… Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play …
by Steve Goddard
I remember May 18, 1980 like it was yesterday. I was skiing behind Taos Ski Valley in ten foot deep snow, up to the base of Wheeler Peak.
Current view of Taos Ski Valley
At the time, I was working as a volcano researcher for the US Government, studying the nature of explosive volcanic eruptions. When we got back to Taos, we turned on the TV and saw amazing pictures of Mt. St. Helens, which had literally blown it’s top.
Eastern Illinois University photographs
Mt. St. Helens had previously been a dependable source of snow and ice all summer, and the K2 ski team (including Phil Mahre) used to train up there in the summer. It no longer is tall enough for summer skiing.
The mechanism of the eruption is well understood, thanks to an amazing video reconstruction.
As the magma chamber rose up in the volcano (magma is less dense than rock) it did several things. First, it melted the snow and ice and turned the soil into mud. Second, it made the north slope of the volcano steeper and less stable. Third, groundwater from melted snow and ice seeped down into the magma chamber and added to the steam pressure. At 8:32 am, a large earthquake further liquified the soil on the north slope, and caused a massive mud slide. The weight of the overburden quickly became less than the steam pressure inside, and the volcano blew it’s top. A massive amount of ash and trees poured down into the Toutle River wiping out everything in it’s path.
Bridge on the Toutle washing downstream
A reminder that explosive volcanic eruptions dump a lot of steam, ash and gas into the atmosphere.
In June 1783 the Laki volcano close to Katla erupted for several months with clouds of poisonous gas that killed 9,000 people in Iceland. But the eruption also created a cold fog that spread across much of Europe and North America, in some places causing the coldest summer for 500 years as the Sun’s warmth was blotted out.
“The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena,” wrote the naturalist Gilbert White in Hampshire. “The country people look with a kind of superstitious awe at the red louring aspect of the sun thro’ the fog.” The climate across the northern hemisphere was sent into upheaval, even weakening the monsoon rains in Africa and India, leading to famine in Egypt and India.
A few days ago, the Met Office forecast that the ash cloud would move to the northeast out of British airspace by May 19th. Their forecast for May 18th (today) appears to have been very accurate.
Below is their current forecast for the next five days.
Will Katla erupt? What do readers think?
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I don’t know, but I’m glad that governments are starting to abandon their computer models and allowing flights through the present ash cloud. Hopefully they will come to see the flaws in climate-change computer models…
I give it a 50/50 chance……..how’s that for a solid commitment?
I’ll bet my prognostication proves accurate!
I hope so we need colder winters!
That’s a cool gig… A volcano researcher in Taos!
Valles Caldera is pretty cool too. It’s funny that Los Alamos National Laboratories are built in a volcanic hazard area.
I got my BS in Earth Science that year a couple of weeks after the eruption… I guess I missed my 30th class reunion.
It would be an interesting event.
Yes but when. Recent discussion on here is that when the current volcano stops erupting the pressure builds up in the chambers and spreads to Katla where it goes kaboomb!
Has anyone bothered to check the known very large volcanic eruptions against what we know about the climate at the time?
e.g. in New Zealand the largest eruption from Taupo occurred 26,500 years ago producing 300 km³ of ignimbrite and 500 km³ of pumice. That is a lot of stuff in the air that would go round the southern hemisphere at least. There have been many eruptions since.
Mt Tarawera in 1886.
Just a little more from Gilbert White in 1783:
‘From June 23rd to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun at noon looked as blank as a clouded moon and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting.’
‘All the time the heat was so intense that butcher’s meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed, and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic and riding irksome. All the while, Calabria and part of the isle of Sicily were torn and convulsed with earthquakes, and a volcano sprung out of the sea on the coast of Norway.’
OT
If the conditions that would cause Katla to erupt come about, most likely Katla will then erupt.
Sorry, just testing my IPCC speak.
I think Katla will erupt within a few months. There is this relationship between solar minima and earthquakes and volcano eruptions; we had a long solar minimum and Katla hasn’t erupted since 1918.
I’m wondering how you could have skied uphill in ten feet of snow behind a valley. But that would sure be something I would remember.
Will Katla erupt? What do readers think?
Dreg’s only know, doesn’t it?
