Sheepy Dalek on a Saturday

Tolbachik is still going strong:
More information: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=80473

A screenshot I took 2 days ago:

Best info provided on the KVERT site

Etna showed 4 paroxysms but once Greg set his scripts on it, it stopped. Voodoo going on. (j.k)

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Report on a Deep Space Live:

The museum is also called “Museum of the Future”, the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, hosts a special “Deep Space Live” show every Thursday evening at 8pm.
The topics varies. Sometimes experts explain astronomical themes, sometimes Red Bull presents extreme sport events, sometimes paintings are explained and sometimes something totally different is on.

The Deep Space is a room with 2 screens (on the wall and on the floor) provided by 8 very special projectors each able to handle at least double HD quality images. People are even sitting “inside” of the floor projection or may walk around in it. On the 7th of february the topic of that DS-Live was “Feuerberge – Vulkane aus der Nähe” (translation: Mountains of Fire, volcanoes close-up”) with the Austrian photographer Christoph Kaltseis presenting his images.

I was very much looking forward to this, I do not think I need to explain to you why.
The image shows the start of the  ”talk” in the “Deep Space” theatre in the Ars Electronica Center in Linz Austria.

I hesitated to write a report about this show because I was not all to happy with it. The pictures were good, some were spectacular. But the talk going along with the images lacked substance and had quite a lot of incorrect information. It was mostly a slideshow of images and a story more like travel journalism, than a talk on volcanoes which I had been hoping for. This is OK, I just had wrong expectations.

The speaker had discovered his interest in volcanoes when he was visiting the Arenal in Costa Rica without realizing beforehand that he was visiting a volcano. Then there were some nice images of volcanoes of Costa Rica and some on Yellowstone.

Then it went on to the Italian volcanoes Vesuvius and Stromboli with some nice images of “Stromboli” the village nestled into the coastline of the volcano. Then some spectacular photos from a nightly eruption of Stromboli, leaving traces in the image like fireworks.

I took all the images standing on the balcony in “Deep Space” in the AEC with my mobile phone, so the quality is by far not the same as the one provided for the audience in the “Deep Space”.

Then he moved on to Vulcano, the Italian Island. May I please add for anyone who was present at the show, that a volcano showing intense fumarolic activity is NOT extinct! And that there are more volcanoes in Europe than the Italian and Icelandic ones. And that especially Middle Europe is not totally dead in the volcanic sense. Here i d like to mention the excellent posts by El Nathan and chryphia about the Eifel Volcanic Field. http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/region.cfm?rnum=01&rpage=list

The photographer had been visiting the erupting Kilauea using a helicopter and showed great images of rope lava, an open lava tube and the ocean entry.

Again: May I please add that Mauna Kea IS the highest mountain on earth if you consider how high it rises from the surrounding surface on the earth. But it is not 17 km high! The ocean around Hawaii is 6 km deep and Mauna Kea rises up to 4200 m. So it rises 10 km not 17 km.

Here is an image of Ol Doinyo Lengai when it still had its hornitos on top. Those got blown of in an eruption 2007 and now you can not walk as easily on top of the crater anymore as it lies 150 deeper. (Wikipedia link.)

The Danakil Desert. The speech on how how difficult it is to access these volcanos was interesting. Then we heard a description of the hike up to Erta Ale. The people there sure look dangerous and the “hotel-rooms” which are rented in advance of the hike to the volcano, look more like a dogshed and don’t really make one feel like being in a safe place.

And then came the most spectacular thing about the whole talk. A long video showing the boiling lava in the mouth of Erta Ale.

Simply beautiful to see a volcano in action. I added GVP and Wikipedia links with basic information on the volcanoes, in case someone who was in the audience, would like some facts.

Spica

Ruminarian IV – You asked for it.

CAVEAT: I am not a Geologist, Seismologist, Ornithologist, Hematologist, Banker (I have a soul), Congressman (I knew my parents), Auto Mechanic (well, professionally I’m not) or formally trained in any of this. I am an amateur, just like you. In other words, take it with a grain of salt, I can be wrong.

This sort of falls in with my previous “It’s a Gas” post from August 14th of LAST year (Originally “this” year, but the Mayan Doom thing came and went and went before this post made it out… it is 2012 that it refers to.)

The other day, I was a bit stoked by finally locating an SO2 dataset for the southern hemisphere. I knew it was out there, many times data from that have been mentioned in various papers. The data set is from the Taylor Dome, located at latitude 77.66°S. GISP, the source for the Northern data set is at around 65°N. Plotted together (with the Taylor Dome set inverted so that each can be clearly seen), you get a reasonably decent look at SO2 for both hemispheres.

