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Photo by Toby Elliott on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
We need to know: Can We Stop Volcanoes with Solar Panels?
Quick set up a summit. Give me a grant. Climate Change causes more rain (except when it causes more drought), and apparently the weight of “up to” four meters of monsoon rainfall can compress a crustal plate leading to earthquakes.
Now, four meters of rain means a lot to a pitiful 1.8 meter homo sapiens, but it’s hard to believe a plate of rock 30 kilometers thick would care less or even notice. It’s all absurd.
The whole article, written by a “Reader in Physical Geography” at Coventry Uni makes out the climate change is all around us, but unwittingly depends on the idea that the Sun is just a big torch shining on Earth, and not a raging nuclear magnetic dynamo 300,000 times bigger than the planet, blasting us with charged particles at a million miles an hour and with a magnetic field that stretches past Pluto. Poor Dr Blackett with his 20 years of university education was never taught about the Sun. He has a pretty graph pointing out some correlation between earthquakes and monsoons but […]
Watch on SteynOnline or ADH TV
By Jo Nova
My appearance with the wonderful Mark Steyn Tuesday is playing at SteynOnline, or on the Australian ADH TV.
Mark was tickled with the idea from my article last week: The science is settled but we just found 19,000 new volcanoes. He also wanted to talk about The crime of talking to Tucker Carlson and the Red-pilling of Naomi Wolf. We discussed other major science surprises like the mass phytoplankton blooms that seed clouds. That was another rule breaking surprise just two months ago — that moment when researchers realized that all the toluene and benzene pollution over the Southern Ocean was actually not caused by humans at all, but by phytoplankton.
We discussed the odd coincidence of how all the places that are warming in Antarctica seem to lie over the top of a 91 volcanoes we only discovered a few years ago. As I said, we know the surface of the moon better than we know the depths of the ocean. Only three men have visited the Mariana Trench and it’s only 11 kilometers from the surface of Earth, but 12 men have walked on the moon.
— […]
…Hillier, J. K., and A. B. Watts (2007)
By Jo Nova
What would we know?
Underwater seamounts are one to four kilometer high mountains that mostly used to be a volcano. But under a kilometer of water they are hard to see, holy smoke, and we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Mariana, and it’s only 11km “away”.
Most of these undersea volcanoes remain uncharted by sonar, and with only one-quarter of the sea floor mapped, it is impossible to know how many exist. Sometimes we only find out when a nuclear submarine runs into one:
“It’s just mind boggling.” More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered
New seamount maps could aid in studies of ecology, plate tectonics, and ocean mixing
Paul Voosen, Science
In 2005, the nuclear-powered USS San Francisco collided with an underwater volcano, or seamount, at top speed, killing a crew member and injuring most aboard. It happened again in 2021 when the USS Connecticut struck a seamount in the South China Sea, damaging its sonar array.
Despite discovering nearly half the known underwater volcanoes just this week, we already knew 30 years ago that they […]
Photo of the 2015 explosion of Calbuco Volcano in Chile, by Keraunos ob, posted on the Earth of Fire blog by Bernard Duyck.
By Jo Nova
A year ago I wrote about the odd link between the Hunga Tonga volcanic dust and floods in Australia, but perhaps volcanic dust also played a role in the savage rain bombs of 1893 that caused the infamous floods of Brisbane?
After Hunga Tonga erupted last year, about a week later unusually heavy rain started falling over Australia — even washing out the Indian Pacific Railway line connecting East and West Australia. A month later and the dust had gone around the world and returned to give us glorious sunsets followed by more rain bombs.
So it may be just a coincidence, but the second heaviest Australian rain bomb was on Feb 3, 1893. And three weeks earlier on January 7th the Calbuco Volcano in Chile had its largest eruption in the last 130 years?
In 1893 an astonishing, flabbergasting day occurred, where 907mm of rain dropped from the sky on Crohamhurst in Queensland (that’s nearly 36 inches!). It came in an astonishing week, where the heavens dumped 2 meters […]
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai
By Jo Nova
Unusual rain in Australia started within days of the Hunga Tonga dust cloud travelling across the continent
On January 15th, Hunga Tonga launched a magma-powered thunderstorm that sent atmospheric shockwaves around the world. Ash, salt and particulates were carried through rising columns, right through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere and all the way up to 58 kilometers above Earth. For hours 400,000-odd lighting bolts zapped the airborne chemical soup.
The dust from Hunga-Tonga travelled West and reached Australia on Jan 18 – 20th. On Jan 21-22 flooding rain washed out the main railway line and roads in central Australia. Over the next few weeks, rains soaked the ground across parts of Queensland and New South Wales. By February 15th, the remnant volcanic dust that had circled the Earth and was back again creating rich red sunsets over Australia. A week or so after that, the rain bombs fell on South East Queensland, and travelled south through New South Wales to Sydney.
