Well, what a terrible film that was. I have wanted to see this film for a while, mainly because it is located on one of my favourite places to go, Stromboli. So me and the wife spent a somewhat extortionate £12 for the DVD, set up some popcorn and a nice red and set to watching the film. Ingrid Bergman's character marries a local of Stromboli, without really knowing what it would be like when she gets there, which in the 1950s was quite a remote location! The film is all about how she tries to adapt to life on the island. Needless to say she has a miserable time throughout the whole of the film, and cries a lot. The one fantastic thing about this film is seeing what life was like on the island during the time (assuming that Rossellini portrayed it somewhat realistically), with the major employment the fishing industry, and in particular what a somewhat major eruption of the volcano may be like to experience. During all this she discovers that her husband is abusive, and when she gets pregnant tries to escape the island with the help of another good looking fisherman. Not entirely sure what happens at the end of the film, she tries to escape by going to Ginostra (via the summit) and getting a boat, but ends up collapsed on the summit of the volcano crying (again). In the end we don't know whether she commits suicide, stays on the island, or manages to leave. That pretty much sums up the whole film. On the version of the film that I bought there are several extras, including an overview of the film at the time and controversy surrounding it, involving the relationship between Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossillini, but also of a competing film called Volcano (set on Vulcano) which was also in production. This extra was probably better than the film itself! My recommendation: if you have been to Stromboli and are interested in how it may have looked 60 odd years ago, give it a go, because it certainly is fascinating. I certainly wouldn't consider this a movie classic however. I have been to Stromboli a few times now but have never really explored it properly. On my last visit we had the chance to take a boat trip (complete with pirate flag flapping in the breeze) around the island - which I really would recommend! The trip cost around 20 euros each, and lasted around 2 - 3 hours. The boat stops at a few places around the island with time to get off and explore or jump in and swim. Just watch out for jellies! Ginostra (pictured below) is a very small village which hugs the slopes of Stromboli. The main port of the island leads to San Bartolo and San Vincenzo, however, there is no way of getting to Ginostra by any other way than a smaller boat, hence the boat trip! Stepping off the boat at Ginostra onto a newly built (2004 ish) dock felt a little bit like stepping back in time by 50 years. On a 30 minute visit we managed to walk round every path, see the two or three restaurants, pop our heads into the small church, and go past the village shop. Ginostra had a slowness and peaceable nature about it, compared to the more vibrant other side of the island. Littering the slopes around this village were hordes of prickly pear plants, lemons, and olives, half finished buildings, empty buildings, and broken solar panels. A surreal visit but certainly worth the experience, Ginostra is a place I imagine would be good to recover from writers block (no distractions). A location to keep in mind for the future. Another one of the stops was at the Sciara del Fuoco. Throughout the published literature and in many of the pictures that are taken, the Sciara is one of the most prominent (picture bottom left below), however, you really don't get to see the prominence of the scar to the island until you see it up close from the seaward side. From the summit all you can really see if the upper lip. I envisage that, when the volcano erupts, the view of incandescent rocks tumbling down the ashy slope is mesmerizing. The final stop Strombolicchio was a chance to get out and do some swimming around the old volcanic conduit, which with a pair of goggles on looking down the sides of Strombolicchio it seemed to stretch into the abyss. Another fantastic thing about being on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean is the darkness! My first foray into night time photography was in the lake district, where I managed to catch a fuzzy view of the Northern Lights with an orange tinge. This time I have done a slightly better job. All in all, Stromboli is one of my favourite places to go. The dust (or I should probably say ash) has settled and I am now over a week on from passing my viva with the "most minor of minor corrections", a most relieving and pleasing result. The lead up to a PhD viva is a little bit surreal. After spending 3 years on research, going to conferences, writing papers, drinking way too much coffee (and accompanying biscuits), and finally spending 3 months writing up your work, it is a strange feeling knowing that your research is going to be critiqued and discussed in a matter of only a few hours. Of course, the examiners spend a long time looking through your work, but having 3 years of your work condensed into a 2 hour discussion barely scratches the surface! However, something I didn't realise until participating in my own viva is that it is not all about discussing every minutiae of your work. The examiners are looking for two main things when your are in your viva: (1) Did you do the work yourself? (2) Do you know what you are talking about (i.e. do