Volcano ash flies high - June 15, 2009
Sarychev Peak on Matua Island in the Russian Kuril Islands is blowing its top and the ash cloud is threatening aircraft flying over the area.
The volcano began spewing on June 12, and since then, according to US Air Force Weather Agency, that ash has now spread 700 nautical miles (1,300 kilometers) east-southeast and 400 nautical miles (740 kilometers) west-northwest of the volcano. The image was taken by the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
The plume reaches up 5 miles (8 kilometers) into the air, which is why air traffic controllers and ships in the locality have been warned, “The ash cloud presents a threat to aeroplane engines and may lead to communications systems failures,” Olga Shestakova, a spokeswoman for the Marine Geology and Geophysics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences told the Telegraph.
The particles that can cause havoc are often too tiny to be picked up by weather monitoring systems (see "Volcanoes ignite monitoring efforts")
Volcano fans can keep up to date over at the blog Eruptions, where they will also find more details about this, and other volcanoes.
Comments
Sarychev is a very active volcano, last erupting in 1989 [small], VEI 2 in 1976, 1965 and 1954; VEI 3 in 1960, and generating a thick layer of cinders in 1946 [VEI 4] which buried much of the remains of Japanese military occupation during WWII. There is an abandoned Russian village, Sarychevo. No one lives on Matua, but it is visited by afficianados of WWII sites. Scientists from the Kuril Biocomplexity Project visited Matua in the summers of 2006, 2007, 2008.
http://depts.washington.edu/ikip/index.shtml
We have no plan to return this summer, though we hear there may be a volcanological expedition later this summer. Currently there is a group surveying marine mammals in the area, we hope they will get information about how the eruption affects the local biota.
This island was hit hard by a tsunami in December 2006. We have before and after observations from that event
[MacInnes et al., 2009 Pure and Applied Geophysics; and MacInnes et al., in press, Geology]. We are studing the pre-historic tsunami record and perforce then are also documenting the pre-historic record of volcanic eruptions. Without going into details, suffice to say that our excavations are full of volcanic cinders. We’ll have to wait and see what deposit this current eruption leaves on Matua and neighboring islands!
We plan soon to post pictures of the pre-eruptive state of Matua and Sarychev.
Posted by: Jody Bourgeois | June 17, 2009 11:48 PM