We can all agree that volcanic explosions are filled with awesome. But get too close, and you're toast. Richard Roscoe must have been using a big lens to stay out of the danger zone of Sakurajima Volcano in southern Japan when he snapped this stunning sequence last month of a visible shock wave propagating out from an explosion in the Showa crater:
Notice the rocks and boulders being flung out from the ash cloud at high speed; had a human been in there, s/he would've probably got a nasty bonk on the head, at best. But this is a tiny outburst by Sakurajima's standards -- it used to be an island until a 1915 eruption sent lava pouring into Kagoshima Bay and connected the volcano to mainland Kyushu.
Sakurajima is well outfitted with remote sensing equipment, too, mostly because of its location: it's about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) across the bay to downtown Kagoshima, a city of about 600,000 people (see satellite image below). Ash routinely sprinkles the town, and the local airport sometimes has to ground or reroute flights to avoid volcanic clouds.
Images: Photovolcanica, JAXA
Tags: Geology, Natural Disasters, Physics, Volcanic Eruptions
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