Tuesday, May 6, 2008

When a mountain blows its top . . .


. . . things can get pretty picturesque.

The Chaiten volcano in southern Chile has been doing its thing for the past few days, and there have been some wonderful photographs in the press. Click them to enlarge.




Here, Chaiten is burning at night, below a spectacular lighting storm.




The plume of smoke and ash is blowing right across South America, into the Atlantic Ocean. There's probably more greenhouse gases in the plume than a few years' worth of automotive emissions from US cars.




Mother Nature at her destructive best (or worst, I suppose, if you live nearby!).

Peter

1 comment:

  1. I seem to remember reading that Mt. St. Helens blew more pollution into the atmosphere in twenty minutes than ALL the internal combustion engines that ever ran. Environmentalists were horrified; The damage was irrepairable. Three years later, they had even worse problems because Mother Nature had eliminated the damage...
    I wonder how much irrepairable damage to the atmosphere is being done here?

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