Saturday, April 10, 2021

The best shot I found of the La Soufriere eruption

 

If you haven't been paying attention, you may have missed that the volcano La Soufriere on the Caribbean island evolved from having a lava dome-building eruption, where hot thick pasty lava extrudes slowly and relatively peacefully, to an explosive ash-releasing eruption.  

This eruption has forced evacuations from the northern part of the island (where the volcano is), and has deposited ash over most of the island.   Nobody's sure how long the dangerous explosive phase will last; it could evolve from here back to a dome building eruption, it could build and blow and build and blow, etc., or it could have one totally catastrophic gigantic massive apocalyptic climate-changing explosion that puts a caldera where St. Vincent is currently located.  (Nobody really wants that last one.)

So, there are many articles about this important event.  I'm going to link to the Daily Mail article, which had numerous pictures and three videos.  Below that is what I think is the best picture of the massive ash cloud.

St. Vincent is rocked by more volcano explosions after first eruption in more than 40 years as six-mile ash plume sees flights cancelled and 16,000 people told to evacuate

Though I can't really help, I hope the good people of St. Vincent stay safe.

As an aside, in 1902 this volcano erupted and killed over 1,500 people. This isn't exactly overlooked in the history books, but it is somewhat overshadowed by the eruption of Mont Pelee on Martinique on the same day and several hours later, which killed everybody in the city of St. Pierre except for one prisoner, around 27,000 poor souls.





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