Rapidly Inflating Volcano Creates Growing Mystery

OurAmazingPlanet
Wed, 19 Oct 2011

How long has this been going on? Uturuncu, a Bolivian volcano that is inflating at an incredible rate.

Should anyone ever decide to make a show called "CSI: Geology," a group of scientists studying a mysterious and rapidly inflating South American volcano have got the perfect storyline.

Researchers from several universities are essentially working as geological detectives, using a suite of tools to piece together the restive peak's past in order to understand what it is doing now, and better diagnose what may lie ahead.

It's a mystery they've yet to solve.

Uturuncu is a nearly 20,000-foot-high (6,000 meters) volcano in southwest Bolivia. Scientists recently discovered the volcano is inflating with astonishing speed.

"I call this 'volcano forensics,' because we're using so many different techniques to understand this phenomenon," said Oregon State University professor Shan de Silva, a volcanologist on the research team.

Underwater Volcanic Eruption

National Geogrpahic News
Thu, 20 Oct 2011

Whitecaps churn in the Atlantic off West Africa as an underwater volcano erupts off Spain's Canary Islands on Monday.

Whitecaps churn in the Atlantic off West Africa as an underwater volcano erupts off Spain's Canary Islands on Monday.

Since last week, the volcano has been spewing gas and fragments of smoking lava, staining the ocean surface green and brown, as seen above.

Spanish authorities have closed a port on Hierro island, ordered ships away from the island's village of La Restinga, and banned aircraft from flying over the island's southern tip, according to the AFP news service.

Six hundred residents living at the port were evacuated Tuesday.

Deepest and Most Explosive Underwater Eruption Ever Seen Happening Near Samoa Hotspot

Our Amazing Planet
Thu, 20 Oct 2011

Double magma bubble forms at Hades Vent at West Mata submarine volcano. An underwater volcano bursting with glowing lava bubbles - the deepest active submarine eruption seen to date - is shedding light on how volcanism can impact deep-sea life and reshape the face of the planet.

Submarine eruptions account for about three-quarters of all of Earth's volcanism, but the overlying ocean and the sheer vastness of the seafloor makes detecting and observing them difficult. The only active submarine eruptions that scientists had seen and analyzed until now were at the volcano NW Rota-1, near the island of Guam in the western Pacific.

Now researchers have witnessed the deepest active submarine eruption yet. The volcano in question, West Mata, lies near the islands of Fiji in the southwestern Pacific in the Lau Basin. Here, the rate of subduction - the process in which one massive tectonic plate dives under another, typically forming chains of volcanoes - is the highest on Earth, and the region hosts ample signs of recent submarine volcanism.

The End of the World as We Know It? An Internal or External Shift?

(Click link if embedded url does not work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kHHZkUiRP30)

The Quickening

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