The big unknown is that the Hunga-Tonga volcano launched water vapor, salt and dust incredibly high — almost too high. The aerosols are far above the troposphere where rainfall originates and […]
Scott Manley has done an excellent summary video of the Tongan volcano, much of the science and history of it as well as the effects thousands of miles away. The area around the volcano had completely reformed in the last ten years. He has collected some great footage together.
It’s interesting watching air pressure waves travel across Japan and the USA. Ken Stewart found the compression- decompression wave hit the east coast of Australia at about 5:16 Qld time and took 3 hours and 24 minutes roughly to get to Shark Bay, an average speed of about 1,160 kph. The decompression was about half an hour after the first peak and can be seen (still) in weather station pressure data.
Eruptions of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai are roughly 900 years apart and this one was on schedule.
Thanks to Greg …
A
The CliffMass weather blog noted that the pressure wave hit Seattle at 4:30AM local time, so the air pressure spike took 8.5 hours to cross the Pacific at about 664miles per hour. h/t WattsUp
Sending best wishes for the poor people of Tonga. Planes are on the way to help, slightly complicated because Tonga is still Covid free, and […]
A few weeks ago a CSIRO boat mapped out a string of 3 kilometer high seamounts that no one knew about. They are 400km east of Tasmania and sit in water 5 km deep (so no one is going to run into them, even in a military sub.)
But remember, even though 80% of the ocean floor is unmapped, and we haven’t even logged, named or noticed thousands of volcanoes, we *know* that they are not heating the ocean, changing ocean currents, or affecting our climate. Skillless models tell us so. (Pay us your money).
h/t Thanks to Tallbloke
Huge underwater volcano chain discovered off Tasmania
Denise Chow, Euronews
“We’ve only mapped a tiny fraction of the ocean floor,” said Andrew Fisher, a marine geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the new discovery. “We have more detailed maps of Mars, Venus and the moon than we do of the seafloor. Other planetary bodies can be mapped in high resolution with satellites, but on Earth, the water layer gets in the way. The only way is to go out with ships.”
More than 80 percent of the ocean […]
Either Katla in Iceland is about to blow or it isn’t. It is a subglacial volcano giving off five to ten times more CO2 than vulcanologists expected. This has some experts spooked, though others are saying it’s not that unusual.
UPDATE: The lead researcher herself adds that her work does not suggest an eruption is imminent, nor that it would be like the theEyjafjallajokull eruption in any case. h/t Pat for the new take. Apparently The Sunday Times has been exaggerating… “Ilyinskaya tweeted that she has previously told the Sunday Times that “the severity of Eyjafjallajökull air traffic disruption was very unusual and unlikely to happen if Katla erupts, and still, they quote me as saying exactly the opposite!”
Katla volcano set to erupt, Patrick Knox, The Sun
Katla Volcano, Iceland, 1918
Icelandic and British volcanologists have detected Katla— Icelandic for “kettle” or “boiler” — is emitting carbon dioxide on a huge scale which suggests magma chambers are filling up fast.
According to the Sunday Times, the scientists believe it could be an indicator that an eruption could be brewing which would overshadow the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010.
The emissions are in […]
A reminder of what most of our planet is made of.
Volcano, lava spreads across road, Hawaii, May 2018.
The lava has reached Leilani estates. Rock and ash are being thrown into the air. Evacuations are underway. There has been some warning. Small earthquakes have been occurring. Cracks appearing in roads.
See the drone footage of the eruption in Hawaii:
…
RT news story on this:
9 out of 10 based on 40 ratings
Let this go down as a prime example of Big Meaningless Numbers used to scare you:
Antarctica’s ice melts five times faster than usual Ben Webster — The Times (copied at The Australian)
Antarctica has lost an area of ice the size of Greater London since 2010 as warmer ocean water erodes its floating edge, a study has found. Overall about 1,463 sq km of Antarctica’s underwater ice melted between 2010 and 2016.
What does 1,463 fewer square kilometers of ice mean?
The findings suggest that melting glaciers on the continent could add significantly to long-term sea level rises, with severe implications for thousands of coastal towns and cities.
Your house might wash away. Or not. How close to zero can a number be and still be “a number”?