Note that both of these plots are for Total SO2, and not just Volcanic SO2. All we are interested in are the peaks/spikes. (Likely volcanic in origin).

Interesting things in the plot:

52.9 BC shows a sizable spike in the Northern plot. According to GVP, Apoyeque in Nicaragua went up around this time with a VEI-6, so it’s a candidate (± 100 years).

78.2 AD could be Vesuvius, there is enough slop in the resolution to where it could be a fit with the 79 AD (historical record) eruption that killed Pliny the Elder (and gave us the archetype for a Plinian Eruption based on the writings of Pliny the Younger). An additional candidate (or co-emitter) could be Furnas in Portugal (80 AD ± 100 years) Both of them are listed as (or likely) VEI-5.

640.1 AD may be Shiveluch. GVP places an event there at 650 AD ± 40 years.

1612 BC is quite interesting. There is a monster spike in the Southern Hemisphere, and smaller one in the Northern hemisphere. GVP places the Santorini VEI-7 in this time frame, but logic says that it should have had the greatest effect in the northern hemisphere… so what happened about this time in the south? Fuego (Guatemala), Chacana (Ecuador), and Taapaca (Chile) all erupted with unknown VEI around 1580 BC, (± 75, 10, 75 years respectively), so any or all of them could be a candidate.

Since we are now in the southern hemisphere, that topic that came up when I posted the original plot: “Where is Taupo?” To put it simply… it ain’t there. Taupo went big in 230 AD at VEI-6. Yet not a blip. It also had a large event in 1460 BC (± 40 years), again.. nothing in the SO2 record to speak of.

dfm noted that the Taylor Dome series may be stunted in what it can record due to the “roaring 40s.”

For those of you that don’t know… 40°S latitude is notorious for it’s storms and high winds… it’s fairly persistent feature of that latitude. There is almost no land along that latitude… maybe 1100 km total out of 30,384 km of latitudinal track. It’s also right at the boundary of the Southern Hadley Cell and the Southern Mid-Latitude Cell.

At the surface, stuff north of the boundary tends to flow north, stuff south tends to flow south. That is, unless you shove the plume up towards the stratosphere where the flows reverse… and then if it gets to the stratosphere, well, things are different there. The stratosphere is above something called the “Tropopause.” The Tropopause is the very top of the troposphere. All weather that we encounter… Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Thunderstorms, Derechos, Typhoons, Monsoons, Lightning, Gales, Gusts, Waterspouts, Snow, Sleet, Rain, Hail… are products of the troposphere. The stratosphere is above that. It’s called the stratosphere due to it being layered… layered in temperature. The reason it is layered, is that not a lot goes on there. Well, not a lot of mixing, at least as compared to the one below it. Yet stuff still goes on there. This is the region where SO2 in a volcanic column is converted to Sulfate and can operate as a screen, reflecting sunlight.

You can see the boundary region in an averaged tropopause height plot. The red region around the equator are the two Hadley cells straddling the equator. Just north and south of these two regions are the mid-latitude cells that run to about 50°N and 50°S. Beyond there and you are into the Polar cells.

So… did Taupo produce an SO2 signal but both GISP and Taylor Dome ice miss it?

In Bolivia, there is a “extinct” stratovolcano called Nevado Sajama. GVP doesn’t have a listing for it, so that implies that it has had no Holocene activity. Davidson et al (1995) places the Nazca Plate Benioff Zone at between 150 to 175 km under the volcano, so it is likely that it is outside (barely) the region that produces magma for arc volcanism. However, that paper also lists Sajama as a Holocene volcano. Some of the ejecta from it overlies 2.2 mya material. So its last activity is at least younger than that. But the thing about Sajama that we care about, is that it has glaciers.

From the Sajama Ice Core descriptor:

In June-July 1997, two ice cores to bedrock were recovered from the summit of the extinct Sajama volcano, Bolivia (18°S, 69°W, elevation 6540 m) and were subsequently transported back in a frozen state to the cold room facility at the Byrd Polar Research Center (BPRC).

This record goes back to about 23000 BC. It only has 100 year resolution, but it at least gives us a peek at something inside the Southern Hadley cell.

An important note: This is Sulfate, not SO2. Sulfate is the end product after SO2 is converted through interaction with water and radicals.

But we are still left with the question of where is the Taupo SO2 signal? The best bet? There isn’t one.