you know the science behind your work)? With this in mind how do you prepare for your viva? This is something that I asked quite a few people and I came to the conclusion that it can vary dependent on the subject area you are in and your potential external examiner. Personally all I did was re-read my thesis in the couple days before. Essentially, you should have absolutely nothing to worry about if your wrote your thesis yourself and did all the research. In my case I was relatively happy I met the criteria. Although, I am sure it is probably a good idea to re-read some key papers surrounding your thesis and certainly some of the papers of your external examiner. Next step, getting an academic job which doesn't involved moving every 6 months! One of the most reliable volcanoes for regular activity, was, well, being rather unreliable last week. For remote sensors who are there for just 3 days at the summit, this was most frustrating. On the first day the explosions were small, with 5 occurring in the space of around 4 hours. While on the next two days, one day we couldn't measure at all, and in total we maybe heard 4 explosions in 8 hours. It was relatively difficult to see whether explosions had occurred (i.e. the presence of ash emissions and visible ejectiles) because of the poor measurement conditions. All of this is visible in the pictures below. It was also incredible to see how much the summit had changed since my last visit in 2003. The activity of 2014 (see global volcanism program or INGV reports) has really had a marked visual effect on the summit area. Stromboli is a very hot location to work in the month of July, as such, the morning climb was made bright and early at 5 am. Even so the morning sun begins to heat the morning air rapidly, needless to say, by the end of the 2.5 - 3 hour climb, a change of shirt was necessary! However, this does make for some fantastic morning views during sunrise (see photos below). On the last night we ate at the Osservatorio Pizzeria, a fantastic restaurant with great views of the craters at night - lo and behold we saw 8 explosions in 2 hours! Given the low activity observed at the summit and lack of incandescent material I neglected to bring my camera and telescopic lens, a decision which I now rue. It could of course be that we just couldn't see or hear these explosions at the summit or the volcano was toying with us! I also had my first opportunity to travel around the island on one of the many boat tours to see the Sciara del Fuoco (the large scar on the side of the volcano) and visit Strombolicchio and Ginostra. Experiences I will blog about soon. For the meantime, this trip reiterated the unpredictability and the ability of a volcano to present, what I would describe in a human, as moods. Way back in July 2012, three months before the official start of my PhD a research trip to Etna (see my previous post - caddying for the discovery channel) resulted in the rather fortuitous measurement of some strombolian activity in the Bocca Nuova crater of Etna. More than two years later we have published the results of the research. Using UV (ultra-violet) cameras we managed to get a short period of measurements of sulphur dioxide flux from the vent pictured in the photo on the right. Apart from estimating the mass of explosive events we also noticed an interesting trend in the data. The observed trend suggested that for larger massed explosions there was a longer delay before any explosion could occur and that smaller explosions could occur in quicker succession. For full details and the graph I refer you to the paper. It is in the process of being upgraded to full open access (or should be anyway...) so you may or may not be able to view without an institutional login! One of the questions we try to address in this paper is why this pattern/trend is observed. Among the potential explanations one that stood out in particular was related to the behaviour of gas slugs. In the paper, we show that given the estimated masses of the explosions, we can reasonably assume that the gas rising in the conduit is doing so in slug form. In the video below on the left is a happy slug rising in a conduit on its own. In this situation the base of the gas slug rises at a constant speed as the nose accelerates towards the surface prior to burst. In the video below on the right, we have two slugs rising (video is horizontal to fit more of the process in) one behind the other. As a slug rises it creates a sort of area of influence (interaction length) behind it which allows the whole of the trailing slug (including the usually constant velocity slug base) to accelerate. This then enhances the chance of coalescence between slugs which is rapid as the slug enters into the wake of the leading slug. This process is illustrated in the video on the right. So how does this create a trend involving larger massed explosions and longer wait times? Well, if larger slugs are formed by coalescence then they will have, in essence, gobbled up a number of trailing slugs to get to that size, ergo a larger slug will cause a longer delay before another explosion can occur! Again, we can't categorically rule out other ideas or hypothesis given the inherently unviewable nature of the interior of a magmatic conduit!
Of course the paper only describes the activity we witnessed and measured during this period in July 2012. For a brief spoken summary of the paper in an AudioSlides presentation, click here. Please see the references on the paper for further information.
