And welcome back to the nonprofits. You made it to Friday, and it's a volcano. And who better to tell us about geological phenomena than our resident geologist Kelly Laughlin. But he's not here this week, so we're gonna go to Tracy instead.
Yes, my friends, you have indeed heard true. The end is nigh and it is high time you all repent for your inadequacies in life, else suffer the wrath of Lord Vulcan Laos nominee Aus. Yes, indeed, friends, exhibiting a flair for the dramatic, Lord Vulcan Laus nominie Aus, the Roman god of fire and smithing, has chosen to show his might by causing a fair amount of above average
seismic activity on the slopes of Iliamna Volcano. The volcano has been dormant for many years to US mortals, but for Lord Vulcan Laos nominie Aus.
The forge has barely cool.
This story is from ABC News by Julia Jacobo on July eleven five.
A lot of jads of jas.
That is a lot of jays. Amazing, Thank you.
Now, I don't know if that's a reference that I'm missing, or if that's your own Latin nonsense that you tossed on there.
Latin nonsense.
Oh I think that was like glory be to his name or something.
Okay, so not nonsense, just Latin. So it was very intimidating though. I'll say that now. I know that our producer loves me, Cynthia, because she keeps giving me science stuff to talk about, and that's amazing. But Jonathan, I know that we share a passion here. So can can you tell us more about some of the data that we have about this particular volcano?
Sure, since this last eruption, the volcano was recorded ejecting smoke and light ash in eighteen seventy six, nineteen thirty three, nineteen forty one, and forty seven. And that's according to MPs, MPs being the I forgot ack anyway, I'll get to it in a minute. It regularly tips trips seismographs from
getting close to an avalanche as well. You know, you put a volcano heat lots of glacier snow, and you get eventually get a lot of avalanches, which also cause a lot of micro quakes or earthquakes if they're big enough. And it is summer after all, so things are melting a bit, and there is climate change, so but this seems to be a bit different. Through the shaking is the same, it usually does not last for hours as
it did on June fifteenth. Iliama is remote located, and on this I'm quoting the article for this located in the Jigmut Mountains within Lake Clark National Park and Preserve National Park Service. There it is remembered and it is monitored closely by volcanologists due to its potential hazards. There are several communities within a two hundred mile radius. Why a two hundred mile radius, you say, Think about Pintubo,
Think about Mount Saint Helens. During Mount Saint Helens. The next day, I walked out to my car and took an eighth inch of ash off my windshield before I used Winschild wibers because it's gritty and it would scratch the glass. So this happened in Marina, California, just north of Monterey, some nine hundred plus miles from Mount Saint Helens. So yeah, these things can affect things very very far away.
So in Mount Pinatubo. When it blew in the Philippines about a month after I left, put three foot of ash, you know, about one hundred miles away. So yeah, that's pretty big boom. And so that's you know, that's why two hundred mile radius. And there are Pedro Bay port Alsworth and Anchorage, Alaska according to the National Park Service, that are within that range.
Okay, so when they talk about the area being affected, they're not just saying by like seismic activity or a magma flow.
They're talking about like.
Ash fallout and other sort of like environmental and weather phenomena.
Yes, cool, Okay, gotcha.
So Tracy, that's not an expert, what can you tell us about in volcanos?
So here's the deal.
I'm going to pass along the sentiment of a man that I respect slightly more than the average individual, and that is that as a amateur, as a person who knows nothing, I believe that gives me license to speculate wildly. So if you look on the on Google Maps and you look up Iliamna volcano, you notice that it's like kinda like ish close to water.
Not super close.
So this is my speculation that soon this entire volcano will break in half and then magma will emerge and it will spill onto this water creating more land for America Red, white, and blue, but also creating a super large amount of steam that will blanket all of Alaska and the northern territories, the Northwest territories of Canada, and the Yukon in darkness for the rest of time, as is the will of our Lord Vulcan laos nomini aus.
That is Latin for something that I did look up and then closed immediately because I didn't think it was gonna come up again. But I don't think there's much cause to worry in all seriousness.
I read through the article.
The US Geological Survey called it a normal volcano alert level. So if we don't trust the people who study this all the time and monitor it all the time, who are we gonna trust me? I just said, Vulcans doing it, So like we have to lean on the experts on these sort of things, and.
They don't think it's much to worry about. So I'm just gonna go with what they say.
I mean, have you ever watched Dante's Peak?
