May 09 2008
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Volcano erupts in Chile
A lot of you may have already seen this, but a 1200 meter volcano called Chaiten in Chile erupted the other day, blowing smoke and ash kilometers into the sky. It also sparked massive lightning, and the images are incredible:
There are quite a few amazing pictures of the event on Flickr. There is also this astonishing video on YouTube:
This is the first eruption of Chaiten in almost 9400 years. Small towns nearby have been evacuated, and I haven’t heard reports of anyone getting hurt.
I rather hope we get some images of the eruption taken from the space station. They tend to be rather dramatic.
pic from spave
http://www.flickr.com/photos/floro/2475401414/
amazing
“A Pillar of Winds” as the background music.
Nice.
Landsat 7 is scheduled to fly over it on the 17th. The imager isn’t what it used to be, but something interesting should come from the opportunity.
Nice Shot, Steve G, though L7 will have a better resolution. I’ll let this list know…
I’m glad that you didn’t accidentally mix up the headlines and post “Large Hadron Collider Comes Online”.
Cool video!!!
TAnks!
GAry 7
I was hoping there’d be a higher-resolution version of the top pic… 500x just isn’t going to cut it for my new wallpaper! Bah!
Wait a second here… isn’t that Jesus appearing in the sky?
Look closer at the cloud of dust near the back, it’s clearly a bearded dude in a robe whisking up the forces of nature for his own divine purposes.
It’s not a volcano… IT’S THE RAPTURE!!!
Actually that volcanic cloud looks remarkably like - a leg wound!
Autumn,
I believe the music is “One if These Days” by Pink Floyd off the Meddle album (1971)
darnit! They need to release a bigger resolution of that picture. I need it as a wallpaper!!
I love volcanos. They’re my big 2nd interest.
At the Universe Today website, someone posted this link
http://galacticcentral.org/imagebucket/volcano.jpg
where is a 2996 x 2000 version of the first image
Amazing. I didn’t know that a volcanic cloud could cause such lightning. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it certainly looks apocalyptic.
@Michelle:
I found this image from the Fark thread:
http://www.tflive.com/images/we_are_almost_there_mr_frodo.jpg
bonjour pour tous je veux bien vous envoyez des theoriques mais je veux une confirmation jai bien envoyé plusieures théoriques mais sans avoir aucun aide veuillez noté mon nom sur google.com et vous allez avoir tous les conséquences merci de votre attention morad genie
HOLY CRAP!
God was really slacking off when he packed up after only six days construction. The quality of his workmanship is really disappointing. Tut tut, cracks everywhere, stuff leaking out….. shoddy.
Man, that brings back the memories. Sunday, May 18th, 1980. Ellensburg, Washington - 40 miles east of Mt. St. Helens. I awoke Sunday morning to find the sky pitch black. I went outside and the smell of sulfur was in the air. Small ash particles floated everywhere like snow. From that distance we didn’t hear the initial boom of the explosion at 8:30 a.m. but by 10:00 a.m. it was pitch black and would remain so for the rest of the day.
57 people died that day. I remember the newspapers at the time published a picture of a dead boy lying in the back of a pickup truck. He was covered with ash. That one always haunted me for years and years. I always wondered what his name was, what his dreams were, and what he might have been if he had lived. Funny how things stay with you like that after 28 years. It will be the 28th anniversary of that event in exactly 9 days.
Tom — I can imagine that would stick with you. I have a similar memory of a tornado that came through my neighborhood May 5th 1989. I remember it like it was last week. Much devastation. It could have been much worse, though. Volcano eruptions don’t just devastate, they destroy everything in their path.
That top picture is impressive, indeed. And it is now my wallpaper, thanks to Kytshar for linking to a higher res one.
Since it’s been way too long since you have mentioned pareidolia (one whole day), did you notice the divine Ganesha, come to remove all obstacles between us and enlightenment?
Heh. Christians are the only ones with imaginations…
“Ellensburg, Washington - 40 miles east of Mt. St. Helens.”
Correction. I just did a little calculation. We were 95 miles from the volcano at a bearing of 55 degrees so approximately northeast. The wind direction was approximately towards the east which is why towns on the east side got coated with a lot of ash. I think we got 3-4 inches of it. If we had only been 40 miles away we probably would have heard the explosion.
Thanks, this is the first time I’ve heard about it.
One does not simply walk into Mordor…
That IS awesome. I blogged about it here:
Geology, Wizardry, Astronomy, Obamanation
What amazing pictures.
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Holy crap, I think they used freakin’ Zombi for the background music in that video! ZOMBI!
One of these days Chaiten is going to cut you into little pieces!
> Brangoon
C’mon, dude. It’s OBVIOUSLY bin Laden …..
Best. Eruption. Ever.
“This is the first eruption of Chaiten in almost 9400 years.”
Must be global warming.
This is the first I’m hearing about it, too. On an astronomy blog. There’s something to be said about news reporting in America…
Amazing pics of Chaiten. The raw power of the earth ‘venting’ itself into the sky never fails to stun me.
Tom, I remember that picture of the boy in the pickup after all these years, and I lived in Wisconsin at the time of the eruption, very far removed from the devastation of Mt St Helens. One of the other ‘human scale’ images from that event is that of a station wagon partially crushed by fallen trees and buried in ash, several miles away from (but in the path of) the blast. I don’t recall whether or not the car’s occupant(s) survived.
It’s nowhere near Cerro Paranal / The Large Binocular Telescope / Gemini South I hope - is it?
