Volcano Alert
A major volcanic eruption has generated a lethal, destructive tidal wave (tsunami) in the Sunda Strait of Indonesia.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46663158
Anak Kratatau has erupted twice in the last 24 hours. After the first eruption, a tsunami swept across the Sunda Strait, toward Sumatra and toward Java. This was followed by a second eruption. Anka Krakatau’s most recent prior eruption was in July.
In the town of Pangdelang, a concert was underway on the beach, with over 200 concert goers and a band named “Seventeen”. They are now missing and presumed dead.
It is daylight by now in Indonesia. Vulcanologists are trying to determine if the tsunami was caused by a slide of part of Anak Krakatau’s cone to the sea floor, displacing seawater and generating the tidal wave. The Sunda Strait is narrow, which channels these giant, destructive waves into focused trains.
As you may recall, in 2004, the 12/26/2004 Boxing Day earthquake at Banda Aceh on the west coast of Sumatra was a 9.2 quake that created a massive tidal wave which rolled across that area as if it did not exist, pulled back and rebounded across the Indian Ocean, and rebounded again toward Sumatra. The possibility that the tsunami might reach the west coast of the US was very real. Hawaii did get a flood that was up to 1 meter deep and the wave rolled further east toward California. Over 288,000 people lost their lies to that earthquake-generated wave of destruction.
Anak Krakatau is the successor volcano to Krakatoa’s massively self-destructive eruption for two days in August, 1883, which sent a tidal wave in all directions before the caldera collapsed inward. That massive eruption not only caused damage everywhere the tsunami that it created went, but also dropped the temperature worldwide by 1 degree Celsius.
A plinian eruption, which is what Anak Krakatau engaged in, is very similar in its shape to a nuke explosion. Same shape, same shock wave, same rebound.
Anak Krakatau is the result of filling a new magma chamber to revive Krakatoa’s extinct caldera. This has been going on since 1927.
There is no such thing as a truly extinct volcano. They tend to move with the Earth’s plate movements. Mount Damavand a potentially active volcano, is a stratovolcano which is the highest peak in Iran and the highest volcano in Asia. Erta Ale in Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression is the most dangerous volcano in the world. It sits on three plate boundaries, and the caldera has finally filled to the brim and is spilling over. The Earth’s crust there is less than a half mile thick, whereas it is normally 18 to 20 miles thick on land, and at the bottom of the oceans, barely 3 miles thick.
The US Navy has a base at Sigonella, Sicily, below the very active volcano Etna. While there has been recent speculation about a revival of activity in the Alban Hills volcano complex south of Rome, it is more likely that the magma is moving under the sea bed to Etna’s magma chamber.
Why do these things matter? Because they affect everything that we take for granted if they are severe enough events. If you will recall, Iceland’s Eyafyalajokull shut down all air traffic in Europe and between Europe and the US/Canada until it simmered down. Pinatubo forced the evacuation of Clark Air Force Base in the Phillippines.
Keep the missing people from this disaster in mind when you’re having Christmas.
Category: Historical
“Mother Nature” is cruel.
She’ll kill you and not think twice about it.
Prayers for those in harms way.
Thank you, Graybeard.
It’s like a ticking clock. It’s only a matter of time.
Agree, prayers to all involved.
How long till Lars chimes in that it’s global warming because of trumpBushHitler???
I always thought it was TrumpBushHitlerCheneyHalliburtonTheIlluminati!
I was going with the Clifnnotes version…
My cold is annoying me.
If that rope-a-dope shows up, please put him in his place. I doubt that he will, because it doesn’t involved politics, but you never know.
Thank you.
Shield volcanos, like Kilauea, look cool on TV with their spurting lava, but are pretty benign as geologic cataclysms go. Stratovolcanos (like St. Helens, Etna, or Vesuvius), cinder cones (like Paricutin), and lava domes (like Lassen) are capable of vastly greater destruction.
Anak Krakatau is a stratovolcano, and the pyroclastic flows spat out by stratovolcanos put hydrogen bombs to shame. My Grandpa was in Naples harbor when Vesuvius erupted in 1944, destroying the 340th Bombardment Group (Medium) on the ground at Pompeii Airfield. Even though the blast was directed away from Naples, he said it was still scary as hell. Grandpa had bad luck in Naples; his last ship had been sunk there by German bombers a few months earlier.
I have never believed it was coincidental that Etna erupted during the Sicily campaign and Vesuvius followed suit during some of the heaviest fighting on the Italian peninsula.
Can you, splain, your last paragraph?
Oh, I dunno. Maybe something about God reminding us that all of humanity’s cumulative firepower don’t amount to shit compared to what this planet we’re standing on can do to us, and the planet ain’t shit compared to the Sun, which ain’t a patch on the galaxy, which is nothing compared to God Himself. Or maybe an expression of tragedy, like the sudden appearance of the Aurora Borealis above Fredericksburg, Virginia on the night of December 13, 1862. Or maybe both.
Is TOW a pro whitey/ nazi / national/ socialist/ communist/ collectivist lover?
Collectivism leads to suffering, poverty, and death.
Disappointed.
Watch it Yef, this is your last warning.
ex-OS2
He’s a firefighter, SlowJoe. What you said was uncalled for. His wife’s family escaped Pot Pot’s Cambodia by the skin of their teeth.
Let it go, and don’t do that again.
Seriously?
What the actual fuck, dude? How the hell do you get that from anything I’ve ever said?
