Geobulletin alpha

Deadly Mount Sinabung eruption, May 21, 2016 

Sinabung as viewed from the east.Photo by Tom Casadevall, U.S.G.S., 1987Mount Sinabung in the North Sumatra province of Indonesia, erupted on Saturday killing seven people in a village.  The village, Gembar, is one of four villages inside a 2.5 mile danger zone from which 5,000 residents were evacuated at the time. Villagers still enter the zone intermittently to tend to property. A video showing parts of the eruption and its ashy aftermath is available from The Guardian here.    [...]

Drunk on Geology - Black Butte Porter 

The next up in our Drunk on Geology series is Black Butte Porter from Deschutes Brewery out of Bend, OR. (Also home to the Obsidian Stout and the Inversion IPA)Although "butte" is a generic geological term for an isolated mountain jutting out of the landscape (dictionary.com), Black Butte is a specific mountain located within Oregon.Location of Black Butte, Oregon.Here is the geology of Black Butte from the Oregon.com webpage:As you drive toward the flats of [...]

Quake Activity Detected At Inskip Hill 

About 20-25 miles WSW of Lassen Volcanic Center in Northern California lies a little known volcanic hill called Inskip. This is a Pleistocene volcanic cone complex which has had exactly no volcanic activity in historical time. Recently I have begun seeing some small quakes occur directly beneath it at a depth of about 3km, one of which occurred today at a magnitude of 2.2. This is probably nothing but it is always important to be vigilant when it comes to long dormant or presumably extinct [...]

Ubehebe Crater: Possibly Younger but No Imminent Danger of an Eruption 

Making the rounds today is news about new ages for Ubehebe Crater in the northern end of Death Valley. The small crater is part of a cluster of scoria cones and tuff cones that are mainly basaltic to basaltic andesite in composition – not a big candidate for an explosive eruption. However, the eruptive products

Oregon Trip Day 7: A Volcano Observatory 

Photo from Windy Point: I'm standing next to 50,000 year old basaltic andesite from Black Crater (foreground, age approximate), looking across a 2,900 Ma basaltic andesite flow from Little Belknap (dark flows beyond the foreground trees), at the snow-capped peak of the 300,000- to 35,000-year-old Mt. Jefferson stratovolcano (Windy Point location, MSRMaps).(If you don't know what observatory

Thesis Defense - Fall 2009 - Michelle Dooley 

Geologic Mapping and Petrochemical Stratigraphy of Southern Warner Valley, Southern Oregon, USA Michelle DooleyM.S. CandidateDepartment of Geological SciencesSan Diego State UniversityAdvisor Dr. Vic Camp ABSTRACTThe tectonomagmatic evolution of the northwestern margin of the Basin and Range Province is well expressed by the mafic-to-intermediate-to-silicic volcanic stratigraphy and structure of the south Warner Valley in southern Oregon. The Warner Valley, a north-south trending Basin-Range [...]