Word: volcanoes
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...speech full of criticism for President Barack Obama's stimulus plan, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal singled out one program for particular scorn. "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington," Jindal said, deriding the $140 million appropriated to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for "something called volcano-monitoring" as one of the most egregious bits of pork to lard up the $787 billion stimulus package. But to those who live under the looming threat of flowing lava, it was a poor punch line. "Does the governor have a volcano in his backyard...
...explain what you do? Let me walk you through what's happening at our Alaska volcano observatory, one of five in the country. [The others are in Yellowstone National Park, Washington State, Hawaii, and Long Valley, California.] We have seismic networks and other geophysical equipment monitoring a number of volcanoes in Alaska, including Redoubt Volcano, 100 miles southwest of Anchorage. The volcano is showing a lot of signs of unrest that probably presage an eruption. So we look at seismic data, webcams, radar data and satellite imagery; we make overflights in airplanes to observe; we take gas measurements...
...precise can you be with your forecasting? Once the volcano starts erupting, we get better and better. An eruption is usually episodic - there's some activity, then a pause. The hard part is pinpointing where it first starts up. We use a graduated alert system. Right now, Redoubt Volcano is at orange. At orange, the military might move some planes out of a vulnerable airport. I read that trucking companies are buying ash filters. When it's red, we hope to give them hours of warning...
...Pictures of the soldiers with refugees were captioned GUARDIANS OF THE LOCAL POPULACE and DO NOT WORRY, WE ARE THERE. In pride of place was a display of pictures and letters detailing how the Indians extracted the body of a Chinese climber from the crater of the nearby Nyiragongo volcano. Above these was a proud banner reading BEYOND MANDATE. Retrieving a dead Chinese tourist from an uninhabited, uncontested mountain may be noble work. But the responsibility to protect was supposed to be about more than that...
...known as the "year without summer." It followed the Tambora Volcano eruption in Indonesia in 1815. It was sudden climate change on a similar scale, and it resulted in a severe famine in Europe, food riots and mass emigrations. Volcanic aerosols have a lifetime of about a year in the stratosphere. The lifetime of soot from nuclear fires is about five years. It's obviously much harder for a society to recover from such an extended cooling...