Ash in the land of Lord of the Rings

Mount Tongariro, a volcano in New Zealand's Tongariro National Park in the central part of the North Island, erupted on Monday for the first time in about 100 years.  Part of the movie "Lord of the Rings" was filmed in the area around this volcano.  (I don't know which parts.) 

 (Photo from TV NZ One news)

An ash layer around two inches thick settled on the surrounding area.  There are many active steam vents now.  There has been little seismic activity.  Geologist don't know if there will be more eruptions soon.

New Zealand is seismically active.  The islands have frequent earthquakes.  There are 27 volcanoes on the North Island (some are dormant), and there's an area known as the Aukland Volcanic Field that underlies much of the metropolitan area of Aukland.  It consists of many small dormant volcanoes.

Volcanoes have given me nightmares since I was little.  I'm not fond of earthquakes, either.  (Only been in a few, none bad.)

I still want to go to New Zealand someday ... probably Aukland.  The volcanoes are dormant and that area has many fewer earthquakes than other parts of the country.   

News from the Climate Change Front

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Group, generally considered to be climate change skeptics, funded a project to investigate global temperatures over the last fifty years.  Guess what?  Their results confirm what so many scientists have been saying!  Well, duh.  Facts is facts.  Temperatures have increased by 1.5 °F over the past fifty years and "essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases." 

It’s wonderful to see they went at this with an open mind, ready to accept whatever the data showed them.

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Way south, a huge, mile-deep rift valley was found under the ice in West Antarctica. It's about the size of the Grand Canyon:

That's a trace generated by ice-penetrating radar towed by a team of scientists on snowmobiles.  It’s thought this deep canyon may be channeling warmer ocean water to the bottom of the near-by Pine Island Glacier.  This can lubricate the underside, speeding its flow and hastening its melting.  This glacier is poised to calf a large chunk soon: 

The picture is from November, 2011.  The crack was about 19 miles (30 kilometers) long, 260 feet (80 meters) wide and 195 feet (60 meters) deep back then.  The giant iceberg that will result will cover about 350 square miles (900 square kilometers).  Yikes!

The current rate of ice loss from West Antarctica is thought to contribute about 10% to global sea level rise, currently at about 3.3 millimeters per year and increasing.  If the ice sheet there (West Antarctica, not the entire continent's ice) were to completely melt, sea level would go up by several meters.  Greenland losing its ice would add another couple meters. 

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That's it for now.  Don't go buying any beach-front property!