No?
I haven't. What's that about?
Also?
So tell us, oh, go ahead and watch it, watch it.
We have fourteen minutes, and I don't know anything about volcanoes.
So well, you know there are fifty one. I have fun fact, there are fifty one volcanoes monitored in Alaska alone. It's the Ring of Fire, you know, that goes ro all around the Pacific.
It's like, that's what I got it.
Yeah, the Ring of Fire.
Yeah.
He must have fallen off a boat in the Pacific somewhere anyway, yeah, far north.
So is there is there something significant about Iliamna? Then, John, like, why like, why are we hearing about this one specifically?
Is there any rhyme or like anything thing particular to it?
I don't think so. I think just because it's been so long, which is not so long in geological time. You know, it's been like, you know, one hundred it's been sixty some odd years. I guess seventy years. Let's say, actually it's been sixty six years. But you know, since it's last we're just bree smoke which ashed and smoked. It didn't really irrupt, you know. So but it's still
an active volcano. And so you know, we have other active volcanoes in the Ring of Fire, and you know there's Mount Rainier and there's of course Mount Saint Helens in Washington, Oregon, and there's you know, volcanoes all the way up the Andes Mountains in South America and Central America and that go up through the Rockies but don't really become We don't have any active volcanoes until you get up towards Washington State or Oregon, Washington, northern California.
So you know, that's just there are a lot of volcanoes in the United States. Most of them I think are in Alaska, but or Hawaii. Hawaii's are also very active. Kilaway has been erupting for what thirty years now, something like that.
I imagine. Then there's probably that's probably where the plates are meeting.
Yeah, there's a couple of small plates in between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. So there's a lot of going on. And wherever you have fault lines, you know. It's another thing about luring a fire is that those subduction zones and things like that tend to have volcanoes popping up as well. Like it might might might even be a couple, though I don't remember any couple in the coastal ranges of California. But because that's
San Andrea's fault goes up California. Well, that's ally so it's like you can see the fault line. Okay, it's overdue for a major eruption anyway, So it actually is more regular, and it's those plates are more regular in their earthquakes than volcanoes earthquakes.
Well, and speaking of fault lines, there's one too that I don't hear a lot about, but I used to when I was younger, the San Madrid or New Madrid, a little bit south of a little bit south of Tracy and I in Missouri. And apparently I also do for a sort of event, a seismic event sometime soon. I don't know, Tracy, have you heard anything about it?
When was the last one? You're in eighteen hundreds? It was in your early eighteen hundreds, gotcha.
I've been hearing about that since I was in like middle school, because I remember them telling showing me that our building was built to be earthquake ready in the event that we were to have an earthquake. I was like, ah, okay, that's why we have to prepare for earthquakes here in Missouri, even though we don't.
Have them really at it.
All right, that's it, that's just.
In case The thing with this moderate's fault is that last time it erupted, it was like a it was like a an eight on the Richter scale, which is like earth shattering. You know, the the entire Mississippi River changed course into Louisiana from that. You know, it's like, you know, the whole New Orleans land mass was created
because of it. You know, it's like it's really weird, you know, And it was not that long ago, so you know, but it's supposedly a little bit more when a couple hundred years goes by, it's a little bit more on the edge doing it. And now that place is all populated. At the time there was no population there.
That'll be that'll be something you'd think that I then will have the hopefully they'll have some sort of methods for detecting ahead of time.
All right, now it's time to move because there are.
Yeah, you'll get it. You'll get a couple of days notice, and you'll have all the time in the world to drive your way, your way away from it. That's not going to affect you. I don't think you can go that far. If it's that big of an earthquake, you'd have to get over the rocky mountains to put the mountains between you and the earthquake. You know, earthquake might trigger other faults in other parts of the United States.
To go geysers and faults and all kinds of stuff, guys.
Next to nothing.
I looked up Dante's Peak, and the reason I haven't seen it is it came out when I was three months in Utero, and it's about it's about volcanoes.
It's jaws with volcanoes, is my understanding of.
Shark.
I mean, at the end of the day.
With it, you just if somebody comes up to you and you're in a beachside town and they say there's sharks in that water, maybe just don't go on the water that day. And if somebody comes up to you and you live next to a volcano and they appear to know stuff about volcanoes, and they tell you the volcano is about to be bad, go to vacation for a week, see.
