Volcanoes and Things...

This week I watched the BBC factual drama Supervolcano and was thoroughly entertained. It was about Yellowstone National Park in the US, which is built on top of a supervolcano. The programme showed what would happen if the volcano one day exploded (its due for one in the next 100,000 years so watch out!!). Very interesting.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my volcano experiences from the Philippines. It was back in 1991 when Mt. Pinatubo exploded not far away from where I was living at the time.

The main thing I remember about the volcano eruption was that a typhoon was moving across Manila at the time, and all the volcanic ash got mixed in together and made a dense cloud... turning day to night! I remember it was about 3pm in the afternoon, and watery sand was falling from the dark sky - it felt like night time, but it was the middle of the day! It was almost like snow...

The above pic shows the ash getting mixed up with the passing typhoon.

The eruption was huge, and created its own weather system, complete with flashes of lightning. It dropped about half a cm of ash on the house that I was living in at the time. The ask was very destructive and created lahars. It stopped planes flying for a number of weeks from the capital, Manial, and devastated many people's homes and livelihoods. The worse part was the ash which fell up to 200m thick on the mountain, but further away, just a few cm of ash collapsed buildings and caused lung problems.

The picture above was taken in colour!! Everything is covered in ash. It looks B&W because everything is covered in ash.

Even though it was a relatively small eruption compared to a supervolcano - it still managed to reduce the global temperature by 0.5C for a couple of years through increased ozone depletion!