The total area of Antarctic sea ice averages about 11 million square kilometers. So that’s one part in 7,500 that melted or 0.013%. But volume is what matters and the percentage of volume that melted is even smaller. Let’s assume ice volume was lost to a depth of one kilometer (the depth of the “grounding line” where the ice-sheet meets the earth). The giant Antarctic Ice Sheet […]
The world is watching one volcano in Bali, but it’s sobering to think there may be hundreds of others going off, and almost certainly ones we don’t even know about. The article Is the Bali volcano making us warmer or cooler? by William F Jasper, reminded me of Ian Plimers words about there being squillions of undersea volcanoes so I found the 2007 paper, by Hillier, that tried to count them. Trying being the appropriate word. Volcanoes are biggish things, but when they are under one or two kilometers of water they are hard to hear, hard to see, and, by crikey, we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Marinara, and it’s only 11km “away”.
People are constantly discovering new volcanoes, like a 3,000m one off Indonesia that no one realized was there til 2010. It turns out the second largest volcano in the solar system is apparently not on Io, but 1,000 miles east of Japan. It’s the size of the British Isles, but who knew? A few months ago a team found 91 new volcanoes under Antarctica. (This is getting serious, someone should talk to the Minister for Lava!)
…
Not only can […]
Oh. My. Lord. Keep the car in the garage.
…
Climate Change Could Increase Volcano Eruptions
Dr Graeme Swindles, from the School of Geography at Leeds, said: “Climate change caused by humans is creating rapid ice melt in volcanically active regions. In Iceland, this has put us on a path to more frequent volcanic eruptions.”
The study examined Icelandic volcanic ash preserved in peat deposits and lake sediments and identified a period of significantly reduced volcanic activity between 5,500 and 4,500 years ago. This period came after a major decrease in global temperature, which caused glacier growth in Iceland.
The findings, published today in the journal Geology, found there was a time lag of roughly 600 years between the climate event and a noticeable decrease in the number of volcanic eruptions. The study suggests that perhaps a similar time lag can be expected following the more recent shift to warmer temperatures.
Read more at University of Leeds
It’s amazing what you can achieve when you take a simple correlation and run with it.
Meanwhile in New Zealand, Mt Ruapehu is emitting high levels of CO2
Look out, we may set off […]
It’s possibly the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world, some as high as 4km and we didn’t even know these existed til recently. Despite that overwhelming ignorance, we’re 97.00% certain that all the warming in Antarctica is due to your car and airconditioner. Robin McKie, The Guardian writer, talks about the recent discovery of so many volcanoes under the ice. Not surprisingly, we have no data on how active these volcanoes are. However because we *know* climate change is definitely wrecking Antarctica, it follows that your car, air conditioner and pet dog could melt more ice, take the pressure off the tectonic plate and set one off. Then things will really get out of hand.
Anyhow, it’s just a coincidence that all the warming in Antarctica is where the volcanoes are.
Warming in Antarctica | New volcano discoveries
Spread the hagtag #allvolcanosmatter.
From The Guardian: Scientists discover 91 volcanoes below Antarctic ice sheet
Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth – two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica.
The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes – with the highest as tall […]
It is easy to forget we stand on a molten lava ball. Worth a minute of your time. Wow.
It’s being called the Lava fire hose — 70 feet of flowing liquid rock. Pure Geo-voyerism. How close is that boat… camera trick?
I gather Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano has been erupting pretty much all the time since 1983 so this is not “evacuation time”. But I’m guessing this waterfall variety is pretty unusual. If it keeps up, it’s one helluva tourist attraction.
All the forces of nature are pretty much just showing off here — wrap your mind around this steam:
“The steam plume created by the lava reaching the water is also a concern.
“It’s super-heated steam laced with hydrochloric acid from the interaction with the seawater and has shards of volcanic glass,” Ms Babb said.
“It’s something to be avoided.”
The story: Massive lava stream exploding into ocean in Hawaii (ABC)
9.7 out of 10 based on 63 ratings
One for the geologists. It took twenty years, so this was the slowest “CT” scan ever done. They used seismic waves from Earthquakes and “numerical simulations” (and we know what they are). But possibly these models are not worthless. Apparently these blobs of hot rock under the Pacific and Africa are 5,000 km across, and may have been there for 250 million years. In any case, the full press release is below. There’s no mention of heat that might be coming up from this big ball of magma and how that might influence ocean currents, or whether it even changes on a timescale that matters (Hey we have one “CT” scan. We can’t get a trend from that. I just wonder… — Jo
..
CT scan of Earth links deep mantle plumes with volcanic hotspots
[Science Daily] Scans prove that plumes of hot rock anchored at core-mantle boundary rise to form island chains
University of California, Berkeley, seismologists have produced for the first time a sharp, three-dimensional scan of Earth’s interior that conclusively connects plumes of hot rock rising through the mantle with surface hotspots that generate volcanic island chains like Hawaii, Samoa and Iceland.
