We live on the Ring of Fire. Although, it’s not really a ring…it’s more like a horseshoe. But I guess Ring of Fire sounds cooler than The Heated Horseshoe.
Basically,
this means that we have lots and lots of volcanoes. In fact, 75% of the world’s
volcanoes are found along this relatively narrow strip of the earth.
PBS did a piece on the
Ring of Fire. The first few lines read, “Alaska's frigid and remote Aleutian
island chain, the towering Andes mountains of South America, and the tropical
islands of Micronesia would seem to have little in common. In fact, these
diverse areas are all part of the most volcanically and seismically active
region on Earth, an area known as the ‘Ring of Fire.’” Apparently PBS thinks we
are frigid and remote. How rude.
If you are the curious
type and want to read more of the PBS piece, you can go to: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/savageearth/hellscrust/html/sidebar3.html
But my news (for those who
haven’t seen it on national news yet) is that we have a volcano trying to wake
up. Pavlof. Our personal village volcano is Dutton. But on the range just
behind Dutton is the Pavlof volcano—and it is spewing out steam and lava like
crazy. It’s about 20 to 25 miles away from us, so we are fine as long as we don’t
get rained on by ash. And we’ve gotten some pretty cool pictures because we can
see it from our village.
Taco (Jeremy) has been
worried about it blowing its top because that would stop all flights, and he is
supposed to fly to Anchorage on Wednesday for Youth Conference. But I’ve been
telling him that I don’t think it’ll blow—I think it’s just letting off steam.
I do that a lot, so I recognize the signs.
:-) However, it turns out I’ve
been wrong. All flights today were put on volcano hold. It is not a happy state
of affairs here. One of our teachers was supposed to fly home today, and now he
can’t get out of the village. And this may impact Taco’s Youth Conference trip.
We’ll see what happens.
Pavlof as seen from King Cove.
If you want to watch a
video of the volcano, you can pull up here or go to the links below:
This
is a video we took from King Cove looking at Pavlof. The clip is about 2 minutes long. If you can't watch it here, you can pull it up on youtube:
http://youtu.be/mvnCsp5ImYk
This
clip has a bunch of chattering and nonsense in the background (we had two of our kids in the car with us). It is less than
two minutes long. Or you can pull it up on youtube:
These are two videos we took at night. You can see the lava shooting out the side of the
mountain. I can't remember which one we put on youtube:
http://youtu.be/5VGJOsqFdsU
We also have a clip that was taken by Dave Morris, a friend of ours. It is just over 3 minutes
long. Because of its length, I am not downloading it here...but you can
go to youtube to watch it:
There's one thing you can count on living in the Bush of Alaska...life is rarely dull.
