Increased activity at Marapi in Indonesia prompts elevated alert

I wanted to make a quick post on the some new volcano news as I’ll likely be a little sporadic with my posts next week. I have my last trip of the summer to lovely Minneapolis for a SERC workshop called “Teaching Mineralogy, Petrology and Geochemistry in the 21st Century“, so I’ll be busy for a lot of the week.

However, there is a some news of activity at another volcano in Indonesia – this one being Marapi. Don’t be confused, this is not a typo, I’m not talking at Merapi (although Google wants to correct Marapi to Merapi every time), but rather a volcano with a very similar name on Sumatra. Marapi is another stratovolcano that sees frequent small (VEI 1-2) eruptions, the last of these being in 2004, while an eruption in 1975 produce some fatalities. This week’s Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcanic Activity Report did have a brief mention of the small explosions and increased seismicity at Marapi and Indonesia officials have raised the alert status of the volcano to Level 2 (of 4). The latest news has the volcano producing plumes that reach a few hundred meters (see above) and suggest that the explosions and seismicity are continuing, albeit at a lower level than earlier this week. Officials have also set up an exclusion zone of 3 km around the volcano’s summit.

A word of caution – there are an awful lot of images in articles about this activity that show eruptions of Merapi rather than Marapi, so I’d be skeptical of most.

The ash plume from Marapi in Indonesia as seen earlier this week.