8.7 out […]
The Calbuco volcano in Chile has suddenly erupted. People have been evacuated from a 20km radius. Local flights are canceled. The ash cloud is moving east. It’s not clear yet how much effect it will have on the climate. But it is big and worth watching. So far, there are no reported casulties. This volcano has been quiet for 42 years, and caught everyone by surprise. h/t David W
Calbuco volcano, Chile @SegHumana
8.5 out of 10 based on 42 ratings
As I’ve repeatedly posted this year, there is a strange coincidence between geothermal activity and warming in Antarctica. We are still discovering volcanoes underwater, so we can’t pretend we have accurate data on their contribution in joules or the trends in that. On Antarctica almost all the headlines of doom and collapse come from West Antarctic peninsula or the ice sheet nearby which also happen to be over the West Antarctic Rift System. Most other places in and around Antarctica are cooling or staying the same, and sea ice is hitting record levels. “Must be CO2 then.” ; -)
Damiani et al looked at the crustal thickness beneath Thwaites Glacier, and finds it is quite thin, like that beneath the Pine Island Glacier. The researchers conclude that it is likely there is a major volcanic dome in Marie Byrd Land.[1]
Spot any media mention of the possibility that hot lava might be to blame instead of your SUV.[2] Good little propaganda writers produce plenty of gloom and doom headlines of the imminent collapse of ice-sheets. Where are the journalists? For that matter — which climate scientist tries to make sure journalists present an accurate report?
h/t The HockeySchtick
..
[…]
The sea ice around Antarctica is at a record high since satellites started recording, and snowfall is thumping down on the northern Antarctic Peninsula*, but alas — some glaciers on the same peninsula are continuing to melt, just like they have done for 300 years. Hence, a team of researchers-with-models conclude that this means these glaciers are especially, very, super-sensitive to air temperature changes and will “likely” melt fast, raise sea-levels, and disappear in 200 years time.[1]
Glaciers in northern Antarctic Peninsula melting faster than ever despite increased snowfall
Increased snowfall will not prevent the continued melting of glaciers in the northern Antarctic Peninsula, according to new research. Scientists have discovered that small glaciers that end on land around the Antarctic Peninsula are highly vulnerable to slight changes in air temperature and may be at risk of disappearing within 200 years. — Science Daily
“Faster than ever!” Blame Climate Change TM:
[Prof Glasser]: “This unprecedented glacier recession, in response to climate change, will result in significant contributions to sea level rise from this and similar Antarctic Peninsula mountain glaciers and ice caps.” –Wales.co
Hmm. I note that other warming parts of Antarctica are near a string of volcanoes and (surprize) […]
Marvel this: It would seem that massive volcanic eruptions in Australia wiped out 50% of all species 510 million years ago.
Try to imagine a volcano so big, the lava flow covers 2 million square kilometers. For US folk, that would be like a volcano that covered California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Idaho and Washington State combined.
(And some people think we are facing a “crisis” today?)
It was, to put it mildly, quite bad news for trilobites which had only been around for a trifling 10 million years at that stage. Otherwise life at that time was sponges, fungi, algae, and on land, attractive sounding things like microbial mats. (I suspect a Cambrian-era-Greenpeace would have struggled to find cuddly photogenic targets. Oops, no cameras either.)
510m years ago that Kalkarindji volcano erupted. The dashed line indicates the borders of the Kalkarindji “large igneous province.” Image: Fred Jourdan/ Curtin University Department of Applied Geology
I love the grand big-picture in all its imponderable vastness and power. I’m not so enthused on their climate analysis. I half wonder – half marvel at whether we can really figure out what happened that long ago.
The poor researchers are burdened with […]
That deep heat almost seems to coincide with Atlantic and Southern Ocean volcanoes?
All roads lead to the ocean. This time, though, we’re talking about the mysterious deep abyss, below 2,000m and even below 3,600m. Wunsch et al, claim the data shows the deep ocean cooled by one hundredth of a degree in the last 19 years. But they admit that really… this could just be noise. (Well, shock me.) But they have some new and glorious heat maps, and I use those to do some wild speculation about volcanoes.
When all is said and done, there are three inescapable oceanic truths:
Around 90% of all the energy in the Earth’s climate system is in the oceans. Thou shalt not create nor destroy energy. If there was an energy imbalance running day after day, gazillions of Joules of energy must be somewhere. They cannot “pause”, take holidays, nor appear in future without being present in the now.
Despite the 95% certainty among 97% of certified “climate scientists”, no one can find that energy. Thus the social-science-fact meets the physical-science-fact. Which “fact” should we spend billions on? The stone-age approach is to go with the “doctors” not the data, and […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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