Molten rock at Kilauea’s summit has disappeared from view, but the world’s largest lava lake is still bubbling away in the crater of Africa’s Nyiragongo Volcano.
The tricky part is getting down there to check it out.
It isn’t easy for tourists to approach Nyiragongo’s summit, either.
But the fascination of that incandescent glow is intense.
It’s wonderful (from a distance) to follow the ongoing eruption at Kilauea via the Web. Twitter is especially helpful.
I’ve been wondering what the 1980 reawakening and eruption of Mount St. Helens would have been like on Twitter. Here are some tweets I’ve found from volcanologists and other interested people who have not forgotten May 18, 1980, as well as a movie from the National Archives.
It’s difficult to monitor an underwater volcano like Kick-’em-Jenny and it’s also dangerous when that volcano is restless. This is why scientists use volcanic earthquakes to take the fire mountain’s “pulse” from a relatively safe distance.
Have you ever wondered how volcanologists do that? Here is a whole hour-plus 2013 webinar from IRIS Earthquake Science about it, nerdy but aimed at nonspecialists like us.
As we will see with this weekend’s Sunday Morning Volcano post, there are a lot of quiet but still active volcanoes in the Eastern Caribbean. Fortunately, these sleeping trouble-makers are bedecked with seismometers and other monitoring equipment so that volcanologists can give the local residents as much advance warning as possible when the volcano starts to wake up.
We don’t usually think of Antarctica as “fire and ice” country, but it has many volcanoes, including Mount Erebus, which erupts fairly frequently and hosts a major lava lake (shown above from space).
Volcanologists also study the volcano’s gases and ejecta from its explosions.
While I’m working on the book, I repost things occasionally from my other blogs for your enjoyment. Was doing so today with a 2014 post on Korea’s Baekdu Volcano, also known as Changbaishan and other names, when I learned that China had closed part of the national preserve around this mountain out of concerns for possible hazards from North Korea’s nuclear test, about 70 miles away. Mind. Blown. I don’t have time to look into this in detail right now but will post an update next week.
Not this millennium – the last one. More precisely, 969 A.D., give or take 20 years.
Europe was moving into the High Middle Ages, the Kingdom of Ghana in Africa was enjoying its golden age, and the Maori were settling the land now known as New Zealand, but Y1K really came in with a bang for those living around the Sea of Japan.
It was not an effusive eruption. The top kilometer of an estimated 3500-meter-high volcanic structure was blown away and massive ash flows covered the land.
Around this volcano are dramatic-looking gray spires of rock lining ravines. Those are the eroded remains of massive pyroclastic flows that Changbaishan/Baekdu volcano unleashed during one of Earth’s biggest explosive eruptions since the end of the last ice age.
We moderns have no frame of reference for such a thing.
In its infamous 1883 eruption, Krakatau/Krakatoa blew out over 20 cubic km of material – Baitoushan (another name for today’s volcano) erupted 150 cubic km in the VEI 7 Millennium Eruption.
Some of that ash covered the Korean Peninsula in a layer up to 3.2 feet (1 m) thick. The ash also traveled across the Japan Sea to drop a respectably thick layer on southern Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, over 500 miles away.
Baekdu/Changbaishan has had a few more eruptions since then, the last in 1903, but they were much smaller ones.
Of course, the question on everybody’s mind is if and when another big one might happen.
No one has a clue as to the answer.
In geology, and particularly in volcanology, knowing what a volcano has done in the past is key to understanding its most likely threats to us here and now.
Unfortunately, people can’t even agree on Baitoushan/Changbaishan/Baekdu’s proper name, let alone adequately catalog its geologic record.
A few other bodies of water in Asia share its name, but this 3 x 2-mile-wide crater lake that gives rise to three major rivers is the Heaven Lake that everyone there knows and loves. (Image: Wang65)
Heaven and Earth
Today the Lake of Heaven fills a crater caldera at this complex volcano right on the border between China and North Korea.
The two countries have been arguing about the territorial line here for centuries. Currently [as of 2014], it runs through the middle of Heaven Lake, but because of the volcano’s shape, somewhat more of the edifice is in North Korea than in China, making it off limits to most of the world’s geoscientists (until recently).
This is what a visit to the lake can look like from the Chinese side, where the volcano gets more visitors per year than Mount Fuji does in Japan, and from the North Korean side, where foreign tourists are allowed, with precautions.
