Author: College of Engineering

The world’s largest active volcano—Hawaii’s Mauna Loa—has been quiet for the past four decades. But in November 2022, the volcano began to stir.

Some cloud cover on November 28 scattered light from the eruption and urban areas and made it more diffuse. “It also looks like the lava emitted by the eruption was so bright that the sensor was saturated, producing a ‘post-saturation recovery streak’ along the VIIRS scan to the southeast,” noted Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Tech. “These streaks are only seen over very intense sources of visible radiation.”

“The eruption is effusive rather than explosive, although its initial phase overnight on November 28 was quite energetic and injected some sulfur dioxide to high altitudes, possibly all the way to the tropopause,” said Carn. “That is unusual for this type of eruption.”

Read more at NASA Earth Observatory, or follow Simon Carn on Twitter, @simoncarn.

Related

• Mauna Loa: Satellites Capture Incredible Views Of Eruption [Photos]
• Mauna Loa wakes up after almost 40 years; eruption’s duration uncertain, say scientists

Chad Deering (GMES) was quoted in a University of Wisconsin Oshkosh news story picked up by Science Daily and Phys.org. The story explains how a study led by Deering and UW-Oshkosh geologist Timothy Paulsen links zircon data from sandstones recovered from Earth’s major continental landmasses to the evolution of the Earth’s rock cycle and its oceans. Snehamoy Chatterjee (GMES) is also a co-author on the study.

“Continents tend to be worn down by weathering and rivers tend to transport this sediment to the oceans, leaving scattered puzzle pieces for geologists to fit together,” said Chad Deering, a Michigan Tech geologist and coauthor on the paper. “There is increasing evidence that important pieces of the puzzle are found in the ancient beach and river sediments produced through continental weathering and erosion.”

Read more at UW Oshkosh Today, by Natalie Johnson.

Continental Magmatism and Uplift as the Primary Driver for First-Order Oceanic ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr Variability with Implications for Global Climate and Atmospheric Oxygenation
T. Paulsen, C. Deering, J. Sliwinski, S. Chatterjee, and O. Bachman
GSA Today, pp. 4–10, 2022.
doi.org/10.1130/GSATG526A.1

A powerful volcanic eruption has obliterated a small, uninhabited South Pacific island known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai. Damage assessments are still ongoing, but preliminary reports indicate that some communities in the island nation of Tonga have been severely damaged by volcanic ash and significant tsunami waves.

“The umbrella cloud was about 500 kilometers (300 miles) in diameter at its maximum extent,” said Michigan Tech volcanologist Simon Carn. “That is comparable to Pinatubo and one of the largest of the satellite era. However, the involvement of water in the Tonga eruption may have increased the explosivity compared to a purely magmatic eruption like Pinatubo.”

Read more at Earth Observatory by Adam Voiland, with Mike Carlowicz.