In a previous post on the topic of the TVZ, we found that Taupo’s last eruption showed almost no zonation. Zonation is where different levels of the magma chamber have chemical signatures representative of the crystal formation process that was present at the time of the eruption. As the eruption progresses, different groups of signatures come out as the point source of the eruption gets to them. With no zonation, the likely reason is that that chamber was well mixed and highly dynamic. Convective currents were keeping everything stirred up really well and the chamber was very homogenous. It doesn’t explain the lack of SO2, but it may lend a clue. (something for you and I to ponder)

Is it possible that since Taupo is under a lake, that the SO2 was leached out early in the eruption by the large quantity of water?

Havre Seamount in the Kermadec Islands of New Zealand erupted (significantly) in July of this year… here is the Aura OMI Level 3 SO2 vertical column for that period. (May through August in order to make sure we caught it)

Hmm… nada. Up north around Vanuatu there are emissions, but nothing in the Havre Seamount area. It doesn’t prove the point, but it supports the idea of the SO2 being leached early.

Now we move on to 1258. It shows up on the GISP data set, but not in the Taylor Dome set. It also seems to be missing from the Sajama core, but as noted, it has a 100 year resolution and could still miss it. No matter how you slice it, there is still that glaring item about it showing up in the North Hemisphere, but not the South. If it were an equatorial event, one would expect a coincidental signal in both sets…. weather permitting. Zooming in on that year, sure enough, there is a signal in both sets.

But the northern signal is 6.4 times the size of the southern one. Whoever comes up with the source for the 1258 SO2 spike is going to have to address that. If not, it will be a rather large monkey wrench to deal with .

And now for something completely different. (maybe…)

Ever hear of e-folding? How about continuous interest compounding on a banking instrument? They are related. E-folding comes to us from the world of atomic physics. Continuous interest compounding comes to us from … banks. Both have to do with how you figure out how much “stuff” you have after a certain amount of time.

The top equation would be used to find out how much “stuff” you would have left in a half life equation with a given decay rate of “r” time. “t” is the amount of elapsed time.

The bottom equation does the same thing, but instead of the rate to wind up with “half”, it’s the rate to wind up with 1/e. “e” being a natural logarithm. (about 2.718281828)

The only reason I bring it up, is because Bluth et al (1997) did in their paper “Stratospheric Loading of Sulfur from Explosive Volcanic Eruptions” They come up with the conclusion, that SO2 blown into the atmosphere, is converted to sulfate at an e-folding rate of 35 days. That means that after 35 days, 1/e of the material will be left. (about 36.7%). Sulfate, on the other hand, shows an e-folding rate of about 12 months for the really prolific SO2 eruptions, and 6 months for the more moderate emitting eruptions. In both cases, wintertime sulfate removal rates are slowed down by about 20%.

Not having a handy eruption to run the equations on… let’s go back to my fictitious Mt Gibbons. For the sake of argument, Mt Gibbons erupted 1.0 Mt of SO2. Here is how it would play out according to Bluth et al.

What this plot does, is to apply the SO2 conversion and the Sulfate removal rates simultaneously (well, as close as I can get) to the eruption… which for the model, is assumed to be one large ejection of the SO2. As you can see, peak loading occurs about 2 to 3 months after the eruption.

Where the model fails, is when the SO2 is emitted over time, as in a series of SO2 emissions. Keep that in mind as you ponder how this works.

Okay.. that’s the show. Hopefully you weren’t bored by the post.

Enjoy!

GEOLURKING.

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OT side note for the true purveyors of arcane bits of knowledge.

Refer back to the Tropopause graphic. Notice anything interesting about it? Hint: Earth’s aphelion is in the first week of July. Thats the furthest point of our orbit. Perihelion, or the closest we get to the Sun is in the first week of January.

Now notice the tropopause heights at each time of the year. In January, the equatorial regions swell quite a bit, and then this flattens towards the poles in mid-year, around July. At that point, the poles are more inflated than during perihelion.

Essentially, the orbit of the Earth drives an oscillation in the atmospheric thickness.

No reason to note it other than it’s quite cool to see it plotted out.

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“Stratospheric Loading of Sulfur from Explosive Volcanic Eruptions” Bluth et al (1997)

http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~raman/papers/BluthJG.pdf

“Late Cenozoic magmatism of the Bolivian Altiplano” Davidson et al (1995)

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00286937?LI=true#page-1

Sajama Ice Core Data

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/trop/sajama/sc1-100a.txt

The Decade Volcano Programme

Fig.1 The dead of Herculaneum, burnt to death by 800-centigree hot pyroclastic flows from Vesuvius AD 79 (O Louis Mazzatenta, National Geographic)

The volcanic eruptions of Mount St Helens in 1980 and Nevado del Ruiz in 1985 made the general public aware of the dangers of co-existing with a large and potentially lethal volcano. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the possibilities of a lateral St Helens-type blast on a population of a great city as unaware of the hazard as the unfortunate citizens of Armero, Colombia. Blasts from the past such as Vesuvius 79 AD eruption that obliterated the large Roman cities of Pompei and Herculaneum or the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique, that completely destroyed the town of St Pierre, leaving only two survivors out of a population of some 22,000, served to reinforce the message. With human populations world-wide soaring, it is inevitable that humans will settle closer to potentially active volcanoes in ever-increasing densities. As a result, more human beings than ever are at risk from volcanic eruptions.

