Galapagos and Sub-Saharan Africa video by Greg Walsh

My friends know how much I rave about Namibia. It's the most stunning place I've ever visited, and this video by my friend and videographer Greg Walsh shows some of Namibia's most stunning landscapes. The first part covers his travels to the Galapagos, followed by footage from Amboseli National Park in Kenya, Victoria Falls on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border, Chobe National Park in Botswana, and finally Sossusvlei in Namibia (the beautiful, sandy landscape that appears at 6:30). I find the Amboseli and Sossusvlei sections the most spectacular. Enjoy!


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Travel to Mars!

This is amazing!!!  There are a few things that you should keep in mind as you watch this. First, we know more about the topography of Mars than we do Earth (our ocean floors are poorly covered). Mars is ~1/2 the diameter of Earth, has ~1/3 of the gravity, liquid water is not stable on the surface (water on Mars acts like dry ice on Earth), and surface temperatures range from nearly 70 degrees F at the equator during the day to -155 F near the poles at night (average temperature is dang cold - about -65 or so). Make sure to click the little "HD" near the bottom and choose 2K.



A FICTIVE FLIGHT ABOVE REAL MARS from Jan Fröjdman on Vimeo.

Want to see a lava lake in action?

Here's one hour of the lava lake at Kilauea compressed into 34 seconds. I took this with my GoPro at sunset in 2014. Remember, this crater is the size of the Superdome!

What Volcanologists Do - Our LiDAR research featured on BBC's VolcanoLive - Now on Youtube.

A couple of years ago, I had the good fortune of working with the fine folks at the BBC and my former student, friend, and now colleague Dave Finnegan (all of these cool LiDAR machines belong to Dave and his group at the Cold Regions Research Lab in New Hampshire) to feature our LiDAR research. We are mentioned early and show up around the 45 minute mark. This was a four night live broadcast from Hawaii to Europe, and was viewed by a couple million people. Pretty cool opportunity! Once you pull up the video, scroll down to the lower right of the video and click on the settings wheel and choose the 1080p setting so you can view it in high def. You can also find the other three episodes on youtube as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vdmKCG0f4M&t=42s

What Volcanologists Do - A LiDAR Study of the Overlook Crater and lava lake at Kilauea volcano, Hawaii

Goal of our Research : Determine how fast the Overlook Crater at Kilauea volcano is growing.

Night view of the 1/2 mile wide Halemaumau crater. The Overlook Crater is a smaller crater inside Halemaumau, and the glow you see here is from the heat of a lava lake reflecting off the plume of gas coming from the lake

Why is this important:  One of the biggest hazards associated with the lava lake are rock falls from the crater walls that land in the lake and cause explosions (Check out the video below one of these explosions!) that have shut down a popular tourist area and endanger volcanologists lives and expensive equipment.  With this project, we are able to predict how much material should fall into the crater with time, although we still can’t predict the size and timing of each rock fall event.

Some Background: Below are a couple of images showing Kilauea volcano and the location of the Overlook Crater and lava lake.  

The Big Island of Hawaii, and the active Kilauea summit.

Below is a closer view of the summit.

The Overlook Crater and lava lake sits inside Haleamaumau crater (1/2 mile wide) which sits in the Kilauea caldera (about 3 miles wide) which sits on top of the 5000' Kilauea volcano

Below is a view of the Overlook Crater and lava lake. It's an amazing place because it's a lava lake in a crater in a bigger crater in a bigger crater on a volcano!! In the picture of the Overlook Crater and lava lake below, you will see two of us working beneath the arrow. 

The Overlook Crater and lava lake. This crater is larger than a large football stadium.

You can also look at my GoPro timelapse video that I took in 2014 at sunset. I sped this video up 100x.

Below is what our LiDAR setup looks like. The photo shows my two former grad students Adam Lewinter and Amy Burzynski. LiDAR measures 250,000 topographic points a second by bouncing a laser light source off rocks. 

Adam Lewinter and Amy Burzynski, two of my former UNC graduate students, setting up the LiDAR on the edge of Halemaumau crater, looking towards the Overlook Crater.

We can scan the entire Overlook Crater in just a couple of minutes, and can measure rock surfaces more than a kilometer away. We have some new LiDARs that can measure surfaces 6 miles away.  Here is a link for a video put out by the LiDAR manufacturer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx2dEoUYEf8  - make sure you hit the settings button on the bottom right of the video and chose 1080p to watch in high def!

What did we do: We obtained LiDAR data for 13 different days from 2009 – 2013 and calculated the perimeter of the crater and the volume of rock that fell into the lake between each LiDAR scan.

What did we learn? First, we learned that the perimeter has more than doubled over our study, and the area of the crater gets bigger by ~4000m2 per year, almost exactly the size of the area within a 400 meter running track. Below is a figure of how the perimeter has changed. This allows us to predict how much material will fall into the crater each year, but not how big each rockfall will be or when.

We also could look at the exact shape of the crater, and determine if there were areas that looked unstable and that might pose additional hazards. The movie below is a fly through of Halemaumau and the Overlook crater that shows exactly what the crater looks like. The most important thing is that we found an overhang of about 20 meters. We don’t know if it will all fall into the lake at one time, or if it will break off in many pieces over time, but it is not likely to remain stable.

What Volcanologists Do - Using Artificial Intelligence to detect lava lake thermal patterns at Kilauea volcano

Goal: Since gases are so difficult to measure repeatedly (the technology is expensive, so it can't be left out for long periods of time), can we detect patterns on the lava lake that are indicative of high gas levels? If we can then we can simply look at the pattern of the lava lake and give warnings about high gas readings even when we can’t directly measure the gas levels.

Why is this important: So much gas comes off the lava lake that it has affected the health of downwind residents, forcing some to move. It would be helpful to provide warnings to downwind residents when gases are extremely high. However, gases can not yet be measured continually, but we do have cameras that run round the clock and provide views of the lake surface that could indicate high gas levels. Below you can see the gas plume (red arrow) from Kilauea blowing primarily to the southwest.

Below shows some of the patterns on the lava lake detected by thermal cameras that are permanently set up on the edge of the crater.

What did we do? We obtained several thousand thermal images of different patterns and used an artificial intelligence (AI) application called “self organizing maps” that looks for patterns in 2d data. When you have thousands of images, the human mind simply can’t process that much data. Once AI lumps similar images into categories, we look at the times for all of the images in a category and compare them to everything we can, such as gas, seismicity, tilt and see if the pattern is indicative of high levels of any of these eruption processes.

What did we find?  

We found that AI first lumped the images according to average temperature of the surface, and not the pattern. In order to isolate the pattern, we “normalized” all of our images so that they were the same average temperature while preserving the pattern. When we applied AI to the normalized images that isolated the patterns we found that the highest gas levels were indeed tied to one of the categories. This is a very useful result because we can indeed detect high gas levels by looking at lake patterns, and someday may be able to warn downwind residents of high gas levels.

Volcano of the Month - Santiaguito (Guatemala)

Santiaguito is a volcanic lava dome that has erupted from the side of Santa Maria volcano in northern Guatemala. I took this shot as a graduate student in 1988 from the summit of Santa Maria, and did some of my dissertation work here. Here is some more information on Santiaguito and Santa Maria from the Smithsonian.