Propaganda aside, Koreans (North and South) really do love this place. They, as well as China’s Manchu people, consider Baekdu/Changbaishan and its associated peaks their ancestral home.
The spiritual/psychological significance of Baitoushan today is difficult for this Westerner to comprehend.
Crater Lake, in North America, formed in a similar eruption many millennia ago and is a popular tourist site now, but it’s not as important to us as Changbaishan/Baekdu is to the Chinese and Koreans.
Here is a South Korean view:
The North Koreans have put the image of Paektu (their version of Baekdu) on the national emblem.
This is the North Korean national emblem with a long shot of the volcano from a Chinese documentary so you can see the profile. Not taking sides – please don’t yell at me.
As well, the North Koreans compose stirring music in Baekdu’s honor and tend to tell some whoppers about the volcano and their nation (for example, the ice on Tianchi Lake reportedly broke open when Kim Jong Il, who literally autographed the mountain, died in December 2011).
For the Chinese, the Changbai Mountains that surround the volcano are the mythical birthplace of the founders of the Qing Dynasty, so there’s a lot of emotion invested in the volcano on that side of the border, too.
In addition, Changbaishan ginseng is a prized commodity. Logging is also profitable on the heavily forested slopes, and the Chinese have managed to establish a nature preserve there as well as a major tourist resort,
South Koreans are concerned that all this is a Chinese attempt to take the entire mountain).
Here is the Chinese view, presumably waxing poetic about Changbaishan’s beauty, though I don’t understand a word of it. There is nice camerawork, though.
However, be aware, that the Millennium Eruption wasn’t the Hawaiian-style event portrayed here. Far from it!
Myth and Reality
Why are so many ancestral legends focused on this place, spawning the nationalism, politics and emotionalism that complicate humanity’s attempts to deal with this huge hazard?
The Three Kingdoms of Korea back in the day.
This is just a guess, but perhaps the Millennium Eruption “reset the clock” for the people living in that region. The survivors then rebuilt their lives and societies into what developed into today’s Korea and Manchuria–the former Three Kingdoms of Korea.
Those survivors are now the honored ancestors of the Korean and Manchu people, and today the volcano that once wrought such havoc is now worshiped (either directly or secondarily through culture and politics). That’s just an outsider’s guess to explain the strong attachment many have to this volcano.
Though there is no mention of this in the Wikipedia articles (I’m not an Asian history scholar) on the Three Kingdoms of Korea, the Balhae Empire, and the Goryeo-Khitan war, Yatsuzaka et al, (see source list below) do mention a link between the eruption and the empire’s collapse.
All the names of this volcano come from its white ash, which scientists call the Baitoushan-Tomakomai tephra.
Volcano Diplomacy
In the late 1990s and first decade of the 20th century, Changbaishan/Baekdu volcano showed signs of awakening.
After episodes of increased seismicity and swelling between 2002 and 2006, the volcano quieted down, but clearly magma had moved under the mountain and closer monitoring was needed.
The Chinese side of the volcano was fairly easy to access. It took some diplomacy, but in 2011 the two Koreas reached an agreement to do joint research on the North Korean side.
This project is not about monitoring the volcano or predicting when the eruption will happen, but is about understanding what happened during the millennium eruption and also looking at what its state is now, using geophysical techniques. This will help us understand what is driving the volcano.
That’s important. While there is a lot of plate tectonic activity going on in places like Japan, Baekdu/Changbaishan is an intraplate volcano and therefore less well understood.
Well, as of today [2014], as far as I know, Changbaishan/Baekdu’s recent spurt of a bit of unrest has settled down and scientists are waiting for the North Koreans to take the seismograms from the equipment on the volcano’s flanks and mail them to the UK.
North Korea does not have the Internet.
Well…it’s a start.
Update, April 20, 2016: Here is a link to the scientific paper, “Evidence for partial melt in the crust beneath Mt. Paektu (Changbaishan), Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and China.”
As I understand it, this is the first North-Korea-based study of the Earth’s crust underneath this volcano. It has shown that the crustal structure there is much more complex than at a distance because of the volcano’s 3.5-million-year history of eruptions.
The researchers believe that they have identified a roughly 20-kilometer-wide (roughly 12-1/2 miles) area of partial melt that is probably the source for the volcano’s historic eruptions as well as the 2002-2005 period of unrest, which probably was an episode of magma chamber recharge.
There are no warnings issued. It’s just a little look at normal volcanic processes here that the world has never been able to see before.