With this in mind, the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Association_of_Volcanology_and_Chemistry_of_the_Earth%27s_Interior” \o “International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior”  (IAVCEI) set out to identify volcanoes that had a history of large, potentially destructive eruptions and were located close to high-density populations. As the project was initiated as part of the United Nations-sponsored International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, hence the name Decade Volcano, it was hoped that the United Nations would fund the programme the aims of which was to identify the major strengths and weaknesses of current hazard management and contingency plans at each volcano, and how to address the weaknesses identified.

Fig. 2 The UN General Assembly. It was ultimately here support for the Decade Volcano programme must be obtained, not at some faculty. (Marty Lederhandler, Associated Press)

It must be realised that in a highly politicised world, decisions are rarely based on scientific grounds, but on what is politically feasible. Hence the volcanoes chosen had to have a broad appeal, geopolitical as well as demographic, to the representative body that was to grant the funding. But in order to achieve at least a semblance to a scientifically motivated choice, the volcanoes chosen had to threaten tens of thousands of people with at least two of the following volcanic hazards – lava dome collapse, pyroclastic flows, lava flows, lahars, tephra fall or volcanic edifice instability. Furthermore, the volcano had to have been recently geologically active. As a sop to the UN representatives, who in turn would have to have the sanction of their masters at home, any volcano chosen had to be politically and physically accessible for study and there must also be local support for the work.

In the end, the UN did not undertake to support the programme, and funding had to be obtained elsewhere. Where there is a national body responsible for volcanologic research and monitoring such as in the USA, Italy, Mexico or Colombia, this organisation has assumed responsibility for the volcano or volcanoes that naturally fall under their aegis. The European Union supports research and monitoring at European volcanoes whereas some of its member countries, France and Germany, have undertaken to support the work of Indonesian authorities at the same time giving French and German volcanologists access to research at active volcanoes.

Fig. 3 Koryaksky volcano overlooking Petropavlovsk’s 180,000 inhabitants (Wikimedia)

The 16 volcanoes given status as Decade Volcanoes, with the (main) human habitations threatened given in brackets, are:

USA – Mount Rainier (Seattle, Washington) and Mauna Loa (Hawaii)
Japan – Sakurajima in the Aira caldera (Kagoshima and Kirishima) and Unsen (Unsen and Nagasaki)
Russia – Avachinsky and Koryaksky (Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka)
Italy – Vesuvius (Naples) and Etna (Catania)
Greece – Santorini, a.k.a. Thera (Aegean Islands)
Spain – Teide (Canaries, holiday paradise of Europe)
Mexico – Colima (Colima, Manzanillo)
Colombia – Galeras (Pasto)
Phillipines – Taal (Manilla)
Guatemala – Santa Maria/Santiaguito (Quezaltenango)
Indonesia, Java – Merapi (Yogyakarta)
Democratic Republic of Congo – Nyiragongo (Goma)
Papau New Guinea – Ulawun (???)

While no one doubts that given a possible or hypothetical worst-case scenario, these volcanoes pose a serious threat to nearby human settlements, it’s quite obvious that politics has been a main factor in their selection as Decade Volcanoes. The financially and politically influential USA, Russia and Japan have each been assigned two with four to the equally politically and economically influential Europe, while the large Hispanic contingent of nations accounts for no less than five of the sixteen.

Nevertheless, it is a start and a good one too. The programme has led to a better understanding of the volcanic hazards and in one case, at Etna in 1992, measures were taken on the advice of IAVCEI (International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior) that eventually prevented a lava flow from reaching a town. Scientists and civil protection authorities have learnt to cooperate as with the very nasty eruption of Merapi in 2010, without which the death toll would undoubtedly have been much higher. Awareness of volcanic hazards from volcanoes not on the list has been heightened as well. A summary of the advances and achievements brought by the first ten years of the programme can be found at “http://www.sveurop.org/gb/articles/articles/decade.htm”  Directly below, followers of this blog may be surprised, or not as the case may be, to learn that our old friend Nemesio M. Pérez compiled the final report of the IAVCEI meeting in Teneriffe, 2010.

