Rain Gryphon

The curiously-named https://news784.com/ is a good place to start. It's based in St. Vincent, and has current, generally-reliable news.

Searching on You Tube for "Soufriere" gives mixed, but occasionally very good, results.

Most of the Dramatis Personae come from UWI - https://sta.uwi.edu/news/releases/release.asp?id=22236 Searching their names can get you information.

OVSM is centred mostly on Pelee (next island over's volcano), and of course they're French, but they often have interesting information. http://www.ipgp.fr/fr/ovsm/lobservatoire-volcanologique-sismologique-de-martinique

Volcano Cafe https://www.volcanocafe.org/ will have something, although not for a few days.

Same thing with Volcano News https://volcanohotspot.wordpress.com/

Smithsonian's news https://volcano.si.edu/gvp_currenteruptions.cfm is kinda sparse, but it gives a nice overview of what's erupting at any one time.

You can watch the fissure volcano erupting in Iceland. It's formed a little spatter cone, and lava is bubbling up from the opening. Most of it splatters on the slopes, helping to build the cone, but every so often you get a huge surge that overflows and runs along the ground nearby. A very basaltic volcano, with lava coming up from way, seriously deep in the mantle, quite similar to those in Hawaii.

As I watch it for a while, the spatter/gush dichotomy seems much more variable than I initially thought. It goes into a long gushing sequence, which sets a river of fresh lava running from it. I envy the people who get to go and see this from close up.

And, a little parasitic crater breaks out on the flank of the cone. It doesn't seem to detract that much from the main crater.

So, in Indiana we've worked down the age cohorts so that 50 year olds can sign up now. Mr. Biden wants us to bump politically well-organized groups such as teachers to the front of the line, but fortunately, the governor doesn't especially seem to care very much about Biden's opinion. I voted for the Libertarian candidate back in November, but Holcomb has risen in my esteem since then, in large measure because of the very solid, very fair way he's handled vaccinations.

The J&J shots do indeed seem to be going to be used for mass clinics, and vaccine trucks. They're going to have a huge one at the Speedway, which, all things being equal, I'd go out of my way to attend, except that it's the substandard J&J vaccine. They're also having one at Notre Dame (St. Joseph county - South Bend), and one at IVT (Allen county - Fort Wayne). There're 10 roving vaccine trucks, and also a program to use the J&J for shut-ins with county nurses driving about in cars to make house-calls for people who can't come to the clinic. All in all, I think Indiana is doing a pretty good job.

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Deeply impressive nuee ardente coming off Mt. Sinabung. It's run out for over a mile, and if you look at the crater, you can see that it's still flowing out. That's a brave photographer as well. You can see the chopped-up, eroded ground between the camera and the volcano where nuees have run in the past, and shall undoubtedly do so again.

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Pelee's overall tectonic earthquake activity is falling, but there've been two distinct harmonic tremors in the past week. Is the lava rising, or is it draining back to the main chamber? Inquiring minds want to know!

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A new variety of COVID from California.

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The Christmas Tree of DOOM!

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Exploding vagina candles! In other news, this woman apparently has cedar and geraniums, among other things, stuffed up there. Perhaps it's no surprise that it exploded.

So, my all-time favourite volcano (Pelee, on Martinique) has just shown signs of life for the first time since the 1930s. As the article notes, the Soufriere on St. Vincent, and the curiously-named Kick 'em Jenny, an undersea volcano to the south, are also active. That's just a coincidence, we're assured. Still, they all went off simultaneously in 1902, and they all feed from the same subduction arc. It's enough to incite suspicion.

Pelee's 1902 eruption is counted as the third deadliest ever. Krakatoa killed more, as did Nevado del Ruiz, but those were mainly due to tsunami and cold lahars, respectively. Pelee incinerated a fair-sized city with a nuee ardente, such that you had 28k or so dead in about three minutes. For the first time, Pliny the Younger's account of what had happened to Pompeii suddenly made sense.

The Soufriere had erupted the day before, killing some 1500 or so. It was geologically interesting as well. The volcano, which had been erupting a huge incandescent column of dust and gravel, suddenly stopped. The column collapsed of its own weight, and "splashed", spreading out in every direction as a huge, black doughnut, glowing red-hot inside. The people on the northern half of the island, mainly Caribs, were instantly incinerated, which nicely fulfilled a longstanding tribal prophecy. The people on the southern half, mainly English, while outside the zone of effect, were left deeply impressed by what they'd seen. Krakatoa, the Soufriere, and Pelee were jointly responsible for the renaissance of volcanology, which had been considered a settled, uninteresting field prior to that.


Update: Time to scream and run away!

Ah, the French... They're completely insane, but manage somehow to be endearing at times nonetheless.

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PHIVOLCS is calling "scream like a little girl and run away" for Taal. Fox has photos of the impressive ash column, with lots of lightning, so you can tell what kind of turbulence must be going on in there. The fine cauliflower-like structure of the cloud persists a long way up the column before finally starting to smooth out into larger billows. The fine structure shows that the fragments in the column are still outgassing under pressure so that the turbulence remains high, whch in turn gives an idea of how much pressure there is to begin with. I'm darkly amused by the line "Those evacuating on Sunday said they fled the area quickly".

Taal itself is just cartoonishly dangerous-looking anyway, a tiny little irregular island in the middle of an enormous caldera lake. The island itself is made up crater piled upon crater, with a smallish caldera of its own. The big caldera in which the island sits has scallops cut out of the shoreline - it appears to be literally a caldera formed of numerous, overlapping calderae.

Small Sparrow army out sparrowing away at the cake feeder yesterday afternoon, although it was really too dark and grey for photography. Two of the dominant hens sat on top of the cake, without any obvious friction or pecking order issues, and they pecked away at it, eating, but also sending down a steady hail of fragments to the dozen or so birds waiting below on the ground. The whole thing appeared very well organized, and I'm sure it was. Those are smart little birds, and highly social. Everyone got well fed with little fuss or effort. Having that many birds there made for many eyes to watch for predators, too. I'm guessing, although have no real way to know, that these are the families from my Sparrow colony, with the matrons guiding the young through their first winter.

House Sparrows are one of my favourites, along with Crows, and American Robins.

I'm starting to pick up the odd casual Finch at the tube feeder too. Since there's no real snow, they can still find seeds they like better than what I'm offering, but once it does snow, they'll know the feeder is here.

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Das Beeb has some wonderful pictures of Krakatoa. It's apparently been ramping up for a bit, and I've just not been paying attention. Saturday's eruption clouds are heavy and brown, so lots of finely pulverized, fresh material being ejected, and not just steam explosions and the occasional boulder getting launched like in recent years.

From these pictures, it's ambiguous whether there's really a second crater, or if that was just the head of a nuee. Krakatoa did this weird thing in 1883 where at least a dozen secondary craters opened up across the island, which would be interesting to see, although of course that ended rather badly for the locals.