Ring of Fire

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:

http://youtu.be/I2nRgsFlbLw

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:

http://youtu.be/E_nmmCpYajY

There's one thing you can count on living in the Bush of Alaska...life is rarely dull.