going into eruptive maximum at the same time, and this is in the age where anyone can basically see anything around the world as if you were there directly. I might have missed out on a double VEI 6 by 8 years but I think I can live with that considering kilaueas eruption is easily the thermal energy equivalent of both of them combined and it isn’t even the biggest lava flow in the last 5 years… 😉

    • I would not hope for a Black Swan, the ensuing Ice age would lead to Global civil war and put us back in the stone age, with a big dollop of fukushima’s we would be glowing versions of Fred Flintstone.

      VE 5 would be OK provided it happened without loss of Icelanders or their property! Some hope there…

      • Because Icelandic eruptions are dominantly effusive a VEI 5 would actually be a much bigger total eruption than it would sound. Laki is a VEI 4 by tephra volume, yet a large VEI 6 by total volume.

        If it happened from katla then the chances are that it would be about it, but a VEI 5 from a vatnajokull volcano is unlikely to be the end of the story.

        • Of course, my VE 5 if it is a Laki type could end civilization just as a black Swan would, “oooooopsy-daisy”, better downgrade to a VE 4 Grímsvötn…Just to be on the safe(!) side.

          An Öræfajökull eruption should not be wished for in my opinion, I am superstitious, if trusting instincts and feelings, count as superstition that is.
          If that one is next it will make the news quick I bet.

  15. Uwekahuna north component

    Sorry, emptout. I don’t know either.

    • That could be rotational slumping, the forward edge of the ground rising (with the equipment on it) as the back edge drops.
      Not an expert but that is what I would expect.

      • If it is real, which remains to be seen. UWE is located at HVO. If it really first moved 10 cm north followed by 20 cm south, it would be beginning to slide into the caldera and presumably taking HVO with it closer to the action. But the local tilt meter shows nothing out of the ordinary (well – for the current situation). Neither does the seismograph. Too early to tell what is going on – it could even be weather. If the block is beginning to become unstable, the live video at the next collapse event could be really interesting.

        • If I remember correctly, HVO stated their reason for relocation was due to “sheer, and settling” evident in the building structure.

        • Seeing that the instrument eventually settled back in it usual pattern, with no lasting effects, I assume that work was done on the platform.

    • They are always referring to the StuperVolcano. In their book, there is no other kind.

      • Yellowstone has no shortage of steam-spewing fissures. They are called ‘geysers’. And they erupt every day.

        • Albert, well said. Exactly the terms I would use to describe the journalists at the Sun and other similar ‘trash’papers in the UK:
          “Steam-spewing fissures called [old] geysers that erupt every day.”

      • The fun bit is that the Yellostone Hotspot passed this range hundreds of thousands of years ago. Last I heard, the North American plate has not changed directions lately.

        • It’s very fortunate that the Yellowstone plume is much weaker than Hawaii. The volume of the Hawai’i and Maui Nui (50% bigger at its peak) combined is well over 400,000 km3, actually significantly higher than the volume of the Columbia river basalt, and formed over a shorter time scale…

          🙂

          • ” plume is much weaker than Hawaii.”

            Might not be so. The Hawaii plume is punching though oceanic crust, not continental crust. That could account for the apparent difference in strength.

          • Nope, Yellowstone was at one point the superior hotspot, 14 million years ago Hawaii was pretty average while the Columbia river basalts were active. However after that the yellowstone hotspot really declined and that is when it transitioned to large calderas. When the flood basalts were formed there was enough magma to form huge chambers, probably extending very deep probably even directly to the mantle like in Iceland now, with the actual eruptions probably triggered by a rifting event and then the gates to hell are opened. The eruptions were probably similar to the large flows in Iceland, but 50 times bigger and with even higher eruption rates… Probably rather fortunate they would only happen every 20,000 years or so on average…
            Like in the vatnajokull area of Iceland now there was enough magma supply to keep the chamber hot, preventing the lava from evolving much so it still erupted as hot fluid basalt when it could escape. After that the supply was much lower so the magma did evolve and was not connected continuously to the mantle and that still happens now.

