WHAT IS HAPPENING AT WHITE ISLAND VOLCANO??? New Zealand/Kermadec & South Pacific QUAKE/VOLCANO WATCH

New Zealand is dominated by subduction volcanism,with famous Mount Taranaki (or Egmont) as one of the most visually stunning stratovolcanoes in the world from both the ground and above, and with the infamous Taupo Volcanic Zone, best known for being one of the worlds “super” volcanoes. At 250 km from Auckland this is already quite a hazard on itself.

The Auckland Volcanic Field is a monogenetic volcanic field, meaning that an eruptive episode only happens once through a vent. Each eruptive episode generates a new vent somewhere within the volcanic field as opposed to “normal” volcanism where a volcanic vent has succesive eruptive episodes causing a volcano to build up and blow up occasionaly. The Auckland Volcanic Field produces basaltic scoria cones, maars and tuff rings. All three are caused by the same type of magma, basaltic magma in this case, but the location the surface penetration, the eruptive flowrate and the total volume of the basalt determine the type of surface expression. The volcanic field has been active for about 150.000 (0.15M) years now. Older volcanic fields are found towards the south; South Auckland (1.5-0.5M), Ngatutura (1.8-1.5M) and Okete (1.8-2.7M).... [link to volcanocafe.wordpress.com]

Take time and read this article. It's interesting!

Magnitude 4.4 earthquake shakes the ground across Melbourne as 6.5 quake hits New Zealand

MELBOURNE has been rocked by a series of tremors that shook the ground for about 10 to 15 seconds. Follow the story as it happened.
•4.4 magnitude earthquake hits Victoria
•Ground shakes for 10-15 seconds
•Aftershocks followed during the day
•6.5 magnitude quake hits New Zealand•No damage or injuries from either quake
•Scroll down to see reactions on social media
11.35pm AN aftershock to the Korumburra earthquake has hit parts of Melbourne this evening, the Herald Sun reported.
The magnitude 3.7 aftershock at about 7.16pm was the second and most violent since the initial 4.4 magnitude quake hit Victoria at 11.32am today.
A second, smaller aftershock - measuring 3.3 - shook the South Gippsland town of Korumburra, with reports it was again felt in Melbourne, at 12.37pm, a spokesman from Geosciences Australia said.

[link to www.news.com.au]

Much more too read on this story. Excellent infrormation.

Photo evidence for “possible” eruption of an extinct volcano near the Ross Ice Shelf

Like I’ve said before, when your work becomes known, people start sending you things to look at. Such is the case here. An email was forwarded to me by Jim Kingsley that contained a NOAA-17 POES satellite photo and discussion about what it meant. The plume to the left was identified as Mount Erebus, but the plume to the right was simply referenced as “new” with no label as to the landmark. There was also the query “What do you think?”


From International Volcano Research Centre they write:

“As of the 1st of February, the Mt. Erebus Volcano Observatory (MEVO) reports that the volcano continues to have frequent Strombolian eruptions with infrequent ash eruptions.”
and
“The Mt. Erebus volcano in Antarctica was successfully forecasted by INTLVRC’s programme ERUPTION Pro 10.7 to erupt in 2008 with 100% probability.”

Clearly though, from a graph of eruption frequency of Mt. Erebus, there appears to be an increase in activity over the last couple of years, though it is not clear if the lack of the updated entries for late 2007 after October 23rd into 2008 is lack of eruptions or a reporting problem:

I also noted that in the live cam image, you can’t see Mount Terror, some 20 miles away. But this makes sense, why monitor an extinct volcano?

So the next thing I did was to try to ascertain that the plume seen in the original NOAA-17 satellite image was in fact coming from Mount Erebus. The original photo had low contrast, cloud cover, and no good landmarks, so it was hard to be sure where the plumes originated. Once I was sure that the leftmost plume was in fact Erebus, it then should be easy to correlate the position of Terror.

Having some skill in computer graphics, I decided that I’d try to enhance the contrast of the original satellite image to see if Ross Island would become visible. I was successful:

The characteristic “bulb” on Ross Island which is Mount Bird, became clearly visible, identifying the source of the plumes as being on Ross Island. I’ve created this image to help you identify the “bulb” in the contrast enhanced image above.

But I still wasn’t happy with the result, so I tried a different technique. I located a satellite photo of a clear day in the Antarctic summer, the NOAA-17 photo from December 15th, 2007 which clearly shows the Ross Island outline and its features. Note though it appears this photo is using a different IR channel than the winter photo, so the picture looks different. This is probably to help spot iceberg calving better.

The process I used was 66% transparency for the 10-24-07 image placed on top, and did a 3x contrast enhancement to help bring out details. This is the resultant image:

While there was some slight orbital perspective misalignment of the coastline (or perhaps shelf movement) from the 10-24-07 picture to the 12-15-07 picture, from the characteristic outline of Ross Island it is clear that the plumes are originating from Ross Island and near the summits of Mount Erebus and Mount Terror.

I also used Google Earth to help me pinpoint the two given their published lat/lons (Mount Erebus -77.53° 167.17° Mount Terror -77.5167° 168.533°).

Ok, so I’d proved the plumes are coming from very near or at the summits of Mt. Erebus and Mount Terror.

UPDATE: Alert reader Dave D. provided a link to a TERRA/MODIS image that showed much greater detail at 500meter resolution. It is in bands 3,6 and 7 (land/cloud/aerosols properties) at 500m resolution taken at 19:40 UTC 10/24/07

But I still had some issues with the images I’d adjusted and composited:

This is an infrared image, thus warmer things should show up as darker (like the sea) so why do the plumes look white?
What else could be causing the plumes? High wind driven blowing snow from the summits or simple orographic lifting creating a cloud trail perhaps? Contrails?
If this were a volcanic eruption on Mount Terror, why hasn’t this been reported on an continent crawling with scientists, seismic monitors, live cameras and satellite observations?
So I looked further trying to answer these questions.

1. This is an infrared image, thus warmer things should show up as darker (like the sea) so why do the plumes look white?

Normally that would be a dead giveaway as it being a “cold” plume on a GOES satellite image, but this is POES, and a visit to the NOAA-17 page provided a clue under the AVHRR sensor characteristics table

Ok, so I’d proved the plumes are coming from very near or at the summits of Mt. Erebus and Mount Terror.

....

[link to wattsupwiththat.com]

rest of article and amazing images