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With more than 300 volcanoes crowded into a finger of land roughly the size of California, Russia's Kamchatka peninsula is home to the world's highest concentration of active volcanoes.
Interestingly, with all this new activity, tour operators are trying to make it seem like a great time to visit White Islands — something I think could potentially lead to disaster.
A large ash plume rising to 43,000 ft (about 13 km) altitude and extending 175 nautical miles to the south was spotted last night by VAAC Darwin. The likely cause is either a major dome collapse triggering a large pyroclastic flow or a vulcanian explosion of the lava dome.
Details of around 2,000 major volcanic eruptions which occurred over the last 1.8 million years have been made available in a new open access database, complied by scientists at the University of Bristol with colleagues from the UK, US, Colombia and Japan.
Read more at: phys.org...
Locals nervous over Naples 'super volcano'
The ground of the Campi Flegrei ("burning fields"), also known as the Phlegraean Fields, has risen more in recent weeks than it has in a long time.
This does not necessary indicate a heightened risk of an eruption, however, says Thomas Wiersberg, a scientific drilling expert for the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam.
There are concerns that a magma chamber under the fields - presumably connected to the one under Mount Vesuvius, east of Naples - is filling up, the rising pressure possibly heightening the danger of an eruption.
As Wiersberg pointed out, however, the two episodes of considerable ground uplift since the 1960s were not followed by an eruption. The uplift in the early 1970s - about 1.50 metres in three years - was somewhat greater than the current one, he said.
He said the drilling project aimed in part to monitor the Phlegraean Fields over the long term and gain more knowledge of what had occurred earlier in the super volcano.
"First we've got to understand what's happening under the surface," Wiersberg said. Then it may be possible to say more about the likelihood of an eruption.
Fears of nearby residents - and some scientists - that the drilling could "awaken" the super volcano have proved to be unfounded.
"Technically, everything went smoothly. No additional volcanic activities were triggered, nor were there any problems with gases or fluids," he noted.