            The Hawaii hotspot has erupted well over twice as much lava as the Columbia river basalt in only the last 2 million years, it can’t do 500 km3 flows because big magma chambers can’t form there (they would collapse and destroy the entire island), so they erupt smaller and much much more often to the point of being continuous. Looking at Hawaii this way really makes this all fit together, especially the huge size compared to other islands. Hawaii is essentially a flood basalt that has been deprived of magma storage space…

            There is more in the below comments. 🙂

        • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377027305003252

          In fact I actually underestimated it, Maui Nui + Hawai’i would be probably close to 550,000 km3, all of that in the past 2 million years. That is 60% of the volume of the entire Hawaii/Emperor seamount chain, in 1/36 of the actual age of the chain… Not only that but the rate of supply has increased by an order of magnitude from 2 million years ago. At this rate there actually might not even be another Hawaiian island for a long time, the new volcanoes might just join to the big island and make it the ‘bigger’ island.

          Looks like we didn’t really miss out on an active flood basalt at all, in fact over 50,000 people live on its most active part…

          • Hmm. This paper may be doing some double counting. It corrects for subsidence of the lithosphere from the weight of the mountain, which is fair enough, but this leads to the lithosphere being pushed up around the mountain and that is also included in the accounting. SoI think they may be counting it twice. More seriously, thermal expansion is forgotten. Hot spots rise because the hot magma is less dense: this can push up the crust by several kilometers. Iceland is a good example: it is above the sea rather than 2 km below, because of the heat underground. It floats. That is not magma input. And as the hot spot moves away, the lithosphere cools and the crust sinks back. If you forget this effect, you will find that your supposed magma supply correlates with age, exactly as these authors find. The Hawaiian hot spot has fluctuated, as shown in better calculations, but only by a factor of 2 or so.

          • Hawaii and maui Nui are both still way bigger than the previous islands, the only seamounts approaching the size of the islands now (and which were probably formed out of multiple volcanoes too) are of late cretaceous age and probably about to be subducted under Kamchatka. You can see it based on the underwater topography.

            Mauna loa on its own is 75,000 km3, kilauea is 30,000 km3, mauna kea is 40,000 km3, hualalai and kohala are both about 20,000 km3. This is 185,000 km3. There is also mahukona north of hualalai, and loihi south of kilauea, and both of these are probably about 10,000 km3, whic hbrings the total up to 205,000 km3, not really that much lower than the number they got. The HVO articles say that Maui Nui was about 50% bigger than hawaii, and molokai, kahoolawe and lanai have all undergone significant collapses so they used to be much bigger. Hence, the estimate they have is probably not that far off.

            Either way, either island individually is at least comparable to the size of the colombia river flood basalts.

          • There is a 2004 paper addressing that. They find that the magma supply rate has fluctuated but around the same range since about 20 million years. Roughly since Midway formed. Before that, there was a period of weaker magma output which was after the sudden change in direction. The Emperor Mount must have been similar to the current activity but it is hard to get the numbers, after so much time. The islands have subsided and eroded too much.

          • The plate apparently moved significantly slower when the detroit seamount formed, which is why it is so big. After the plate changed direction it still had this weaker activity but the faster plate meant it was harder to make an island. Then it increased forming larger islands, and then at some point in the last 2 million years it has done so again, forming Maui Nui and then Hawai’i. The magma supply rate to kilauea currently is about 0.2 km3 per year. It is a bit hard to tell exactly how much, but mauna loa currently has about 5% of the supply rate of kilauea, loihi probably has about the same to a bit more. So currently the supply rate is in the range they have said, and it has been that way for a pretty long time. And it doesn’t slow down either, kilauea had low supply before after 1840 and before 1952 but during that time mauna loa was way more active than it is now. Mauna loa tends to do big eruptions but further apart, rather than kilauea which erupts continuously at low rate (most of the time). In the end I think kilauea erupts slightly more than mauna loa on average because it is closer to the hotspot source, but the output from the hotspot is a pretty consistent 0.2 km3 per year, which might temporarily increase to as much as double that from decompression melting after a caldera collapse (my theory of the near future, explained many many times 😉 ) or much more rarely a mass wasting event/ giant landslide. Regardless of whether the average didn’t have to change before, kilauea and mauna loa are both considerably higher rate than the long term average and since haleakala volcano formed about 2 million years ago many of the volcanoes have been gigantic and way bigger than before, mauna loa is probably as big as every active stratovolcano in the world combined… Kilauea could well be even bigger than that at some point in the future the way things are going there now.

