Thursday Throwdown: Stromboli's tiny bubbles, Hawaiian lava flow update and recovering from Eyjafjallajökull

Lots of little pieces of news I’ve run across … time to play a little catch up.

nStromboli: A volcano after Don Ho’s heart.

Every once in a while, my RSS feeds will dredge up some articles from years gone by … and this week there were two New York Times pieces that are a few years old, but interesting nevertheless. The first is about research conducted by Dr. Robert Sohn at WHOI on explosive undersea eruptions. The second is work by Corr and Vaughan about finding subglacial volcanism in Antarctica. Both are interesting reads if you missed them (like I did) the first time around.

Yesterday I talked about lava flows – and specifically the Kilauea lavas that are in the Kalapana subdivision. Here is the current update from HVO on the flows along with some details from the local news (link has video).

We have a new Smithsonian/USGS Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcanic Activity Report – again, filled with great information, including news from Rabaul, lava flows and a >6 km ash plume from Kliuchevskoi, and continuing strombolian activity at Pacaya.

There was some news last week about recently published research on the mechanisms for eruptions at Stromboli. I haven’t had a chance to digest it all, but the long-and-short seems to be to think about these eruptions like Don Ho would: “tiny bubbles”. The original paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

In case you haven’t been visiting the NASA Earth Observatory page in a while, they posted an image taken last week of the current activity at Nyiragongo in the DRC. The image shows the sulfur dioxide-rich plume coming from the main summit crater.

And there have been a lot of articles this week with airlines reporting the cost of the Eyjafjallajökull airspace closures. The reports are all in the tens of millions of Euros, but across the board, the airlines say ticket sales are back on track. Funny how quickly businesses recover after something like this eruption (even after all their wailing and moaning at the time).