No harm to astronomers or ash cloud risk to the many fine telescopes there is there?
Or am I getting my places / names mixed up?
Is the eruption large enough to effect the climate & cause a drop in global temperatures as Mt Pinatubo (?) / Mt St Helens / Krakatoa did by any chance? Anyone got any ideas / guesstimations on that (cold weather change) front?
Cool pics anyway BA. THX
I remember hearing & reading about Mt St Helens -from a very safe distance away in Australia - would love to visit the site if I ever get the chance ..
Nah, bin Laden’s already dead. Died a few years ago of typhus -that’s if his failing kidney held up that long or he wasn’t flattened into the rocky mush of Tora Bora shortly after the US first bombed Afghanistan from the stone age it was already in back further to an even more miserable stone age.
Whatever has actually killed him, I’m pretty sure than bin Laden’s been dead a long time now - but of course we’re not officially told so that there remains that feeble skerrick of an excuse to continue to wage America’s War of Terror and keep you all paranoid and easily controlled ..
bin laden is a classic convenient Goldstein-type hate figure (read Orwell’s novel ‘1984′ there) exploited as the caricature Black hat for propaganda purposes. Shame too many of the American population keeps falling for it ..
—–
The videos? Gee .. how hard to fake are they - not! Was he a real figure - sure. Was he really as bad as some wish to beleive, some sort of menacing Muslim super-villain? Course he blinking well wasn’t!
Even assuming he’s still alive as some think - & as that renowned truth-teller (hahahaahaha .. sob!) George Bush the lesser claims -
lets consider what bin Laden / Al Quaeda has been able to do lately in theway of actually attacking America … Hmm .. lets see that’s right - NOTHING!
(The people fighting you in Iraq? Those’d be the Iraqis & their attacking you just ‘coz you’ve invaded them! The folks in Afghanistan? Well, that’s the Taliban & guess what -once again (like with the VietCong) while there may be some ideology involved really the main reason why they’re fighting there is because its actually their home !)
If you compare the damages objectively for a second - and, yes, I know that’s hard in your climate - then AQ has knocked over two skyscrapers & killed about 3,000 people Vs theUS having bombed, invaded and occupied two entire nations murdering hundreds of thousands (at min.) of innocent children, men & women in the process. I’d say any half reasonable observer would now say you’ve gone wa-aay too far & done vastly disproportionate harm as oppsoed to wnhat ’s been done unto you.
Time to call ‘enough’, to leave other nations the hell alone & to apologise to the rest of the world for the enormous amount of damage and slaughter that you’ve done so far. Not that there’s any chance of Presiking Bush the Mad & his Neo-Con puppeteers doing anything so sane and brave as that ..
——————————————————–
” ..the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. We [the USA] are only 6% of the World’s population - we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind.”
- John F. Kennedy. (Quoted by Phillip Adams, Page 11, ‘Weekend Australian’ magazine. Dec. 13-14, 2003.)
Quote from President Eisenhower (quoted in ’The Guardian weekly’, 2005 Jan 28th – Feb. 3rd .) : “We cannot consider that the armed invasion and occupation of another country are peaceful or proper means to achieve justice and conformity with international law.”
“There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies against despots - suspicion.”
- Demosthenes, Phillipics-2. [Collins Concise Dictionary of Quotations, P.108.]
“Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate.”
‘Since it is impossible to coerce thought, the way to social harmony is to discuss conflict and pursue truth; the more people speak their minds freely, the more they are likely to be loyal citizens.’
– Jewish Dutch 17th C philosopher, B. Spinoza.
- Col. Charles Stuart during the American War of Independence, 1778.
“Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate.”
- Col. Charles Stuart during the American War of Independence, 1778.
______________________________
CORRECTION from above post.
Sorry if this offends people - but sometimes the truth does hurt.
The USA is NOT the good guy here.
… & the Bad Guy here is really that small group of extremist pro-Isreali Jewish & XN Neo-con fundamentalists who have for too long hijacked your nation’s foreign policy.
This is NOT “conspiracy theory” but just the stark truth recognised by people even at opposite ends of your political spectrum from Pat Buchanan through to Noam Chomsky.
Remove the malign “Israel uber alles” neo-conservative lunatics from power & stop funding and arming Israel - insist it makes peace on just terms with the Palestineans and its Muslim neighbours or gets evacuated from the Islamic world region to Europe or theUSA instaed -where, really it belongs & half the current Islamic world - Western world conflict ends almost instantly. Stop demonising and patronising and bullying the SW Asian / Muslim nations and planet generally and become a good global citizen & the other half is mostly gone too. Its not that hard if you actually think …
… but, of course, it seems you never do ..
Umm… Guys? Maybe flying about next to an ash plume *might* not be the best idea…
Great video, though.
Thanks Kytshar for the hi-res link!
(I think Steve G is correct, it is Pink Floyd for the background music.)
@StevoR:
Well, given that the LBT is on Arizona, I would say it’s completely safe from the Chaiten Volcano rage…
But talking about the other telescopes located in Chile, most of them are located some 1500 kms north of the volcano. That number goes for Gemini South, Cerro Tololo (CTIO), Las Campanas and La Silla.
Paranal (VLT) is more than 2100 kms north of Chaiten.
So, nothing to worry. I’m writing this from Paranal, by the way…
Tom> C’mon, dude. It’s OBVIOUSLY bin Laden …..
Oh don’t even joke about that… Bush will send the remaining US forces directly into the volcano!!!
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