The city of Rome is filled with some of the worlds most fantastic art by equally some of the most famous artists: Da Vinci, Bernini, Michealangelo...the list goes on! Many of these are contained within the catholic churches in the city of Rome. Many are also contained in the Vatican Museums, of which, I had not read anything about before visiting. The Gallery of Maps was a complete and welcome surprise. The Gallery of Maps is a long corridor covered from top to bottom with frescoes of the Italian area. The maps were created between 1580-1585 by an Ignazio Danti and by and large they show a relatively accurate representation. Of course any map of the region wouldn't be complete without the volcanoes, which are, of course, duly depicted! But are these volcanoes depicted accurately? Etna, a frequent topic of my blog, and an integral part of my research is shown quite clearly (image above), although not in enough detail to make out the individual craters, merely that it is an exploding mountain! It is logical to assume that all volcanoes with fire or smoke coming from the summit (as in Vesuvius, not pictured here) are active or have been known to be active in the past. A large portion of the gallery was covered with scaffolding. However, visible were two other map portions containing volcanoes - both depicting the Aeolian Islands (pictured at bottom and to the right). The pictures to the right are taken from a section of the map which looks at only Sicily and surrounding islands. The picture below is a broader overall picture of the region. In the bottom picture we see two volcanically active islands Vulcano and Stromboli (Strongule on the map). Data from the global volcanism program suggests, see Vulcano page here, that there were events around that period, and it is also reasonable to assume that the crater terrace area would be similarly active with fumaroles as it is today. It is also comforting to see that Stromboli is also depicted as active. Stromboli has been throughout the centuries as active in a similar form to that seen today. The paintings in the middle show Vulcano on the right and a location called Felicur on the left. What is this Felicur? It doesn't match the previous (latin) names of Stromboli, could it be Filicudi? If so, one look into the history of Filicudi suggests it hasn't erupted for 1000s of years. So perhaps the painter got the name wrong and it is actually Stromboli. Or am I missing something obvious? Please point it our if I am! It's position on the overall map does suggest that it is not Stromboli (see image at start of the blog post), as it is in generally the wrong position (which one can simply work out with Google Maps). Vulcano is also painted as larger than Lipari - which is certainly not the case in reality. Wondering through this gallery highlights the importance of artwork to tell us about the state and behaviour of volcanoes, and of course mapping, although, caution should always be taken as we don't necessarily know what the artist painted was true or representative! Besides all this, the maps really were and are fantastic. Another year and anther EGU has come and gone in the wonderful city of Vienna. It was an early start on the Monday morning with two posters to present in the evening. Up they went and off I go to the rest of the days sessions, brimful with interesting insights based on remote sensing of volcanic gases from as far south as Erebus. On returning to my posters at 1 pm, I noticed that one of them had disappeared! Was this academic sabotage? Definitely not. Apparently the poster had probably fallen off the board (beware fabric posters!) and the cleaners "cleaned it away"...a look in the conference bins (with the help of the helpers) proved fruitless. Much kudos has to go to staff at the printer poster service and the helpdesk for swiftly printing another one in time for the evening poster session! Wednesday saw the finish of the Volcano Monitoring Using Instrument Networks session and a couple interesting presentations on the recent lava flow activity at Stromboli in the latter half of Summer 2014. On previous occasions, paroxysms at Stromboli have followed on from these lava flow events, however, on this occasion this was not the case - demonstrating the need to monitor these systems and detail and the variability and unpredictability of volcanic systems! Measurements of CO2 flux and gas ratios provided interesting insights into why a paroxysm may not have developed on this occasion (presentation given by Aiuppa). Before this Tamburello discussed the intriguing possibility of using changes active degassing (strombolian eruptions/puffing) to passive degassing ratios to investigate the state of the system at Stromboli. Wednesday also saw the start of a session dedicated to the recent Bardabunga and Holuhraun activity. This was a fascinating session, purely because much of the science was shiny new. A large portion of the presentations were dedicated to calculating gas emissions from the fissure activity at Holuhraun. These demonstrated that SO2 was injected at incredible rates of ~ 1000 to 4000 kg per second during the early stages of the eruption (in presentation given by Barsotti). When you consider that a quiescent Etna can release around 2 to 10 kg per second (the exact figures escape me) this is a huge difference and is a very important aspect in determining the style of observed activity. A BBC article on Bardarbunga was quickly written after the session and touches on the importance of these events to the UK. Time to do some sight-seeing. Four years ago today I embarked into the world of online blogging, the topic, volcanoes. Since then, I have finished a masters at Lancaster, spent a year in the real world of work and started a PhD, which incidentally, is nearing completion. Along the way, I have blogged about volcanic trips to Etna, Vulcano and Stromboli; conferences in Japan (including a fortuitous eruption of Sakurajima!), Vienna, San Francisco, Edinburgh and Norwich. What a