If something happens with the volcano, if it doesn't come back. This is how much didn't really lose.
I was really really wondering how you were going to tie that back to volcanoes. When when I was like, how do we end up on sharks, but you brought it back, and that.
Volcanoes Johnte's peak it.
I will make up stuff about volcanoes if you, if you keep me, if you, if you keep asking me about this.
Let's let's do this, because I have I thought we were going to have a little extra time on this one, very little, so I I yeah, so I came up with this thought.
So if magma is molten mineral, right, I know what you're talking about, go ahead with me.
And ice is a mineral, does that make water magma?
Yep?
Planet simple long temperature?
Wrong temperature, what's.
What's the relevancy of temperature?
Yeah?
Talk to to get me there?
Well, if you, if you, it has to be in a melted state. Magma's plastic melted plastic state, that's why it's there. And magma is specific to what's internal to the to the planet, which is extremely hot, so.
That the time three feet inside the crust is three feet inside the layer that we're on.
Which I don't think is the crust crust.
Okay, three feet inside of that is inside the planet, and it's not that hot.
So okay, yeah, okay, But what I'm saying is you know, like you can go down just three or four miles in the temperature starts getting really warm. So and the magma's coming up from much farther down than that, and it is usually once it hits the surface between three and four thousand degrees, so, you know, and then it turns into lava. Blah blah blah. Different volcanoes have different temperatures and different consistencies of their magma. Their lava magma
is lava when it comes to the surface. So that's uh, you know, that's what I understand it to be. So ice turning to water is water.
What is not water? Also a magma?
It is a molten mineral, but molten natural material now.
Here Now, now what is a mineral?
See I got that here too.
So a mineral is a naturally occurring inorganic solid with a specific chemical composition such as H two oh and a definite crystal structure. Ice meets all of these solid solid H two oh meets all of these criteria. Okay, Now the definition of magma, I was a little bit wrong because I said, I said that that magma is molten minerals, and that's not I was being charitable to my game.
The definition of.
Magma is hot, fluid or semi fluid material or below or within the Earth's crust from which lava and.
Other pot is a matter of opinion, it is a.
Matter it is.
It is a description that is purely subjective and arbitrary.
So I decide that things become hot above absolute zero, So all things are hot. Therefore all are molten and naturally occurring, and within the Earth's crust are magma.
There we go very scientific.
I mean, if we're gonna use, if we're gonna use arbitrary, if we're gonna use, if you're gonna in your scientific like wording, use something, anything that's good is rocks.
And I'm like, okay, so all the rocks I don't think are good are not rocks?
No, if we're going to use something.
That's why. That's why science is precise wording. That's why science precise wording and definitions. So you know that way you you were all talking on the same page. Communications issues are always a problem. But you know the other thing is, though, when you think about it, communication and how you communicate a certain ideas, you're just trying to get as accurate as you can to another another brain, and so that's difficult, and there's entire studies on that.
But if you want to argue terms, you go study philosophy. There are ninety percent of us arguing with the terms mean, you know. But once you get a good grip on the terms, you know. I never understood why they use Latin and Greek for that myself, because it's like, why would we do that?
It's descriptive And I really feel like I'm see like geology specific definitions for magma, and at least what I've found on a ten second Google start feel free to not believe me, is.
That magma is defined as molten or semi molten rock found beneath the Earth's surface. And I think you can just be generous here and say that rock and mineral are the same thing.
I'm looking up the difference between a rock and a mineral.
Okay, if it's if it's probably going to be a rock is some collection of minerals that are found naturally.
Occurring one or more minerals.
So there you go.
It's when ice cube is a rock?
Ice cube is ice is a naturally occurring rock?
I well, you know, and also water does a lot of water vapor comes out of erupting volcanoes. Matter of fact, there's a lot it's it's but it comes out as steam, not as not as rocks. It's not rocks, it's steam.
Where why why?
Okay, it's served on the rocks as well.
Thanks, thank Irish Ice.
So I'm just gonna say, I feel like.
This is ice vapors just wants to sin.
I think he just wants to sin.
Wants to sin against the vulcan.
Vulcan is ashamed of you. He made you in his image as a lava monster, and you.
Showbacks. Don't serve Vulcan, they serve Neptune.
So we'll Seetune protects you from the underwater volcanoes.
Yeah, they're there too.
That's actually a pretty solid flex and that's where we're going to ended.
Thank you everybody for tuning in this week.