Indonesia’s Mount Merapi volcano put a lot of ejecta into the air; ash, CO2, and SO2. Here’s a recent news report showing the eruption:
Tracked by satellite, now the Sulfur Dioxide plume is headed for Australia.
From Spaceweather.com :
A plume of sulfur dioxide from Indonesia’s deadly Mount Merapi volcano is swirling through the upper atmosphere over western Australia. This 7-day movie from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) onboard Europe’s MetOp satellite shows the plume in motion, and it could soon swirl across the entire continent. Sky watchers in Australia should be alert for volcanic sunsets.
Here’s the movie, click the image if it does not animate for you.
Our friends in Western Australia like Jo Nova, David Archibald, the Thompsons, and “Bulldust” might be able to share some sunset photos.
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NASA View
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=46881
We’re to busy with the boat people to be worried about a little volcano well may be some are worried as there has been a news black out on this disaster in Australia
Ulric Lyons says:
November 11, 2010 at 3:33 am
“How curious it is to see how warm 1884 was in Europe after such an event.”
It would seem that the effect of volcanic activity on climate are not fully understood.
I suspect that geography and the composition of the volcanic emissions determine the scale of any possible effect?
Is it safe to say that the SO2 plume is safe, from a toxic perspective, having been airborne so long? I would guess they are following those images by tiny variances in IR and that the “richness” of the SO2 concentration has gotten more and more tracelike? Or is it opposite, relatively rich in SO2, but cooled off almost completely?
With the SH moving into summer this could be bad news for global climate.
Let’s see how much cooling in global temp Mt. Merapi eruption might contribute. When Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded in 1991 (dubbed “the biggest volcanic eruption of the century”), it contributed up to about 0.5 C global cooling in the next 2 years up to 1993.
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The word is that Merapi has so far emitted only about 1% of the total SO2 emitted by Pinatubo, and Pinatubo’s plume achieved double the altitude. If that analysis is correct, there will be no observable climatic influence from this eruption.
Although one can always hope…………….
“”””” Richard C (NZ) says:
November 10, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Question for lurking Chemist.
Is there the possibility of acid rain from this?
I know that the NI NZ Mt Ruapehu eruption covered parts of the region with ash that when deposited on cars, made washing the cars a risky business paintwise. “””””
Richard,
I don’t know about this Merapi chap; but they do say an SO2 Plume; and ash. I would not expect that any acid rain which they would get; would necessarily hurt car paints since it would be quite diluted I expect.
The ash is something else though; it is typically very abrasive, and if you get it on your car along with other crud like mud, then it would be harder to wash off with a hose and if you sued any kind of cloth the sharp grains of the ash would create sleeks in the paint. I have hiked in that volcanic ash layer that surrounds Mt Tarawera on the shores of Lake Tarawera, and that stuff gets in your boots, no matter what, and really tears up your feet.
When I used to go skiing on Mt Ruapehu; we often would climb up the Whakapapa glacier route, and go down into the crater for a swim. The water was BC (C is for cold), but sulphurous fumes would be bubbling up from down in the crater, and forming a thin layer (inch thick) of scalding water on the surface, and that surface layer was like a 10% sulphuric acid solution. You had to swim along with a big splashing motion out in front of you to stir up the surface layer, or else it would singe your eyebrows. I wore woollen swim suits in those days; and they only lasted a season, because the acid would eat holes in them eventually.
I eventually stopped swimming in there after one time when I was sitting on the snow, to warm up in the sun, while I put my ski clothes back on, I happened to jab my ski pole into the snow; and a whacking great chunk of it simply fell away underneath me and I was looking down a bottomless hole in a crevasse.
That was after the big Wangaehu disaster; when the crater ice wall collapsed and sent half the lake down the river and took out the midnight express from Wellington to Auckland.
Skiing on Ruapehu while Ngauruhoe, next door was erupting, was hard on our skis, because the ash simply ground all the base off our skis.
Somewhere I have some little bird figurines made out of Mt St Helens ash; and that stuff is exactly the same as the Tarawera ash layer (which is more than 200 feet deep in some places near the mountain).
Acid rain seems to erode rocks and concrete; but it doesn’t seem to cause any long term problems when it gets down in the rivers and out to sea; and who knows how many billions of years we’ve had to live with acid rain.
A number of volcanoes have or are erupting this year, including Iceland, Alaska, Russia, SE Asia and in S America as I recall. Has any work been done to measure the cumulative effects from their eruptions? If so, what are the results and where can it be found?
Did anyone notice the final frame of the animation? It runs from 3-9 Nov, and on Nov 9 only, data for 60N is displayed.
Look closely and you see a band of high SO2 all along 60N.
Look where concentrations are highest – Alaska, over the Davis Strait (off SW Greenland), Sweden, Finland… where there are persistent temperature anomalies.
Aerosol warming, perhaps?
So essentially it takes a lot of force to blow that SO2 high up into the atmospehere for it to be delivered somewhere else.
That’s pretty interessting. That it takes the most powerfull of volcanoes to spew all that acid rain denominator high enough into the atmosphere to actually be able to create acid rain somewhere else.
We must’ve had some pretty god awfull powerfull deisel engines back in the 80´s.