Posted on 03/26/2008 9:42:14 AM PDT by cogitator
First of all, before I get to the picture, you may have heard that Halemaumau (the crater within the Kilauea caldera that in the 19th century hosted an active lava lake, which has occasionally reappeared since) had a fairly abrupt change. This change is now a steam-and-ash plume which (as I write this) is still going. Below is the quick-as-an-Easter-bunny new Webcam view of the plume (click to go there).
It was this little event that made me think of showing a big ash (hmm...) event, the Katmai eruption of 1912. The image is from a very nice Web site about that eruption, linked underneath the image. The image itself shows the Mount Katmai environs, and the local depth of ash from the Novarupta vent. (The legend shows ash depth contours should be in blue, but they are in red in the picture).
Novarupta: The Most Powerful Volcanic Eruption of the 20th Century
** ping! **
Dumb mistake! I titled this “Katmai from the air”; this is actually/obviously a satellite image (probably Landsat). So it should be “Katmai from space”.
I had the privilege of becoming a "Halemaumau Pooped Pedestrian" when we visited the Big Island. A certificate stating that was given to those who made a walking trip up to the crater. This is a huge deep crater. I still have the certificate.
This was an eye-opener:
An eruption the size of Novarupta would ground commercial jet traffic across the North American continent.
What they didn't say was that the "grounding" would only last a couple of days. However, if an Alaskan volcano went into a cycle of heightened activity with regular large ash cloud emissions, flights to Asia would have to be very aware of the possibility of ash cloud encounters.
To quote Paris, “That’s hot!”
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