Well, things got busy enough yesterday that the post I was hoping to write just never materialized. Not only did I have the useful academic load, but I also gave a talk on Iceland over at OSU-Newark to the geology club there (which is apparently all of 4 weeks old) - it was a nice talk with a good group interested in volcanoes! So, I'll try to play some more catch up here with news from Merapi and some fear-mongering at the Korean/Chinese border.
Merapi: The NASA Earth Observatory posted a stunner of an ASTER image showing the damage around Merapi. The areas of destroyed vegetation and the highly-channelized flows - either lahars or pyroclastic flows - stand out against the false-color red vegetated areas. A couple things struck me looking at the image: (1) considering how large some of the explosions were - or at least how large they ...