Fig. 4 The 2334 m high Ulawun stratovolcano, Papau New Guinea (listspress)

But it cannot be claimed that all the Decade Volcanoes represent the 16 volcanic centers most dangerous to human populations, nor that the efforts are directed where they are most needed. Let us look at Ulawun, Papau New Guinea as one example! Ulawun, a 2334 meter high stratovolcano, is the tallest volcano of the Bismarck Archipelago chain and one of the most active volcanoes in Papua New Guinea. According to John Seach, it is composed of lava flows interbedded with tephra and erupts basalt and andesite through Strombolian and Pelean eruptions. Thus the main danger to humans comes from the pyroclastic flows associated with Pelean eruptions, the other Decade criteria met are those of tephra fall and structural failure. John Seach reports that the 1980 eruption resulted in an 18 km high eruption column that devastated some 20 square kilometres and claims that structural collapse could potentially lay waste to an area hundreds of square kilometres. That is an area with a radius of about eight to ten kilometres.

But is Ulawun really such a highly dangerous volcano? First of all, as far as I can tell from maps and satellite images, there are few human habitations within the danger zone. Second, it erupts basalt and andesite, neither of which are associated with particularly devastating eruptions. Basalts erupt effusively as at Hawaii or semi-explosively as at Etna. Andesites predominantly erupt explosively, but rarely result in a high VEI as both volume-wise and explositivity-wise they are small to medium. Third, Ulawun erupts regularly, 34 eruptions over the past hundred years with most assigned a VEI of 1, 2 or 3 with a single VEI 4. While this is impressive and a constant reminder to the locals that theirs is a dangerous volcano, the regular eruptions prevent the build-up of a much larger eruption – and also inhibits the build-up of a large human population on its fertile slopes.
Let’s now move our examining eye some 200 km to the NW of Ulawun! There we find Rabaul, the city of WW II fame fought over by the Japanese and Americans for its superb anchorages. Up until 1994, Rabaul was the provincial capital with a population of some 17,000 inhabitants. On September 19th 1994, the Tavurvur and Vulcan stratovolcanoes erupted simultaneously which destroyed the town as had happened previously in 1937. Fortunately, no more than five people were killed this time against 500 on the previous occasion. Today, the provincial capital has moved to Kokopo, a scant 20 km away, but Rabaul is slowly being rebuilt as happened after its 1937 destruction.

Why is Rabaul then, to borrow a phrase from Carl, such an ill-begotten piece of real estate? The reason for its superb anchorage is that it is a submerged caldera, 8 by 14 km wide. The town is located on the rim of the caldera and there are no less than eight vents of which four are stratovolcanoes such as the already named Tavurvur and Vulcan. Just to make certain of the town’s eventual destruction, the spit of land on which Rabaul is situated is not only the edge of the Rabaul caldera. A scant three kilometres due north lies the equally submerged Tavui caldera, source of the 5100 BC Raluan rhyolitic ignimbrite, an eruption listed as producing 4.0  ±  1.0  x  109 m3 of tephra.

Fig. 6 Map of the Rabaul Caldera (USGS)

No doubt there are other, and better examples of volcanoes that ought to have been Decade Volcanoes instead of some of the obviously less than well-chosen current ones, but it cannot be denied that the project has realised its goals and done so very well indeed! The context of its genesis, well before the advent of the world-wide web with its instantly accessible webcams and monitoring equipment, has to be taken into account as well. In the final analysis, the Decade Volcano programme has to be regarded as being highly successful.

HENRIK

Suggested reading:

HYPERLINKS :

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/WikiReader_Decade_Volcanoes.pdf

http://www.iavcei.org/” http://www.iavcei.org/

http://www.sveurop.org/gb/articles/articles/decade.htm

http://www.geo.mtu.edu/volcanoes/rabaul/rabaul.usgs.html

A Volcanic ‘Grand Tour’ Part 3

Etna: a very special place

Prior to visiting Stromboli we had visited Etna, but I have left what the locals call Muncibeddu until last. It is obviously very well-known to anyone with even the tiniest passing interest in volcanoes, and many thousands of words have been written about its volcanology.

On a volcanic scale this is just a hemidemisemiquaver of a microfart, but to me
it is very special as it is the first real eruptive activity I have ever witnessed (I’ve seen fumarolic steaming before – Volcán de Fuego, Guatemala). Here Etna’s Bocca Nueva on the left pumps a bit of ash, while the New SE crater is steaming away nicely to the right. Two days after this the regular ash emissions from BN slowed down, while a couple of big explosions in the NSEC brought a chunk of the crater rim down.

