NASA got an amazing opportunity to snap photos of an erupting volcano from the International Space Station. The Raikoke Volcano on Russia’s Kuril Islands, which last exploded in 1924, suddenly let out a giant plume of ash and gas from its 700-meter crater.
A dramatic photo released by NASA shows the volcano’s plume shooting up over the cloud. Astronauts were able to take pictures of the narrow column of the plume as it rose and expanded over an area called the umbrella region.
“Astronauts shot a photograph (above) of the volcanic plume rising in a narrow column and then spreading out in a part of the plume known as the umbrella region,” said NASA Earth Observatory in a statement.
As Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Tech explained about the picture below – “The ring of white puffy clouds at the base of the column might be a sign of ambient air being drawn into the column and the condensation of water vapor. Or it could be a rising plume from interaction between magma and seawater because Raikoke is a small island and flows likely entered the water.”
Raikoke is part of the Kuril Islands, an archipelago that stretches between Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Japan’s Hokkaido.
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