GVP Weekly Volcanic Activity Report for August 17-23, 2011: Etna, Chile, Sakurajima and a lack of Indonesia

The Virginia Earthquake has had most of our attention this week, but volcanoes continue to be noisy around the world (although no more so than usual). You can get yourself caught up with a lot of the activity in this week’s Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcanic Activity Report. Some of the highlights this week include:

Italy: Over the weekend, Etna did have another paroxysm – and you can check out some of the great images of the eruption on Boris Behncke’s Flickr stream. This looks like the pattern we should expect from Etna for at least the near future, as it produced moderate strombolian eruptions from the rapidly growing southeast crater.

Chile/Argentina:Puyehue-Cordón Caulle is still going strong, with plumes that reached up to 3.7 km / 12,000 feet over the crater and drifted hundreds of kilometers downwind. The NASA Earth Observatory posted a trio of nice images of the current activity – one showing the plume drift to the northeast, one great closeup of the crater area showing the dark black new lava flows from the volcano and one showing the wide plume spreading easterly (with a lot of ash also billowing to the west).

Japan: It should be little surprise to many of you that Sakurajima has been active – it is almost always doing something. This week was especially impressive and some Eruptions readers captured some timelapse webcam footage of the activity, so be sure to check that out, along with one of the many Sakurajima webcams.

…And oddly there were no updates on activity in Indonesia. However, earlier this week the PVMGB in Indonesia warned that Papandayan was still showing signs of an impending eruption. It appears that if Papandayan does erupt, there is the potential to isolate communities on Java, so government officials are watching the volcano closely. Remember, you can check out the status of all Indonesian volcanoes here.

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Top left: Etna erupting on August 20, 2011. Image courtesy of Osservtario Etneo.