few years it has been! Of course, any blog scientific blog wouldn't be complete without discussion of my own research and a little bit of fun - impressions of David Attenborough and exploding duck bins - the latter courtesy of the VMSG conference in Edinburgh. A lot of this couldn't have been possible without a number of people (who know who they are!). Blogging has certainly been easier with a lot to write about. Over the past four years I have gained inspiration on blogging topics from my own work and experiences, to the thoughts of fellow online bloggers. One thing is for sure I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging, being involved in the volcanic community and the opportunity to take part in adding to research in the field. Here's to many more years of blogging to come (and hopefully a job at some point...). A recent period of unrest at Villarica developed spectacularly on the morning of the 3rd of March with a transition to lava fountaining. This eruptive episode has been covered extensively in the media because of the fantastic display and successful evacuation of nearby residents. Usually, Villarica has a relatively stable lava lake at the summit, with occasional mild strombolian activity. Occasionally, the volcano sees more vigorous periods of activity, such as that which occurred on the 3rd of March. One of the major questions surrounding all volcanic activity is: what controls the transitions between different styles of activity? This applies both on longer timescales of years to decades and even centuries but also on shorter ones of seconds to minutes and hours. The latter consideration is my particular area of interest. In a video of activity leading up to the main lava fountain (see video half way down the page), we can see that smaller strombolian like explosions seem to increase in frequency and vigor leading up to the lava fountain (indeed patterns have been noticed in strombolian activity at Etna - a shameless plug of some of my own work). Could this pattern be analysed to predict the occurrence of a lava fountain before it occurs? How could we do this? The answer lies in monitoring gas emissions - a difficult task at night and during more ash rich eruptions! The transition between strombolian type activity and Hawaiian occurs when magma rise speed is high enough such that it prevents the coalescence of bubbles (which are rising at a slower rate than the magma) which drive strombolian style activity when bubbles grow to a large enough size(see this paper by Parfitt and Wilson). Here I am, writing this blog post, after an extremely busy Christmas period involving AGU, a holiday in Colorado and the VMSG conference in Norwich. In my last post (Sightseeing in San Francisco before AGU) I blogged about some sightseeing I did involving visits to Muir Woods and the Golden Gate Bridge. In this post I said that Alcatraz really didn't look that far away, insinuating that it really should have been easy! It turns out, however, that the tides are so strong it would take a miracle to time the crossing correctly. Indeed, there was a group who presented at AGU, who modelled the flow conditions on the night of the infamous escape and concluded there was a very small time window to enable successful escape! A summary news article can be found here. Anyhow, I managed to get a bit more sightseeing done in San Francisco, including a group of noisy seals at Pier 39, a submarine (a common theme from my overseas conference visits - and all by mistake!), and a closer view of Alcatraz (all in the pictures below). AGU is certainly one of the biggest conferences I have been to so far and my first in North America. The poster halls (above) were of very grand proportions. I certainly enjoyed the afternoon poster sessions along with beer on tap which really made going round and discussing peoples work a relaxing and productive experience. The exhibit hall was also present at a significant scale, with companies such as NASA and Google giving demonstrations of their available technology and techniques. There was even a full-size model of a shuttle type craft, but I cannot recall the model - maybe shuttlex. I gave my presentation on the Wednesday at the conference, and for those young researchers and students who have given a presentation at EGU/AGU (or any conference really) before will know that the nerves can build up a bit! AGU is certainly one of the most tiring conferences I have been too as it is pretty full on for 5 days but something I have learnt from previous conferences is that you don't have to go to everything! In fact, you can be much more productive if you don't, it's important to set aside time to reflect on what you have heard or follow-up on any new connections. After a thoroughly relaxing break, it was straight to VMSG in Norwich for a much smaller but equally valuable conference. Indeed, these conferences can sometimes be more valuable, especially if the conference is of a relevant theme. I must admit I was a little skeptical of a conference in Norwich, mainly because of the reputation the city has within the UK! However, it was a very well-organised event in a unique venue. Although, for some inexplicable reason the vast majority of restaurants and pubs seemed to be shut on the Monday - importantly the Belgian Monk pub which was reputed to serve good food and even better Belgian beers, oh well, till the next time. Instead we found a very nice vegetarian curry place. The conference dinner this year was at Norwich City FCs football ground, Carrow Rd, and it was certainly a very cool location for a dinner - although I was a little disappointed that Delia herself didn't come out of the kitchen gesticulating her scarf around shouting "let's be 'aving you!". 2015 means one thing for me at the moment, I am currently 3 months into my third year as a PhD student, which means I only have 9 months left to write my thesis, I guess I should get writing sometime soon then... |
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