Idle question of the day...

[seawasp]

... how many of you have actually witnessed (as in, with your own eyes, not on TV screens, etc.) a volcanic eruption? I have, I'm just wondering how large a percentage of the population has.

(Mine was the 1970 eruption of Hekla on Iceland; we overflew the lava field and then circled the erupting cone for some time in a private aircraft)

Comments

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

Nope. There are no (active or dormant) volcanoes in Texas*, I've never been to Hawaii, and Mt. St. Helens predates me by nearly three years. :D

*Except for the picture my parents took of a cloud formation when they were driving back from College Station last year. You'd swear there was a perfect cinder cone in Fort Worth.

[seawasp]

No, the last volcanic activity in Texas was around 30 million years ago.

Move to New Mexico, however, it gets MUCH more recent, and of course in California there are active and dormant volcanoes.

Gads, you're such a child! I was a senior in high school on May 18th, 1980.

[kengr]

Ah, youth. I was 25 when the mountain went boom.

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

30 yrs old for me :-)

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

Ha! Depends on your science. :p How much more recent is it in New Mexico, and where exactly?

Good grief, my parents had just graduated college. You really ARE older than dirt.

[seawasp]

In geologic terms, just yesterday -- there was an eruption of several CUBIC KILOMETERS of lava only about 3,000 years ago. New Mexico actually has a huge number of volcanoes of startlingly diverse types (as described here), and I'm actually rather surprised there hasn't been any activity in the last few thousand years, given the existence of a large magma body present below the surface and the fairly continuous history of volcanism.

I am not old at all! My FATHER was old, and as I'm not as old as him, I can't be old.

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I wonder what effect that has/had on the New Madrid quake/fault area. Or on the slight earthquake we had a couple months ago.

Oh, no, Ryk, you're not old. For certain values of "old."

[seawasp]

New Madrid is a separate phenomenon; currently I believe it's thought to be a mostly "fossil" fault that's just slowly releasing old pent-up energy, rather than being active.

I'm definitely young. The mirror here is just lying.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

You must be around my husband's age. He watched the plume of Mt. Saint Helens with his classmates.

I was twelve and a half, very eager to go to the two-week Suzuki workshop in Forest Grove, Oregon, and bitterly disappointed that the amount of ash made the trip unworkable. People were filtering their drinking water and wearing masks in Forest Grove at the time.

Child?

[niall-shapero.livejournal.com]

And I had been out of academe (I finished with grad school in '76) earning an honest living for just shy of four years in 1980 (working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developing software for use in the Deep Space Network).