          • Let’s do some calculations. Take Hawaii as about 100 km wide. It is moving about 5 cm per year, so every year you need to create a volume 100 km by 5 cm times the height. For the height, take 8 km. That gives a volume of 0.04 km3 per year. The magma rate can’t be much different from that. It includes the thermal effect which can be several kilometers. It also ignores the fact that the conduit deflect magma from the actual hot spot position, which is why the islands become separate islands rather tan a continues ridge. Iceland has very similar numbers, but the plateau is around 500 km long. So it requires a higher magma rate, but of course spread out more.

            Iceland is in fact called a flood basalt, although not a major one. Hawaii is not.

          • There is a case where an oceanic hot spot became a flood basalt, and afterwards went back to being an oceanic island chain. It is Reunion, and it caused the Deccan traps. That happened when it melted the continental crust of India. There are also oceanic flood basalts but they did not create islands, as far as we know.

          • I know hawaii isnt a flood basalt, it is a really big ‘normal’ volcano. However the term ‘flood basalt’ really only refers to a province of massive lava flows, not to the actual volume of the whole thing. If Hawaii was on land under a continent, it would be a flood basalt, it is because it is in the ocean that it erupts the way it is now. And some eruptions in Hawaii are not really too far off from a flood basalt either, mauna loa 1950 comes to mind, as does the current eruption, and the massive flow that created mauna loas caldera about 1200 years ago (pana’ewa flow near Hilo).

            The Deccan traps wasn’t created by a continent overrunning a hotspot and getting melted, the composition of the Deccan traps is largely tholeiite basalt but some of it is an alkaline rock called nephelinite, which is like picro-basalt but with extra alkali metals instead of magnesium and iron. This is the same super-fluid lava that nyiragongo erupts, and it is associated with a new mantle plume reaching the surface for the first time and partly melting the very base of the crust next to a rift (maybe the virunga area is a near future flood basalt?). If it was melted continental crust then it wouldn’t be a basalt province, it would be a rhyolite province.
            The Deccan traps are a bad example to compare almost any other volcanism to anyway, that is one of the biggest volcanic events in earths recent history (>50% of its volume in about 30,000 years, from wikipedia). Most flood basalts, even ones that ultimately have a larger volume and area, are nowhere near as intense as that.

            Some oceanic plateaus were islands when they were active. Kergualen definitely was, and probably also tamu massif.

          • Kerguelen is a funny one. It is continental crust, I think, but without the keel. You can tell by the equilibrium height (500 meter below sea) which is too high for oceanic crust and a bit low for a continent. There are a few more like that. The Deccan traps erupted at the location where we now have the Reunion hot spot. I don’t think you can tell whether the hot spot was new or the continent it melted through.

          • The above sea level part of kilauea is roughly the same volume as a cone with a base area of 1500 km2 and a height of 1.2 km. Apparently this has a volume of 608 km3, which means in theory kilauea should have a supply rate of about 600 km3 per 100,000 years, 0.006 km3 per year, which is pretty low. However it has actually received about 80 km3 in the past 1000 years alone (math in another comment, but maybe a bit outdated now that I have looked at some things) which is a supply rate average of 0.08 km3 per year. The majority of that erupted (mostly in filling calderas before being destroyed again by re-collapse), with 7 km3) and aila’au (6 km3), with a total of >36 km3. There was also 1790 to 1840 (~7 km3 with multiple refilling of collapses as well as escaped tephra), and from about 1950 to now (~6 km3 mostly in pu’u o’o) which means that more than 50 km3 of that was erupted in only a 600 yearperiod. That gives an average of close to 0.1 km3 per year in these times probably with significant short term variation. The flow rate of the June 27 flow in 2014 (when the summit tilt was basically level) was about 6 m3/s. That is 0.19 km3 per year, which is above average, so kilauea is currently in high activity which could be increased even more if decompression of the system draws in even more magma from the source.
            In the period between 1500 and 1700 mauna loa seems to have been pretty active, and it was historically very active between 1843 and 1950, so gaps in kilaueas high activity in the past 3000 years are probably when mauna loa was more active.