But more interesting is the amount of volcanic ash left in N Hemisphere (and other materials). Someone said a few weeks ago that the ash went too low to reach the stratosphere to have any impact on this year’s weather events. Meanwhile the ash plumes went much higher, crossed Tropo-Strato boundary and what EUMETSAT daily images shows, it looks like part of the ash/dust stay in the atmosphere (light to dark orange) every day whirling around Northern Atlantic all the time:
http://oiswww.eumetsat.org/IPPS/html/MSG/RGB/DUST/WESTERNEUROPE/index.htm
Meanwhile the Vistula River flowing throughout Cracow in Poland where I live has reached historical levels (photos):
http://www.dziennik.krakow.pl/pl/galerie/regiony/krakow/1019230-fala-kulminacyjna-w-krakowie.html
But more interesting is a statement from a “government scientist” that
“Polish Rainfall is intensified by the volcanic dust”.
Read it in English (Google translation):
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dziennik.krakow.pl%2Fpl%2Faktualnosci%2Fna-biezaco%2F1019235-opady-deszczu-poteguje-pyl-wulkaniczny.html&sl=pl&tl=en
Original text:
http://www.dziennik.krakow.pl/pl/aktualnosci/na-biezaco/1019235-opady-deszczu-poteguje-pyl-wulkaniczny.html
My question is – is there any possibility that there is any nexus between the ash and the more intense rainfalls in Europe or, if the Eyjafjoell will continue to emit volcanic ash, will it have some impact (and what) on Europe’s weather in the coming months?
Regards
Katla will likely erupt at some point soon. While such an event is never good, an eruption of Katla combined with other cooling factors that seem to be occurring would be amplifying the pain of a cooling world.
Regarding the eruption of Katla, the experts say it never fails to go off a year or two after Eyjafjallajokull, so I’ll rely on what they predict. It sounds pretty certain; WHEN is not exactly known. However, I believe significant seismic activity will precede its arrival so that loss of life will be significantly less than the last time it went off.
The eruption of mount St. Hellens was absolutly devistating to all aircraft on the continental United States. Aircraft were falling out of the skies at a rate of 100 per hour between Boise Idaho and New York City. The deaths from all these aircraft crashing numbered in the thousands.
NOT!
Sometimes, people and computer models need a reality check…
My son, who is 10, and I visited the Mt. St. Helens observatory last summer. Amazing that nearly 30 years later there is still so much evidence of the eruption over such a vast area. We were talking last night about how the animal species, specifically the reptiles, have returned and changed in the area.
Glenn
Nordic skis are designed to go up hills, down hills, or on flat ground.
http://www.xcski.org/
Steve Huntwork
You can’t compare the airspace over Washington State with Europe. There are probably a couple of orders of magnitude more planes flying over Europe.
The most hilarious thing I see is 25 year old trees creeping up the mountain side, or the bs hitting the fan over and over for every time the green muppets said over and over that it’d take like a “million years” for nature to reclaim that mountain.
When I hear greenies and their muppets say they are nature folks, being one with nature and all that crap I go ROFL and call ’em by name–hippies!
“Jimbo says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:50 pm
OT
Mann No Expert on Tree Proxies […]”
This would explain the many “unconventional” things Mann has done as opposed to real dendroclimatologists. And why he has “found out” things nobody before him has found out. (ok, the other possible explanation would be that he’s a genius but that sounds a little far-fetched…)
Iceland–I spent the summer of 69 making surface deformation measurements w/eysteinn tryggvason on katla and other locations,including surtsey and hekla.
that katla might also blow is very probable. a bigger concern for europe is hekla-
its effect on climate in the dark ages lead europeans to consider it the gateway to hell!
lanny
The ROBUST findings of the PEER REVIEWED literature SUGGEST that the chances of Katla erupting is LIKELY.
But more research (dollars) is needed.
I made a comment a couple days ago to make a point about cycles in the climate:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/16/volcano-update/#comment-391470
The relevant part is:
From TimesOnline ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7127706.ece ) comes the following story:
Just because Eyjafjallajokull is erupting is no guarantee that any other volcano will blow its top. However, given the history of volcanic activity in Iceland over the course of centuries, I’m guessing that it’s likely we’ll see a major eruption by mid-century. {Damn! With that sort of prediction, I’m sounding like I could land a job with the IPCC. *shudder* Now that makes me feel unclean}
Considering that Iceland is on the mid-Atlantic ridge, which is still spreading, Katla is likely to erupt again. When? If it has consistently followed the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, then it is likely to erupt sooner rather than later.