Smokin'!

A smoke plume streams from Indonesia's Paluweh Volcano on April 19, 2013. The image was captured by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA's Earth Observing-1 satellite. (Image: NASA Earth Observatory) The image above of Indonesia's erupting Paluweh Volcano comes from NASA's ever-awesome Earth Observatory. The editors at EO chose to run a closeup, but I love this long shot, showing the green, crenulated ~ 8-kilometer-wide island surrounded by an ocean of dark ocean of blue — the Flores Sea, to be exact. The volcano, which rises 3,000 meters above the sea floor, but only 875 meters above the sea, has been rumbling and erupting for months. A dome of lava began inflating inside Paluweh's crater last November, and the volcano began spewing ash. Then, on February 3 of this year, a massive eruption threw ash into the atmosphere to an altitude of 45,000 feet. Paluweh continues to spew ash and ...