Etna has joined a very select group of locations that I have been lucky enough to visit that at once became truly special to me, and I’m struggling somewhat to convey my feelings about the place. I can certainly understand why it has long drawn people from far away and who then find it hard to ever leave.
Perhaps it is the sheer scale of the mountain that is so wonderful. There can be few geographic features that dominate the surrounding land in the way that Etna towers over eastern Sicily. It is truly gigantic, and visible from many miles away in all directions. Even from the northern coast, where a line of impressive mountains fringe the sea, Etna can still occasionally be seen steaming in the distance, an order of magnitude bigger than anything else.

Etna looms large over the city of Catania, clouds adding to the fumarolic steam to enhance the volcano’s menace. Lava has reached the town on several occasions, notably in 1669 when the city’s walls deflected the flows into the sea. The reprieve was short-lived: a massive earthquake destroyed much of the city in 1693.

From a volcanic point of view it seems to have just about everything you could want – and mostly accessible, too. Craters and cones of varying ages are everywhere, each with its own story to tell of how it changed the landscape. Some of the younger craters still steam, and if you dig just a few centimetres into the ground then the residual heat is immediately obvious.

This is one of the two craters that opened up in 2002-03 just by the old Rifugio Torre del Filosofo. Steam still issues from the open mouth of one of them.

Etna’s upper slopes are covered in ash and lapilli from recent eruptions, creating a strangely rounded, smooth- edged, black world that is from another planet. Towering above are the central vents, always in action and always threatening.
Giant lava runs can be traced across the intermediate slopes, leaving islands of lush vegetation as they have twined around higher ground on their slow journey down the mountain.

Fact of life no. 127: you can’t keep a 14-year old out of a cave. Etna’s extensive lava fields feature numerous lava tubes, and this perfectly formed little beauty was just too tempting for the ‘Lill-Viggen’. The best his claustrophobic Dad could manage was to stick the camera in at arm’s length.

Etna’s lower slopes are home to beautiful forests and vineyards. Attractive villages – old-school Sicily mixed with modern Alpine influences – stand testament to man’s resilience to nature’s forces and the desire to milk the riches of fertile volcanic soils. I cannot quite put a finger on what it is about the place, but I want to live there!

“Honestly, all it needs is a tidy-up and a lick of paint…”
I admit to having fallen completely in love with Etna and the villages that surround it. However, my wife is yet to be convinced about this suggestion for a cheap holiday home for the Viggen clan. (House buried by lava flow on Etna’s southern flank).

Epilogue
I hope this hasn’t come across too much as a “look at me on my hols” post. If it has, then apologies. The humble aim of this effort was firstly to raise a smile or two, and to share a few first-hand thoughts and impressions about places that we talk about regularly as if we “know” them.
More importantly, I hope it might just influence someone out there to do something similar with other locations – or even these same ones – and jot down a few impressions for the rest of us. Science can be a beautiful thing, but nowhere near as beautiful as human experience!
True, we went to real ‘tourist volcanoes’, but they’re still volcanoes, and it’s not our fault that they just happen to be located in beautiful, hot, sunny, accessible places where the food is simply a joy! And thanks to spending a little bit of time on the net the trip was very cheap. Forget the volcanoes, the ice cream alone is worth it!
Anyhow, I really am the last person to tell anyone what to do or not to do, but if I may offer some observations and guidance based on my experiences:
1) I have driven many miles in many types of vehicle in many countries, but nothing can adequately prepare you for that initial few minutes on Italian roads. Even if you have done it before, it’s still much scarier than you ever remember. To drive successfully in Italy is an artform, a triumph of timing, reflexes and brinkmanship over common sense and caution. With the first few kilometres tentatively behind you it becomes a challenge to be increasingly relished, but for a short while I really, really wished I still smoked.

2) If you are going to arrive in Naples expecting to find your lodgings in some unlit backstreet of a Camorra gang stronghold halfway up Vesuvius, in a strange rental car and with the Naples-Salerno motorway shut without warning and with no diversion signposted (actually, nothing in Italy is signposted to any degree of reliability), then do NOT do it at night without a very good GPS.

3) To get good photos of Strombolian action at the top take a tripod and a decent telephoto lens. I had the latter, but not the former, which is why you will not see my efforts here!

4) DO eat ice cream. For breakfast, lunch, dinner and at all times in between. There are a tiny handful of places in the rest of the world – for instance, Bosse’s Glassbar (Linköping, Sweden) – where one can acquire a genuine 10 out of 10 ice cream, but the chances are you will never, ever be in a place that has better gelato than the sunny parts of Italy, so cram in as much as you possibly can. You can burn it all off when you shin up Stromboli.

