Kirishima and Sakurajima

I've been lurking about for the past few days on
Erik Klemetti
Eruptions
Hot stuff from Earth's interior .
There are several volcanoes going off around the world right now. Some are just puffing, others are exploding. Kirishima and Sakurajima are two, located not far from each other as I understand it, in Japan. Kirishima and Sakurajima are two of the exploding kind, while Kilauea in Hawaii is one of the non-exploding kind (that's a very unscientific explanation - right? ha ha. At this time Kilauea just kind of urps lava up out of it's cone, down the side and out into the Pacific, quietly destroying subdivisions and whatever else that stands in the way. (The National Park Service website explains it much better than I want to go into right now. :-) )

Erik Klemetti has a post where he lists all of the volcano webcams, along with their web addresses. Plus he, and the people who comment on his posts, have listed a lot of YouTube video links. I find it all very, very interesting. :-)

Here is a photo from one of the eruptions this evening:

The video that goes with this is amazing. The "atom bomb" look is toward the end. There are other videos that show the shock wave associated with one of the eruptions at Sakurajima yesterday. Wow! Explosive Eruptions And Shock Waves At Sakurajima Volcano, Japan Raw Footage 桜島火山 . I would post the actual YouTube video but it's wider than my post area and I'm afraid it might cause problems with the sidebar. Hopefully you can just click on the link and go to the YouTube page if you'd like to see it.

Erik Klemetti also gives little updates on what some of the other active volcanoes are doing, as do people in the comments section.

Very interesting stuff. Maybe if it was earlier in the evening I would write about it all more intelligently. For now, though, it's heading toward midnight and bed time and dreams of earthquakes and volcanoes and other assorted exciting things.

I think I need a ticket to Japan.