            1200 years ago is when mauna loa went from sustained extensive summit overflows to caldera formation and rift dominated eruptions. That could be the point when mauna loa stopped growing quickly and kilauea started seriously competing for the magma source. Kilauea seems to be winning now, it is dominant more often than mauna loa, and could well take the whole thing in another few thousand years, with mauna loa probably transitioning to its post shield stage within 10,000 years from now.

          • Kilauea is currently clearly in a state of higher flux than normal. Just the disappearance of the forests of the south coast tells you so. Draining calderas may not signify eruptions: care is needed in what you count as new magma. It may recirculate and erupt elsewhere. And 65% of Kilauea’s magma solidifies below ground, some no doubt filling up the rift. Magma input can vary for two reasons. More melt can occur: the main cause of this would be reduced pressure. Or Kilauea may attract magma from surrounding areas, again when internal pressure drops (that will be part of the reason for Bardarbunga’s re-inflation).

            1200years is far too short for geological changes. Competition between Mauna Loa and Kilauea would take place of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Any change seen over a thousand years is reversible. If the hot spot moves by 5 cm per year, it takes 20,000 years to traverse the length of the Kilauea caldera. That is the speed of geology.

          • That bit was actually meant to be its own comment but it got put here for some reason…

            I think kergualen was probably like Iceland, a sort of mini-continent that started forming but never really made it.

          • The 80 km3 number is the amount of magma that ends up above the mantle in kilaueas system. I did a calculation for how much space would be created by the south flank sliding in a 1000 year period. based on the length and orientation of the rift zones (which appears to be in the middle of a significant location change closer to the summit, currently about 100 km long), the height of the shallow magma system (5 km) and the amount of average movement per year (6 cm) there would be about 20 km3 of space. A lot of this probably isnt actually caused by spreading though, probably sliding down of the south flank along the faults in the hilina slump. Maybe only half or less of that is actually space magma can occupy.

            Either way most of the magma that moves into kilauea seems to erupt eventually instead of staying underground. In recorded history there really haven’t been any major intrusions that have actually ended without erupting at all. Even 1924 seems to have erupted eventually (in 1955 and probably at fissure 17). There were a lot of intrusions into the middle east rift between 1960 and 1969, but then mauna ulu erupted and made up for that. Then the same thing kept happening until pu’u o’o erupted 9 years later and then a few months ago there was another intrusion to lower puna which is still ongoing and has so far erupted as much lava as every other post-1790 flank eruption on kilauea combined in the time it has been active.

            The volume of magma erupted after the start of the 1790 flow is about 12 km3. The volumes of magma erupted between 1000 and 1500 is about 22 km3, up to almost 30 km3 depending on how big the powers caldera was. I have seen measurements of it being smaller than the current caldera, and others saying it was twice as big.
            Regardless there has been a lot of magma erupted in the last 1000 years, at least 34 km3, and possibly over 40 km3. This is much more than the amount of space that has been created in the rift zones, and a lot of that space would have been filled passively so the amount of magma that kilauea receives is probably even higher than that (maybe not quite 80 km3 though). Based on this, almost 80% of the magma ends up on the surface in a molten state eventually.

            Maybe your 65% number takes all that into account. That means if kilauea actually does erupt only 1/3 of its magma, then between 100 km3 and 120 km3 of magma moves into kilauea every 1000 years, or 0.1 km3 base rate over that time. If mauna loa averages about the same then that is 0.2 km3 per year. That is also very strongly indicative of a huge increase in supply to kilauea at some point in the relatively recent past. There is apparently some exposed pre-shield lava from kilauea on the south flank, so it hasnt appreciably expanded beyond that in that direction. Most of its growth seems to be towards the east. This still doesnt account for what should be a very low supply number based on its age vs volume.
            Hawaiian volcanoes seem to grow extremely fast, forming a large part of their mass over a short time period, kilauea is beginning that rapid stage now, while mauna loa is just ending that part of its life. This isnt really anything to do with the location on the hotspot, hualalai, mauna kea and kohala are still well over the hotspot, and even haleakala on Maui is connected to it, but all of those volcanoes are shadows of their former selves and one is basically extinct, most likely because nearly all the magma is feeding the active leading edge. Loihi is apparently at the start of its shield stage based on its recent lava composition. It is taking some of the main hotspot source now, and its growth will accelerate. It will probably reach the surface and join to the big island in the next 100,000 years, by which point mauna loa will be in its post shield stage while kilauea is very rapidly growing into a giant like its predecessor.

