Pictures of Kuril Islands Volcano From ISS

KindMind writes "The Daily Mail has cool pictures of the Sarychev Peak (Kuril Islands) volcano eruption taken from the ISS back on June 12. From the article: 'A chance recording by astronauts on the International Space Station has captured the moment a volcano explosively erupted, sending massive shockwaves through the atmosphere. Sarychev Peak, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, had been sitting quietly in the Kuril Island chain near Japan for 20 years, when it suddenly sprang to life on June 12. Fortuitously, the International Space Station was flying overhead at the time, and managed to capture this spectacular image of the ash-cloud tearing through the atmosphere, sending clouds scattering in its wake in a perfect circle.'"

Almost atomic

[timpdx]

Almost exactly what an atomic detonation would look like from space, even down to the clouds being pushed aside and the "pileus cloud" that you see above atomic blasts from years ago.

Re:Original Source and Large Images

[squoozer]

Thanks for the link some of those pictures are amazing. Being a UKian I was quite interested in the picture of London at night [nasa.gov] (shame it's a little blurred). I downloaded the largest version of the image though (about 1.9mb) and noticed something strange. There are a surprisingly large number of green dots and a few blue dots. What I'm wondering is: are the green dots traffic lights and the blue emergency services?

I could maybe believe that the blue lights are emergency vehicles since they will typically have an uninterrupted path to the camera but traffic lights almost always have a cover which I would have thought would make them hard to spot from above. Perhaps they are just artefacts of low light photography. I'd be interested to know though.

Re:Yay greenhouse!

[radtea]

So how many human civilizations' worth of CO2 and other emissions did that just kick out? ;-)

The comments on the original are to the same tune. What makes anyone think that volcanoes are a significant source of CO2? Where would the CO2 that volcanoes are supposed to emit come from?

Volcanoes do emit some C02 [realclimate.org], but then, they emit some of just about everything. Their climate effects are mostly reduced atmospheric heat content due to an increase in ash and aerosols in the upper atmosphere. This effect is particularly pronounced for tropical volcanoes because (surprise!) Earth gets most of its sunlight in the tropics, and while the ash/aerosol cloud does spread out over a few months timescale to all latitudes, its effect is greatest at the latitude of the volcano.

"Volcanoes emit far more CO2 than humans" is the equivalent of "Anthropogenic CO2 emissions increase the frequency and severity of hurricanes". The majority of people on both sides in the public debate on climate change have left the science far, far behind, and are happy to believe stuff that "just makes sense" to them.

Re:It's OT but WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

The part that amazes me is that I, as a human, simply can't comprehend the sheer volume of matter required to form a star. It has to have enough fuel to capable of fusion for billions of years to really be stable. I can calculate and write down the numbers and do the math... but I truly can't visualize in a non-abstract fashion how much matter that is.

Truly amazing.