Volcanos & Me

So here is my Volcano story. In 2002 a wife and I visited her home in the Philippines which hosts the most perfect home volcano in the world the Mayan Volcano. It happened be erupting a year which it does about every 5 to 10 years however this eruption was to be awesome. For almost 2 weeks and watched it billow and a lava flow. The lava flow from our perspective and according to thousands of other Filipinos mostly Catholic look like the Mother Mary. At one point when we were in Legaspi, a power classic cloud came hurtling down the mountain, Volcano side towards probable the home of my wife's mother. The sky turned dark -- filled the sky we race towards her home and thankfully the clock stopped like hitting a giant wall approximately 2 km from our home. Everyone was okay except that thousands of refugees who are fortunate to be on the western side of the Mayan Volcano. Thankfully I had several boxes of antibiotics have been given from drug let's and we were able to help treat their bronchitis that they receive from the inhalation of fashion the fumes. However nothing could be done for their homes and for their animals who were incinerate. A few days before we left for my most memorable times in my life was climbing up to the roof of a storage building at my mother-in-law, my wife's father's sister my wife and myself drinking and one from mixed in young coconut milk picked right from the tree and watching the volcano's light and light show and flow the same time being gifted with a meteor shower, a full moon and starlight. It was awesome with three of my favorite people in the world and nature at her finest, most awesome and most furious. A day or two before we left the volcano erupted by Krakatoa throwing out boulders the size of cars small earthquakes. That of course was a time when video camera ran out of batteries. The memory, the vision and sounds will always be mine. That's my Volcano story, and my Volcano eruption of 2000.
Bill Swann D.O.
I heard somewhere take care

Written by Meg
Sunday, 01 November 2009 14:40
Today is a memorial service in New York, in honor of Craig Arnold, a man I never knew. Why then do I want to honor him?

I think it is because he brushed my soul from afar. Craig was a poet and a pilgrim who was lost last summer hiking on a volcanic island in Japan. He wrote in his blog, The Volcano Pilgrim: "...thinking of Pompeii and Vesuvius, of cities and civilazations laid low by disaster, of the utter indifference of geology to humanity. The Volcano Pilgrim has dedicated the last three years to the belief that one need not shrink from the sublime. Nay, rather, one may seek it out, with a pack on your back and a stick in your hand, liberal applications of sunblock and when necessary a gas mask over your face. He recognizes that chasing this particular dragon may not strike some people as entirely healthy or balanced behavior, but the nature of that imbalance is one of the things he hopes in the course of the journey to understand."

This is a journey I am following as well, in my own quest to feel the earth's power to transform and to heal, as well as to create and to destroy. I don't claim to understand what draws me to this particular form of fire, but I know that it gives me energy and passion. As the earth reveals its heart-blood lava, I am transfixed and transformed. I acknowledge a higher power, one that is indifferent to humanity and yet is the very earth that nourishes and sustains our existence. I will spend this day remembering a soul mate I have never met.




Ancient Volcano's Devastating Effects Confirmed

A massive volcanic eruption that occurred in the distant past killed off much of central India's forests and may have pushed humans to the brink of extinction, according to a new study that adds evidence to a controversial topic.
The Toba eruption, which took place on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia about 73,000 years ago, released an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere that blanketed the skies and blocked out sunlight for six years. In the aftermath, global temperatures dropped by as much as 16 degrees centigrade (28 degrees Fahrenheit) and life on Earth plunged deeper into an ice age that lasted around 1,800 years.
In 1998, Stanley Ambrose, an anthropology professor at the University of Illinois, proposed in the Journal of Human Evolution that the effects of the Toba eruption and the Ice Age that followed could explain the apparent bottleneck in human populations that geneticists believe occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. The lack of genetic diversity among humans alive today suggests that during this time period humans came very close to becoming extinct.
To test his theory, Ambrose and his research team analyzed pollen from a marine core in the Bay of Bengal that had a layer of ash from the Toba eruption. The researchers also compared carbon isotope ratios in fossil soil taken from directly above and below the Toba ash in three locations in central India - some 3,000 miles from the volcano - to pinpoint the type of vegetation that existed at various locations and time periods.
Heavily forested regions leave carbon isotope fingerprints that are distinct from those of grasses or grassy woodlands.
The tests revealed a distinct change in the type of vegetation in India immediately after the Toba eruption. The researchers write in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology that their analysis indicates a shift to a "more open vegetation cover and reduced representation of ferns," which grow in humid conditions, all of which "would suggest significantly drier conditions in this region for at least 1,000 years after the Toba eruption."
The dryness probably also indicates a drop in temperature "because when you turn down the temperature you also turn down the rainfall," Ambrose said. "This is unambiguous evidence that Toba caused deforestation in the tropics for a long time."
He also concluded that the disaster may have forced the ancestors of modern humans to adopt new cooperative strategies for survival that eventually permitted them to replace Neanderthals and other archaic human species.
Although humans survived the event, researchers have detected increasing activity underneath a caldera at Yellowstone National Park, where some suspect another supervolcanic eruption will eventually take place. Though not expected to occur anytime soon, a Yellowstone eruption could coat half the United States in a layer of ash up to 3 feet (1 meter) deep.