Dusk Through Narrow Streets

Alaska’s kind of famous for its earthquakes–I imagine the one in ‘64 is relatively familiar to people, if nowhere near as much as, say, any in San Francisco because California is the center of the universe–but I’m not sure how many people connect the plate-tectonic activity we get with earthquakes to the same kind of thing that results in volcanoes. We are part of the Ring of Fire, after all:

So there you go, we get earthquakes and volcanoes. Active ones, particularly out in the Aleutians. Not the sorts of fun, dramatic volcanoes you see in Hawaii (well, in pictures from the 1980s when Pu’u O’o was actually doing things, now it’s more like a trickle into the ocean) with lava fountaining into the air, and thankfully not the sort you hear about every now and then on Montserrat that’s sending pyroclastic flows down onto another village. But we do get plenty of ash from our volcanoes, when they go off, and the current thing is that Mt. Redoubt is gearing up for a good eruption. We’re not talking a Mt. St. Helens-type problem here, but Redoubt’s just across Cook Inlet from Anchorage, so we’d be getting lots of ash while towns like Kenai would get even more. UAA’s been sending out e-mails asking faculty and staff to cover their computers at the end of the day, and people have been doing that where I work; we’ve been doing it at home, even. We’ve got no idea when the thing’s going to go off, but when it does, the ash will be so fine it’ll get in pretty much everywhere. Which reminds me, I should really check to see if I’ve got an extra air filter for my car and some medical masks in the trunk. The last time Mt. Redoubt blew its top, we had smoke and ash disrupting air traffic for five months, plus enormous amounts of dirty snow, apparently (it was in Dec. 1989, so I was maybe three and don’t remember).

To be honest, though, I think the whole thing’s kind of funny–not because I’m not taking it seriously, but because, I mean, you don’t ordinarily associate volcanoes with Alaska, especially not when the main weather problems I’ve kvetched about have involved insanely cold temps and too much snow. Also because a look at Google News shows that Mt. Redoubt’s showing up in the LA Times and the Boston Herald and all kinds of things–heck, there’s even a place in Austria reporting on it. And I do think that’s amusing, because nobody really gives a crap about Alaska unless there’s oil involved–or if we’ve got a volcano about to go off. Then everyone’s interested.

Personally? I’m really hoping for a volcano day off school.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS