Monday Musings: Iceland, Chilean volcanoes and the SI/USGS Update

Cleaning up some news … busy week leading up to a field trip I am helping co-lead to Death Valley next week.

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nUbehebe Crater in Death Valley, California

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• First off, I want to say how amazed I am at the great discussion that went on all weekend about the signs of potential activity in Iceland. It now appears that the earthquakes at Eyjafjallajökull may be waning, however the levels of seismicity have definitely bounced up and down over the last few days. However, the level and depth of the conversation is a testament to all volcanophiles out there. Nice job, folks.

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• For those of you into extraterrestrial volcanism, there is a brief piece on the development of “channels” caused by lava on Mars. You see similar features on the Moon, where lava flows have made their own channels – and you even see it on Earth, but typically as thermally-eroded bottoms to lava tubes.

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• I meant to post this a while back but forgot – the NASA Earth Observatory has some nice images of the region around Chaiten, showing the extensive ash, tephra and lahar deposits from the eruption that started nearly 2 years ago.

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• I somehow also forgot to post last week’s SI/USGS Weekly Volcanic Activity Report, so here it is.

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• The Volcanism Blog has a report about how the SERNAGEOMIN in Chile has noted no real change in the activity at most Chilean volcanoes following last week’s M8.8 earthquake. There will be a lot of eyes on Chile in the coming months, looking to see if the hypothesized connection between large subduction zone earthquakes and increased volcanic activity comes to pass.

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• Also, a reminder that if you’d like to send a question for me to pass onto Alan Boyle, the science editor at MSNBC, about science in the mainstream media, do so soon. I’ll be sending the selected questions off to Alan in the next few days.