In the Company of Volcanoes

- Dr. Janine Krippner We are fortunate that there is a large availability of volcanic eruption videos online for all of us to enjoy (see below warning), and we can learn a lot from them too. When I am looking at my satellite images of dome collapse block and ash flow and column collapse pyroclastic flow deposits on Shiveluch and Mount St. Helens volcanoes I have videos of these processes running through my mind. This is a short guide to what you are seeing in these incredible videos. WARNING: There are very dangerous and life threatening hazards associated with retrieving this footage, and here at In the Company of Volcanoes we strongly discourage anyone from trying to take your own. It is never, ever worth risking your life. --- This video shows the dome at Unzen volcano undergoing a partial collapse in 1991. This shows how a near-solid body of rock rapidly fragments down to smaller pieces of rock and ash, creating a billowing ash plume rising from the block and ash...

- Janine and Alison This morning I (Janine) was researching the May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens eruption to begin the next phase of my research. Reading through the descriptions of the start of the eruption - when massive blocks of the volcano slid to the north, I enthusiastically jumped out of my chair surprising my office mates. Marking out 1 meter with my feet I looked up at them and told them "this is one meter, now imagine 50 of these. Now imagine a massive chunk of rock moving 50 of these in one second! 50 m per second! This is nuts!" The joys of sharing an office with an over-enthusiastic volcanologist... 50 m/s is how fast the side of the mountain began to travel down and away from the volcano, taking chunks of rock the size of 30 story buildings northward. As the slide evolved into a debris avalanche, the sediment mass began flowing, the blocks reached speeds of up to 80 m/s [1]. So this got us talking about the insane speeds involved in volc...

- Janine You could say that the passion for volcanoes runs in my veins. I don’t remember an age when I wasn’t fascinated with volcanoes. I imagined the extinct Waikato volcanoes that surrounded my home town in New Zealand erupting with huge ash columns and fire. I would stare wide-eyed at the Tongariro Volcanic Center volcanoes and dream of working on them as a grown-up thinking, “this is way too cool to be a real job”.  My interests were fueled by my grandfather showing me videos of his trips to Vanuatu, watching the active lava lake, and my grandmother telling me how scary it was hearing the dangerous bombs that occasionally flew past. A distant cousin also completed a PhD in volcanology ahead of me under the same advisor studying the Coromandel volcanic zone in New Zealand. I was especially fascinated with Ngauruhoe, a cone on the central North Island Tongariro complex. My grandfather told stories of how he and my grandmother were on a trip to Taranaki volcano to the west ...