    • Good grief. Whatever next? “It wasn’t me wot done it, Guv’nor. It wos me body wot done it. Honest, Guv!”
      The fact is, in the UK there are now judges who would fall for this garbage and let the perp off. I kid ye not. An axe attack here is considered a mild verbal disagreement, requiring the perp to attend a taxpayer-paid holiday in the sun and counselling.
      Just a personal axe to grind (every pun intended) the UK legal system needs a root and branch shake-down and rebuild.

    • It’s not like he was arrested for selling Meth in Court

      “The passenger, later identified as Collin Tenhundfeld, 24 years old of Ohio, tried to run past Montgomery and Haney, but Haney stopped him by his shirt. His shirt then ripped and he was able to maneuver away from the officers, running towards the creek. According to Adams, Tenhundfeld did a 15-foot swan dive into the shallow creek, eluding police for several hours.” [Bobbing along in the water I assume… shallow creek dives are never a healthy proposition.]

      But, evidently Ohio has more than it’s fair share of Homo Stultus. From a couple of years ago… Ohio man arrested for having unlawful carnal knowledge of a picnic table. No, not on a picnic table… WITH a picnic table.

      And in South Florida, a Burglary suspect successfully evaded officers… until the Alligator found him.

      BTW, that was only a cursory reference to the Pink Floyd song of the same name. No actual connection intended or inferred.

  16. Time to import alligators into the UK. A good replacement for what we call “plastic policemen”, a politician’s low-budget answer to not being able to fund proper law enforcement officers (think: students in high-viz jackets). Burgled house? Let the alligators deal with the perps. Nice idea!

    • BTW.. the “idea” was his own to try and hide in a bayou…

      This is a part of Florida where county leash laws are eagerly complied with. (if you don’t, you risk loosing the pet permanently) Needless to say, stray pets are not a large problem there. The problem is that children have to be closely monitored as well.

    • The placement works. I’m not gonna try to move it because if a comment comes along while I’m doing it and it’s tagged to the existing thread layout, it will mess things up royally.

      I couldn’t find a link to my favorite Homo Stultus story from Hillsborough County Florida. Two perpetrators performed a “Home invasion” crime and held the occupant at knife and gun point… and stole their egg-beater. They were later apprehended with the purloined egg-beater by sheriffs deputies. They stole nothing else. Just a standard chrome hand operated (I assume) egg-beater. Since they used a fire-arm in their crime, they are eligible for Florida’s 10-20-Life clause in minimum sentencing. Just having it there gives them a minimum of 10 years in State prison.

      Not that long ago, a Home invasion crime here in Escambia county wound up with the perpetrator laying dead in the front door of the home he kicked the door in to. Evidently he didn’t count on the occupant having a shot-gun next to his recliner. I think there is more to that event than meets the eye because it is a bit unusual to keep a loaded shotgun next to your recliner. I keep mine in the bedroom and rely upon the dog to buy me enough time to retrieve it. He gets particularly angry at unannounced visitors and has the mass to back up the bark. (92 lbs, half pit-bull half Lab.) He’s put more than one deliveryman halfway across the yard just from his sudden appearance at the door. (UPS doesn’t even knock anymore)

    • “students in high-viz jackets” → Reminds me of an endeavor by Gulf Breeze a few years ago. They wanted volunteers to sit in marked patrol vehicles alongside the roadway in order to curtail speeders. No authority to pull anyone over. Just to sit there and look pretty.