5) As Spica will also testify, Arancini (see Name that Lava) are extremely yummy

6) When abroad always do your bit to support the local economy, and fight the global advances of multinational corporations! (for example, a healthy-sized jug of red wine costs less than a Coke in many Sicilian restaurants).

This sure beats climbing, but in my humble opinion the 25-Euro Etna cable car just doesn’t take you far enough up the mountain. You’re probably only there once, so pay the full 60 Euros (!) and take the Unimog bus that takes you all the way up to the now-spectacularly-buried-under-ash Rifugio Torre del Filosofo. If nothing is happening you will still have an amazing view of the top of Etna, as well as being able to walk around a lapilli-covered ‘other-world’ of still-steaming craters. If something does happen, you will have the best seat in the house (or maybe you will be running, in which case there’s no finer way to die for a volcanoholic!)

UKVIGGEN
Photos mostly by author

A Volcanic ‘Grand Tour’ Part 1

Today I am proud to present part 1 of UKViggens Volcanic ‘Grand Tour’ to you, but as long as it is Friday… you are expecting some riddles!

RIDDLE – Name that volcano! By Suzie.

Once upon a time K met A.
They kissed, married, argued and had a baby!
But did they live happily ever after?

And another evil riddle!!

We are as peas in a pod, head to tail, but to see us we need to be extinct!

1) What feature am I/we?
2) Where will you see me and what is extinct?
3) In what are we commonly found?

Happy hunting! AlanC

Part 2 will be published once you solved the riddles and Suzie and Alan did the Dinging. Expect part 3 on Monday.
The bar is open, have a nice weekend, happy reading and riddling!
Spica
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Etna’s blackened top towers over the arid yet productive lands beyond.

“The Prologue” *
* with thanks to Frankie Howerd in the British late-60s/early-70s sitcom ‘Up Pompeii!’

In days gone by, it was considered an essential element of a young gentleman’s education to undertake a ‘Grand Tour’. While such journeys might have taken in the works of the Flemish masters, or some botanical study in the Swiss Alps, the focus of the ‘Grand Tour’ was to bathe in the sumptuous delights of the antiquities of Italy. Florence, Rome and, of course, Venice were the signature destinations of such a journey of enlightenment and education.

In the 21st Century such places can be visited virtually from one’s armchair, without the need to hire mountain guides to cross the Alps in safety, or tutors trained in the Classics to provide insight as one travels. The same can also be said of volcanoes: with near real-time seismometers, webcams, blogs and page-upon-page of internet information, why bother going to look at them at all?

True up to a point, but for any young gentleman (or lady) who may wish to further their studies in this fascinating field, is there any substitute for feeling the rough crunch of scoria underfoot? Or, maybe, even witnessing a volcanic eruption at first hand? Of course there isn’t!
So, while the Viggen womenfolk indulged their own peculiar desires to cook themselves slowly around a hotel pool, this humble correspondent and his volcanoholic 14-year old son embarked on a ‘Grand Tour’ of their own. All for the boy’s education, you understand.

And, just as the young English gentlemen of the past sought their enlightenment among the art and artefacts of the Renaissance and Roman Empire, so budding volcanoholics must also journey to Italy, and more specifically the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, for a true educational grounding in the marvels of the magmatic world.

There, within a few short hours of each other, lie the most impressive (Etna), the most active (Stromboli) and the most famous (Vesuvius) volcanoes in the continent, if not the world.

The notion of a ‘Grand Tour’ was obviously still alive and well in 1950s Cumbria: some while ago ‘Fru Viggen’ unearthed the scrapbook compiled by her parents of their honeymoon. Como, Venice, Florence, Pisa and Rome were visited, along with the customary excursion to Pompeii, as evidenced by this ancient relic that dates from 1945.

Vesuvius: meet the world, his wife and their kids!

Vesuvius seems like a good place to start. Wake up nice and early to beat the tourists (we, you understand, are not mere sightseers – we are engaged on scientific studies to seek out and attain higher levels of volcanological understanding!). Nice drive up to the car park to find 20 coaches already there. Oh well, the best laid plans …
So, here we are standing on the rim of the crater of the world’s most famous volcano, surrounded by a mass of people from Texas, Tokyo, Tyneside, Timbuktu … and Esbjerg (a very pleasant couple!). Despite the throng, my first glimpse of the crater as I scrambled to beat the fat bloke to a gap in the crowd by the fence will stay with me forever.

