El Hierro eruption

[Janet]

oh bollocks ... that doesn't work ...

they must have the right local times.

As you were 

[Michael]

Do you think i'm watching from a safe enough distance? 

[Nova]

Do you think i'm watching from a safe enough distance? 

This is El Hierro, not Yellowstone 

[Janet]

After a relatively quiet day yesterday, overnight there were two Richter 4 quakes, a 4.4 at 2.45am followed around an hour later by a 4.2 at 3.40.

[Janet]

I don't know who's been aware of, or following, the competition to find NASA's best photo of the earth from space, but the above photo of the La Restinga eruption last year has just won! Not just won, but when it got to the final two against the breaking of Pine Island glacier in Antarctica, it got 91% of the vote! The competition has had five phases each with internet voting week to week on a total of 32 staggering photos for the best image of 2012. The authorities in El Hierro, of course, hope that it will bring some much needed tourism promotion for the island, particularly in view of the recent activity which they fear might have put people off visiting. The latest crisis seems to have died away as quickly as it bubbled up, and will no doubt do so again at some point. I hope this picture will do some sterling work for the island in the meantime! JA

[Janet]

As this crisis appears to die away, Pevolca has said that although there are still some abnormal values, they are lowering the alert level from yellow to green. All roads that were closed have been reopened. Until the next time ...

[Janet]

Maybe it's too soon to say it's over. An earthquake of 4.1 on the Richter scale which was felt by the public was registered on El Hierro at 3.26pm in the sea to the west of Frontera at a depth of 19km. Nonetheless, only three tremors have been registered today, two of them with magnitudes of between 2.5 and 2.8.

[minesadorada]

Most of the magma intrusion is > 10km.

I would become alarmed if it was < 1km.

[Janet]

There has been ongoing rumbling throughout, but over the last few days it has increased noticeably. It's all still low level, with "weak" tremors, albeit lots of them, but real information is hard to come by: experts say that official graphs are "useless" because "amplitude of the events has been scaled back so strongly that even an earthquake is hard to see. This kind of behavior of the authorities was in earlier times reserved for some dictatorship states who did not want to get bad news´outside the country." Something nonetheless seems to be building up again. JA

[Janet]

There have been continuous tremors over the past month or so since the last update below, but they've all been quite low level, just rumbling away. Yesterday, however, just before 1.30pm, there was a 2.5 magnitude earthquake at a depth of 11km right under the centre of the island. It was felt by some of the public. JA