NASA Earth Observatory: Sarychev Volcano Eruption View from Space - Video

On June 12, 2009, the International Space Station happened to be passing over the Sarychev Volcano just as it was beginning to erupt.

A newly released video based on several stunning snapshots taken by astronauts reveals the beauty and power of the erupting volcano.

Sarychev Peak, which rises to a height of 4,908 feet (about 1,500 meters), is the tallest peak on Matua Island in the northern part of the Kuril Islands, a Russian archipelago in the northwest Pacific Ocean.

The volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain, erupted in 1989, 1986, 1976 and 1946.

The new volcano animation reveals the plume of ash and steam rising from Sarychev. The plume appears to be brown ash capped with a head of white steam, a result of air rising quickly in a strong updraft, before cooling and condensing.

"The plume was so immense that it cast a large shadow on the island," according to NASA Earth Observatory.

NASA Earth Observatory image: Sagarmatha: “mother of the universe”

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data from the NASA EO-1 team, archived on the USGS Earth Explorer.

Fourteen mountain peaks on Earth stand taller than 8,000 meters (26,247 feet).

The tallest of these “eight-thousanders” is Mount Everest, the standard to which all other mountains are compared.

The Nepalese name for the mountain is Sagarmatha: “mother of the universe.”

Everest’s geological story began 40 million years ago when the Indian subcontinent began a slow-motion collision with Asia.

John McPhee

The edges of two continents jammed together and pushed up the massive ridges that make up the Himalayas today.

Pulitzer-winning journalist John McPhee summed up the wonder of the mountain’s history when he wrote Annals of the Former World:

"The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the Earth. If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose."

In other words, when climbers reach the top of Mount Everest, they are not standing on hard igneous rock produced by volcanoes.

Rather, they are perched on softer sedimentary rock formed by the skeletons of creatures that lived in a warm ocean off the northern coast of India tens of millions of years ago.

Meanwhile, glaciers have chiseled Mount Everest’s summit into a huge, triangular pyramid, defined by three faces and three ridges that extend to the northeast, southeast, and northwest.

Edmund Hillary

The southeastern ridge is the most widely used climbing route. It is the one that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay followed in May 1953 when they became the first climbers to reach the summit and return safely.

Despite its reputation as an extremely dangerous mountain, commercial guiding has done much to tame Everest in the last few decades.

As of March 2012, there had been 5,656 successful ascents of Everest, while 223 people had died—a fatality rate of 4 percent.

Maupiti in Society Islands: Revising Darwin's sinking-island theory

A satellite image of Maupiti, one of the Society Islands, which is on its way to becoming an atoll. Submerged reef appears in pale blue. 

Credit: NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY

The three different formations of South Pacific coral-reef islands have long fascinated geologists.

Tahiti's coral forms a "fringing" reef, a shelf growing close to the island's shore.

The "barrier" reefs of Bora Bora are separated from the main island by a calm lagoon.

Finally, an "atoll," such as Manuae, appears as a ring of coral enclosing a lagoon with no island at its center.

The question of how reefs develop into these shapes over evolutionary time produced an enduring conflict between two hypotheses, one from British naturalist Charles Darwin and the other from Canadian geologist Reginald Daly.

In a paper (see PDF) recently published in the journal Geology, researchers at MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) use modern measurements and computer modeling to resolve this old conundrum.

Charles Darwin

Darwin proposed that fringing reefs, barrier reefs and atolls reflect different stages in a dramatic process that occurs as an island sinks into the ocean floor—the ultimate fate of all of the world's volcanic ocean islands.

As young volcanic rock cools and is carried away from a volcanic "hot spot" by the movement of tectonic plates, an island sinks as much as a few millimeters per year.

As the island sinks, resident coral reefs on the island flanks grow upward toward the sea surface. The living coral organisms up top, and their symbiotic algae, get enough sunlight to keep pace with the sinking of the island.

As the coral grows upward and the island sinks down, a fringing reef progresses to a barrier reef, and eventually to a signature atoll.

Michael Toomey

However, Darwin's reef theory can't explain the trajectories of all volcanic ocean-island systems, as MIT/WHOI graduate student Michael Toomey and collaborators Taylor Perron, the Cecil and Ida Green Assistant Professor of Geology at MIT, and Andrew Ashton, a coastal geomorphologist at WHOI, discovered.

The Hawaiian Islands, they realized, show a different kind of progression: For example, the researchers found fringing reef where they expected to find no reef development and drowned barrier reefs where they expected living barrier reefs.

"Those islands are just not sinking into atolls like the Society Islands," Toomey says, "so we wanted to develop a model to explain these differences."

More information: "Profiles of ocean island coral reefs controlled by sea-level history and carbonate accumulation rates" geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/05/09/G34109.1.full.pdf+html