Hang on tight!

Wow! A whole lot of shakin' and rumblin' going on...again.

Two evenings ago it was a 7.2 mag earthquake on the southern end of the San Andres Fault right where it crosses California/Mexico border and just north of the Gulf of California.



Then this morning I saw reports that Mt. Redoubt is starting to shake like a bowl full of jelly and there's a possibility of an eruption.




And this evening there was a 7.7 mag earthquake off the northwest coast of Sumatra.

Chile gets hot!

Chilean volcano could spew for months

There was a time after my sister-in-law’s wedding back in '76 I felt like that. But by noon the next day I was inside out and it was over. Oh, the memories!(Thanks again to Aunt Margie, the Nurse at Bellvue’s Criminal Psych Ward for pulling me through. Then again, she had lots of experience—personal and professional.)

But back to the volcano.

All that ash and soot in the air. Bound to block some sunlight while aloft and absorb same once it settles on the snowcapped peaks nearby. Guess the outcome depends upon how much CO2 is also being spewed out and what sort of upper atmospheric winds there may be. Remember, Mt. St. Helen’s ash landed east of Chicago.

Hey Son, Are you ready to rumble?

My son is currently living and working in Eugene, Oregon. I hope he keeps his eyes open:

Swarm of Earthquakes Detected Off Oregon

There have been more than 600 quakes over the past 10 days in a basin 150 miles southwest of Newport. The biggest was magnitude 5.4 and two others were more than magnitude 5.0, OSU reported. They have not followed the typical pattern of a major shock followed by a series of diminishing aftershocks, and few have been strong enough to be felt on shore.

It looks like what happens before a volcanic eruption, except there are no volcanoes in the area, Dziak said.

Yet. He should have added, “yet” to the end of that sentence.

Here’s a map of the area.

We NEED a huge volcanic eruption(or two)

My wife reported that she saw this story on Anak Krakatoa creep across the bottom of the screen on one of this morning’s news shows. I couldn’t help but think that should the “Son of Krakatoa” live up to its Dad’s performance of 1883, some of the concerns of Global Warming might be put on the back burner for a decade or so. The ash of the 1883 eruption, spewed into the upper atmosphere, has been credited with a drop in the global temperatures in 1.2 degrees Celsius.

While not quite as impressive as the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora which created the “Year Without a Summer,” it (Krakatoa) is still indicative of the power of nature.

[On a side note: I wonder if people of the St. Lawrence Valley wondered if they had pissed off Mother Nature in 1816? Or did they go about trying to figure out what they had done to cause the drop in temperature?]

I would be interested in seeing what affect the smoke and ash of the wildfires out west have on temperatures. On one hand you have a tremendous amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere and on the other there’s all the reflective surface of the atmospheric dust sending sunlight back to space.