Programming note for this week: I'll be headed off to criss-cross North Carolina for a number of events over the next week, so posts this week might be sporadic. I have a post or two ready to roll (including a follow up to "Falling to Lava") but if something new occurs, I might not be too quick about getting something posted if I'm in the middle of nowhere between Fayetteville and Wilmington. You can check out an interview I did with CTV.ca on the "impending doom" from Laacher See - sadly, the Daily Mail article did get the sort of widespread attention that I feared it might garner.
A few Eruptions readers pointed me to information about the ongoing and increasing activity at Lewotolo (also known as Lewotolok) in Indonesia. Unlike other times when Indonesian volcanoes have been restless, the 500+ evacuees around Lewotolo left before the government asked - in fact, no plan for the evacuations have been announced thus far, so caring for the evacuees has become a concern. Lewotolo is on Lembata and hasn't been active for over 60 years. However, over the last few hundred years, the volcano have produced at least 8 small VEI 2 explosive eruptions from the summit crater, although the eruption in 1660 is thought to have been at least a VEI 3. In 1996, the volcano experienced an intense earthquake swarm that reached over 100 earthquakes per day at its peak, but no eruption came of that seimicity. Likely, that was related to magma rising in the system from depth, although some of the earthquakes were apparently quite shallow. From the looks of the pictures of Lewotolo I've seen (such as the one above), the slopes of the volcano have been deeply eroded and hydrothermally-altered - in fact, it seems that many picture show some amount of fumarolic activity on the slopes and at the summit as well.