People or no people, it’s a pretty impressive hole in the ground, but I just couldn’t help thinking how even more amazing that crater must have been before the 1906 eruption, when the giant hole was 250 metres DEEP!

Faced with the crowds my mind starts to wander, and I find myself getting fascinated by the array of sensors around that hole in the ground. What do they all do? Which is the spectral gas emission sensor? Is that a differential GPS antenna I can see there? Do they work?

Some of the many sensors that surround the crater of Vesuvius, linked to the observatory located on the mountain’s lower slopes.

In any case, I can’t help thinking there’s not enough of them. Look away from the crater and laid out before you is a smog-diffused vista of packed urban sprawl. From the top the houses, offices and shops appear so small that they meld into a solid mass of … what?

Humanity! Yes, that’s it. There’s one hell of a lot of people down there. Maybe a few thousand fewer than before the government sponsored a campaign for families to move away from the Red Zone (only to create a vacuum of empty buildings into which the Camorra swiftly moved their illegal immigrants, brothels and drug factories), but there are still several millions. Evacuate that lot? Not a chance. Re-read Carl’s posts on the matter. It’s a sobering subject.

Having left the hordes behind at the top, we descended to lower levels and found ourselves eating a slice of pizza at the quiet former base station of the funicular railway.

A railway up Vesuvius? Yes, there was one, and once back home I have become more side-tracked by that than the volcano itself. In 1891 the famed travel company Thomas Cook Ltd claimed to be able to arrange tickets on 555030 km of the world’s 580397 km of railway line, but the only railway that the company actually owned was the 806 metres of funicular line that climbed 391 metres in elevation to the top of Vesuvius. The steepest incline was 63°.

Named ‘Etna’, this is one of the two original cars on the Vesuvius funicular railway, which had two tracks with a continuous-cable mechanism driven by steam engines. The other car was named ‘Vesuvio’. One of them was destroyed in 1887 when mountain guides broke up the line and set fire to the engine house as part of a dispute with the owner. The railway was back in business by 1889.

The opening of the funicular in 1880 inspired the song ‘Funiculì, Funiculà!’ (all of you will know the tune very well, even if you were previously unaware of what it’s all about). Here’s much-missed Luciano singing about a volcanic railway, together with the lyrics in the Neapolitan dialect:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTSAZAHiOa8

By 1903 Thomas Cook had opened up an 8-km stretch of line that took passengers from Pugliano in Ercolano (Herculaneum) to the base station of the funicular. The 1906 eruption caused major disruption and a halt to the funicular for a few years, and finally the eruption of 1944 put an end to all that nonsense. The post-war chairlift that replaced the funicular came to an unprofitable end in 1984.

Work fleetingly began on reinstating the rail line in the early 1990s, and then again in the late ‘Noughties’, but today such frivolity seems out of place, especially in a city where the council is forbidden to support organised crime, yet the Camorra own everything – not just the construction companies, but those that sell the materials to the construction companies.

So, now you walk – that’s progress for you!

Seems like a nice place to build a town…

I will freely admit that the ‘Lill-Viggen’ and I are not great ancient history buffs. In fact, one of my most precious possessions is a note that was surreptitiously passed to me by my late, great mentor during a long-winded RAeS historical lecture that states simply: “Old stuff is rubbish”. Despite our general antipathy, it would be rude of us to ignore the most famous volcanic tragedy of all time when in the vicinity, and so on to the Roman ruins of Pompeii (one of the genuine glories of southern Italy is that it can sometimes be difficult to ascertain where the ‘modern world’ ends and the ‘ruins’ begin).

Now, I’m sorry, but the fact that Romans lived in houses (Gosh!), cooked in kitchens (No!), ate food (Really?), slept in beds (Amazing!), bathed, shat, fought and f***ed doesn’t really excite me that much. I was surprised, however, to see that they had developed such good scaffolding. And they had Fanta, too!

Never underestimate the ability of dogs to sleep through anything. It’s difficult to tell if this mutt had died and been perfectly preserved by the layers of ash and pyroclastic flows that entombed Pompeii in 79 AD, or whether it was still just sleeping off the whole ham it had stolen and consumed a few days before the eruption. Interesting to note that, even by the first century, the Romans had obviously mastered the dark art of manhole covers.

In all seriousness, Pompeii is incredible on any level, and even I was reluctantly fascinated to see glimpses of how the inhabitants lived (especially following a recent excellent BBC documentary about the place).

Most of the time, though, I looked up at the omnipresent Vesuvius and just tried to imagine what it must have been like exactly 1,933 years previous (by happenstance we were there on 24 August, the anniversary of the eruption) as the flakes of ash began to fall.

UKVIGGEN