      Side note: Gulf Breeze has a reputation for being overzealous with traffic tickets. They aren’t as bad as Wilmer Alabama was, but they are close. (Wilmer lost it’s articles of incorporation due to action by the Alabama Legislature because of their speed traps. They gave one too many citations.) Back before that happened, I actually saw a Wilmer officer giving a ticket to a farm tractor operator. Yeah, modern tractors can “giddy up go,” but this was an old 1950’s era Massey Ferguson.

      Since “de-citification,” the crime rate in Wilmer has gone up quite a bit. They were in the news recently as likely being the operating center of a drug distribution gang. With the high number of back roads and “pig trails” in the area, they can almost operate with impunity. Wilmer is pretty much a border town and with the correct trail knowledge, a person can easily slip into Mississippi undetected. (Which changes jurisdiction) In my opinion, it would take a cooperative effort with Mississippi and Alabama Law enforcement and Federal agents to do an effective take-down of anything there.

      • And yes, there probably was a political angle to revoking Wilmer’s City charter. By eliminating Wilmer, Mobile Alabama is no longer restricted in expanding in that direction.

        • And since Mobile is an established and consistent monetary stream for the money hungry legislature… it’s pretty much a no brainer in eliminating a perceived nuisance town.

        • BTW, they left some of Wilmers bizarre speed limit changes in place… Probably so the Alabama Highway Patrol has a place to pad stats should they be coming up short on their quotas.

          … yes, I am fully aware that all law enforcement people deny that they use quotas… but observation seems to state otherwise. No, I don’t have an axe to grind. My last citation was for improper backing. My neighbor had parked directly behind my driveway and I couldn’t see his car behind my tailgate. When my engine seemed to bog down while backing out, it took me a couple of moments to realize that I was slowly pushing his car up onto his yard with my truck. Minimal damage, but he insisted on contacting FHP. I got my citation, and he got cited for illegal parking. Parking on the right of way is illegal outside of the city.

          • In the UK, I remember a while back they used full-size fake cardboard cut-out police cars on bridges to reduce speeding. I’m not sure what happened in wet weather…

          • Some of those high intensity LED signs tick me off at night. In the right conditions, the blue from them exactly matches the light bars on police vehicles.

    • And it doesn’t matter if he had been feeding bears or not. Ursidae is closely related to Canidae. When I have a treat for one dog, the other dogs will be up in my face for theirs.

    • No, it’s not a fatalistic view of statistics. It’s just a firm reason to not be surprised when something happens… no matter how weird it may seem. In all likelihood, it HAD to happen… eventually.

      • The trick is determining that it could happen.. and accounting for the liklihood of it happening… and if you are lucky, seeing it beginning to happen, then not being there when it happens.

        • My forefathers made Bears, Wolves and other even more dangerous species extinct in the UK ages ago, in the case of Bears 2000 years. Wolves 700 years.
          Biggest danger now is that 70 year old’s feeding ducks get robbed and beaten by the latest incarnation of dangerous species, thugs, who find it easier to rob than work.
          They even have huge political support, as they have had a hard life and its not their fault that they offend. The prisons are full. Everybody come to the UK its free.

          Bring back the Bears and wolves all is forgiven…

          • … sorry, I had to re-read that a couple of times. My mind originally read “beers,” and that puts it into a completely wrong context.

  17. guess we’ve had our earthquake drop for today… but tooo dark to see. 🙁

    • M5.5 apparently. Shame it was dark. Not an especially big jump on the tiltmeter, though.

  18. This… is CGI. How can you tell? How is that umbrella still intact? That is an H-53 in hover just behind it. You don’t get a much larger wind footprint than off of an H-53. It is enormous. I think it is a still cap from Pacific Rim, a giant robot movie. On the Seattle, if the hangar doors were open, you could feel when a helo was in hover over the landing deck… it would pressurize the rear area of the ship and you could feel it from your ears responding to the pressure of the rotor-wash.

    • And there are WAY too many people standing around the LZ… and where’s the deck crew with the shorting probe? Static is a real threat. (Generated by the rotors). Don’t be the first one to touch the chasis.

    • Thank you turtle, all your hard work is very much appreciated, I am so limited on time until probably October, it is hard to keep up right now. I guess you will go into Spring when we get Fall weather? I’m ready for Christmas, it has been awfully hot.

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