I’m not a scientist, but I think this was an enormously successful research project, accomplished with just the very basic methods and resources. That’s beautifully simple science.
It’s also very nice that a big volcano can make the news without erupting.
Here’s hoping that the volcanologists will get their wish for more research and that Paektu can be studied and monitored on its North Korean side as intensively as it is on the Chinese side.
Edited, April 20, 2016, and again on February 7, 2018; see note at top of post. The unedited post was originally published at my Clear Sight blog on March 1, 2014.
Featured image: NASA
Sources(I don’t usually list sources, but it was either this or have pretty much a solid expanse of blue links up above [2018 update – This was the post that got me into the much better habit of always including sources in a post!]):
Baekdu, Korean Wikipedia article (Google translated into English)
You need this background to the recent news that, at Havre Seamount near New Zealand, scientists have found the largest deep-water silicic eruption in history. Some cool videos of eruptions are included, too.
Thanks to plate tectonics, almost three-quarters of Earth’s lava is erupted in the oceans, at mid-ocean ridges, not on the land where we can see it.
These spreading ridges, as they are called, are really a high volcanic mountain range rising from the abyssal depths and running down the middle of just about every ocean on the planet.
Most of that lava and rock is mafic – a word coined from the chemical symbols for magnesium and iron, which enrich this type of magma and make the resulting rock dark.
This runny red stuff usually erupts quietly as pillow lava, but in relatively shallow water, mixing molten rock and good old H2O can be spectacularly explosive.
That is the 1963 Surtsey eruption, off Iceland’s southern coast. This volcano sits in the middle of the Atlantic, but since it’s on a coastal shelf (and therefore atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, along with Iceland), ocean depth there is measured in hundreds of feet, not miles.
Even so, scientists would have had a hard time studying the eruption if it hadn’t broken through to the air.
Surtsey is made out of mafic rock. Another type of dramatic volcano comes from silicic magma – it contains a lot of silica instead of magnesium and iron.
Usually you find silicic volcanoes near the coast, as in the High Cascades of the US Pacific Northwest. They form in such places because, offshore, a seafloor plate is sinking down into the depths of the Earth and the continental plate is riding over it.
Of course, it’s hot down there in the mantle. Not only that, seawater is mixed in with the sinking rock – this lowers the melting temperature and causes chemical reactions that, among other things, make the silicic magma very sticky.
Volcanoes form wherever this magma reaches the surface near the trench made by the sinking plate edge.
The eruption may be explosive, as when gases build up a lot of pressure. Without so much gas, it can be nonexplosive but gooey, as in the Mount St. Helens eruption that began in 2004.
Here is a USGS closeup view of how Mount St. Helens rebuilt itself between 2004 and 2008:
Sometimes subduction (one tectonic plate sinking underneath another) happens far from land.
Volcanologists know this, but they haven’t been able to learn much about the resulting silicic volcanoes, since it all happens in deep water, which is technically defined as more than 500 meters, or over a third of a mile, below the surface.
The pressure of water at those depths is enough to prevent Surtsey-like blow-ups, so evidence of these eruptions usually goes unseen.
In 2012, though, volcanologists were able to trace a raft of pumice that had been sighted by satellite – see the image at the top of the page – back to Havre Seamount in the general vicinity of the Kermadec Islands.
That in itself was big news, but now technology has also enabled volcanologists to visit the volcano.
That is what all the fuss is about today!
Here is the original University of Tasmania fly-through used by Scientific American in the above video:
As of this writing, the Smithsonian doesn’t have a picture of Havre for the volcano’s GVP page. That’s going to change soon, thanks to this major volcanological success!
Featured image: Havre’s pumice raft spreads across the sea, NASA.
Sources:
Carey, R.; Adam-Soule, S.; Manga, M.; White, J. D. L.; and others. 2018. The largest deep-ocean silicic volcanic eruption of the past century. Science Advances. 4(1):e1701121.
Jakobsson, S. P.; Thors, K.; Vésteinsson, A. T.; and Ásbjörnsdóttir. 2009. Some aspects of the seafloor morphology at Surtsey volcano: The new multibeam bathymetric survey of 2007. Surtsey Research. 12:9-20.
Let’s be upfront about the most awesome thing (in modern eyes) this apparent fop ever did: He walked on lava.
Look at his eyes. You know he did.
Lava walking is something that occasionally can but shouldn’t be done unless you have a compelling reason (hits on your YouTube video don’t count; death does).