Put the Bud Light down and step away from the computer.
Dumb move, SJ… really dumb move.
You are way out of line, Joe. Nothing in TOW’s post supports your character assassination. Nazi? Really? Communist? Really? BTW, from his previous posts, he is neither of those.
Bad move on your part, Joe.
This is not the first time you have gratuitously attacked TOW. It just makes you look and sound really stupid.
Seriously, Slow Joe, you might want to engage your brain cells prior to spewing your nonsense publicly.
Oh, FFS.
Another utterly moronic, Bud Light-fueled comment from Slow Joe, a.k.a. Yef.
Way, way out of line. You owe TOW an immediate apology, Slow Joe.
By the way, Slow Joe, does it even register with you that you never actually add anything of value to any of the discussions that you mindlessly intrude upon here at TAH? The only thing that you ever seem to do around here is to continually spew disrespectful, antagonistic garbage such as your unacceptable comment to TOW posted above. It’s not clever, and it’s not funny. Knock it off.
Hopefully the TAH Admins are also getting fed up with your unacceptable conduct and will put you in moderation, or better yet, ban you outright. Soon.
^^THIS^^. What Mick says
TOW, I watched St. Helens erupt in 1980 from up in Kitsap County, WA. Over the course of a few hours, the mountain peak lost around 1000 feet off the top. I remember it starting in the morning on one of those rare crystal-clear days they have around Puget Sound sometimes, and eventually it becoming overcast because of all the ash in the air.
Watching a mountain blow up like that can border on the surreal. Initially, it’s hard to wrap your brain around what your eyes are seeing. Almost as if you’re sitting around one day, and your dog suddenly decides to start speaking Latin.
I live about 50 mile from Mt. St. Helens – here’s a USGS link to recent seismic activity in the area:
https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/st_helens/monitoring_map.html
They sell passes for people to Climb St. Helens during the summer – I knew someone that did it and took some amazing pics from the south part of the rim.
TOW, somewhat know where you are coming from and now it seems Slow Joe has a problem as to things and people from that region as to uncontrolled going’s on over there. Slow Joe needs a permanent stay over there and see how things are over there. There are many good people here in our country that have fled that region just to meet many like him and Lars. If Slow Joe has a problem he might as well as add me with your name for hate statements as my present life companion is another from over in that region and is in constant stress with the goings on over there and especially in the region her family lives in they seem to be in the eye of typhoons that also deliver horrendous damage. They also lie on one of those shelf’s that have volcano’s and earthquakes and tho he never talked about it my Uncle was in Italy during the war and was with B-17’s. Oh Slow Joe we had ash falling here from St Helens in north eastern Co.
I remember reading and hearing accounts that the Mount Pinatubo eruption alone released more pollutants into the Atmosphere than the entire Industrial Age put together (Nitrates, Sulfates, ash and particulates…), so much for man made climate change!
Oh pleez, don’t blow the bubble.
You’re on a roll today, SJ. Got anyone else in mind to smear, or is it spur-of-the-moment?
You OK, Joe? You’re a little out of character today.
I’m guessing that he’s huffing the floor wax again!
Judging by the amount of ash they were digging out of just in Subic alone, I’d believe it.
And Pinatubo was kinda the proverbial straw when it came to US bases in the PI.
So geopolitical in more ways than one.
Listening to free bird right now.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=DzMUsD8OB2c&feature=share
I’d rather hear how to be a Simple Man myself.
U can’t beat da guitar solo.
Deployed to the Naval Air Station at Sigonella several times. Mt. Etna, the most active volcano in Europe, was usually pretty quite, with some smoke from the peak and ash dusting the aircraft. It did erupt a couple times, but those too was fairly benign, non-explosive, with the lava flow visible at night. Some of our maintainers drove up for a close up look and were detained by the local police. They showed their ID cards and claimed to be with the US Navy Geological Survey, and were let through. Got some great pics.
My Prayers for all of those in harm’s way. Mother Nature can be an unsympathetic ol gal. Best we can do is roll with her punches.
I was a combat engineer deployed to Subic when Pinatubo popped. no one told us anything. Long story short anything that had a flat roof or was native made pretty much collapsed from the weight of the volcanic “Snow” luckily we were in the old half round quonset huts at the Upper MEF camp.Had to crawl out the window since you could not push the stuff with the door. got hit with a typhoon at the same time which combined pretty much sandblasted all the leaves on the trees off as well as sandblasted the paint off of cars that faced in to the wind. I can remember looking up at the sky and seeing the sky red under the the clouds. first time i saw Lord of the rings Mordor it automatically thought that must have been what clark looked like. i got to shutdown the only bridge connecting subic bay to clark when the Lahar flow got to with in a few inches of the only bridge that connected us. a few months later i had to go to manila to get my paperwork done at the embassy to get married to the wife and remember there were no actually roads, they had just made a best guess as to where they should be and drove there.the town that was normally a rest stop was buried under 10′ of this stuff and the only way you could tell was the church steeple was still upright. it was something, its funny neither my wife or my self have ever really talked about it to each other. in a few days people started to get back to normal even though ash was constantly coming down if the wind was from the north over the bay.
Family of friends still live in the area. Great fear for them, of course. Most have moved away but some of the old ones remain there just because it is their ancestral home. So sad to watch.
Prayers up for all, and the docs and rescuers traveling to the area to assist.
When the Yellowstone Caldera lets go, nothing will matter to anyone living in the USA so live it up and have a good time today.