Eruptions in Indonesia and Costa Rica

For all of you going into withdrawal now that Eyjafjallajökull seems to have quieted down, there are two eruptions of note that aren’t in the North Atlantic:

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nUndated image of the Barujari cone at Mt. Rinjani in Indonesia.

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• Arenal in Costa Rica – which is almost always sputtering away – had a more significant explosive and effusive event today. The volcano produced enough ash, bombs and gas emissions – along with 8 lava flows (or avalanches, depending on the source) – to prompt the evacuation of the National Park around the volcano. Arenal has had numerous strombolian eruptions over the last 42 years since a VEI 3 eruption in 1968 that killed 89 people.

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• Around the world in Indonesia, Barujari, part of the larger Rinjani volcano, had another explosive event, producing a ~2 km / 5,000 foot ash plume that covered nearby farm fields with ash and (apparently) ejected lava (as bombs) a few thousand meters. There have also been lava flows that have entered the caldera lake at Rinjani. The active part of the volcano is a scoria cone (Barujari) inside the caldera and it is this cone that have been erupting off-and-on since the fall of 2009. However, the current eruption has not been large enough to prompt evacuations of people living near the volcano.

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• And finally, for those of you desperate for a last gasp (for now) of Eyjafjallajökull, here is a nice EO-1 image of the May 22 explosive eruption, brought to you by the NASA Earth Observatory.