Eruptions Newsletter #15 for July 11, 2025

Ok, first off, I apologize for the longer-than-expected break. I was on vacation (or mini-retirement as the media calls it now for some insane reason) and then I had some tech issues after getting an updated laptop from work. Anyway, I’m back. Here is a schedule for the newsletter for the rest of the summer: July 11-August 1 will be business as usual. August 8, no newsletter as I’ll be in New Mexico, then back to it after that.

Activity News

Rainier, Washington

I’ve talked before about how quiet the Cascade Range is, volcanically speaking. Now, I imagine for most people that is AOK. However, every once in a while, one of them reminds us that, yes, potentially active volcanoes live there.

Starting early in the morning on July 8, Rainier experienced a small earthquake swarm. All the quakes with very small — only detectable by seismometer — but numbered in the hundreds over the course of the day. The USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory issued a statement on the same day saying that the swarm likely doesn’t mean anything is brewing at Rainier, but we should keep an eye on it anyway. By July 9, the swarm had slowed and CVO said the seismicity was likely caused by “fluid flow along existing faults” and not magmatic in origin. Even so, this has become the largest ever recorded at Rainier.

I once wrote about a potential Rainier eruption from the perspective of Seattle Mariners (and Tacoma Rainiers) baseball. Needless to say, baseball would be one of the lesser worries if Rainier becomes active again. The last confirmed eruption was around 1450 CE (the Electron Mudflow), but numerous potential small explosions may have occurred in the 1800s.

Kīlauea, Hawai’i

I am beginning to feel like a record record. Kīlauea roared back with episode 27 on June 29. This bout produced what is like the tallest lava fountain so far, reaching an estimated ~1,100 feet (335 meters). Things have been quiet at the volcano since then, but the inflation of the summit along with continued earthquakes has the USGS Hawai’i Volcano Observatory thinking that episode 28 will occur on July 9 or 10.

Well, in the morning of July 9, episode 28 did indeed begin! Lava fountains reached 1,200 feet (~365 meters) and the plume from the eruption reached 20,000 feet (6 kilometers)! The impression lava fountains were preceded by some small lava flows but began to put on the real show around 4 am HST. By the end of the day, the episode was done.

Kirishima, Japan

I’ll have more about some of the volcano-adjacent stuff going on in Japan below, but the long and short is this: business as usual. Kirishima (also called Kirishimayama, but not to be confused with this guy), a complex of volcanoes north of the city of the same name in southern Japan. The most active volcano in the complex is Shinmoedake and its been producing small-to-moderate explosive eruptions for the past few weeks. Although the weather has hidden views of these eruptions, hundreds of earthquakes per day were recorded between June 23 and 26. However, a few glimpses of the activity were captured from the air.

All of this points to eruptions and magma continuing to rise into Shinmoedake. This is the first activity at the volcano since 2018, but it has 5 periods of activity since 2000. The eruptions in 2010 and 2018 were both VEI 3 — not huge but also nothing to ignore — so this new activity could result in some eye-catching explosions like those. The volcano currently sits at Level 3 (of 5) on the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s volcanic activity scale.

Now, about those rumors … (see below)

Lewotobi, Indonesia

Meanwhile, the unrest at Lewotobi in Indonesia is continuing. A new explosion sent ash as high as 17 kilometers (~55,000 feet) on July 7. This ash plume was accompanied by pyroclastic flows that reached 5 kilometers from the volcano as well. The Suomi NPP Earth observing satellite got a good shot of the ash plume as it spread eastward from the volcano.

This activity blanketed the region with a thin layer of new volcanic ash. All this ash in the air meant flights into/out of Bali were disrupted yet again. Indonesia officials have extended the exclusion zone around Lewotobi to 7 kilometers.

Volcano Person of the Week

I was planning on expanding the Volcano Word of the week to add occasional profiles of important volcanologists. Unfortunately, I was not expecting the first one to be a bit of a memorial post for one of the most influential volcano scientists of the last 50 years.

In mid-June, retired USGS scientist Wes Hildreth was killed in an automobile accident in western Nevada. He was out there still doing fieldwork near his beloved Long Valley Caldera up to his passing at the age of 86.

I can’t offer the same memorial as his colleagues from the USGS have offered — you should read it. However, I can offer some salient points about his research into volcanoes and how it has influenced my work and understanding of volcanic processes.

I study rhyolite magmatism (mostly) and without Wes’ work, I likely wouldn’t. As detailed in the USGS Memorial, his work since his Ph.D. in 1977 revolutionized how we think about silicic magmatism in continental settings like Yellowstone, the Cascades, the Andes and beyond.

One of the first and most difficult papers I read as a graduate student was his 1988 classic with Stephen Moorbath “Crustal contribution to arc magmatism in the Andes of Central Chile”. In it, they propose what they called the “MASH zone”, where magma that rises from the mantle and hits the base of the crust. It gets stuck there because basalt is too dense to rise through less denser continental crust, so that magma crystallizes, assimilates bits of the continental crust and “evolves” from basalt to andesite and dacite. This magma is now the right density to keep on rising. The MASH acronym - melting, assimilation, storage and homogenization - is now everyday parlance in volcanology and its source paper has been cited over 2,800 times!

His two papers on the growth and evolution of Mount Adams and Mount Baker in the Cascades helped shape how I think about the life of a volcano. His careful field stratigraphy and dating work (with Judy Fierstein and Martin Lanphere) helped build volume through time curves for the volcanic systems, showing how volcanoes have distinct periods of warm up, high productivity and waning across their lifetimes.

Speaking of the Cascades, likely his most important work for me was the 2007 “Quaternary Magmatism in the Cascades — Geologic Perspectives”, a USGS Special Volume (that you can download for free!) I’ve given the print edition to many of my research students so they can understand the relationships and evolution of the Cascade arc over time. The amount of information - age, composition, volume, spacing — that Wes synthesized in this volume is mind-blowing. This volume was partially responsible for my interested in studying the Tumalo Volcanic Center in Oregon as Wes pointed about the identifying the sources of the eruptions in the TVC was one of the “outstanding questions in the Cascades”.

He, along with Judy Fierstein and Andy Calvert, published an amazing map of the Three Sisters region in central Oregon — one of my absolute favorite places on Earth. This map and the accompanying report help put much of the rhyolite volcanism in the Three Sisters areas into context.

This doesn’t even touch on his work looking at the Long Valley Caldera and the potentially associated volcanism in the Mono-Inyo Chain and Mammoth Mountain in California. His paper “Volcanological perspectives on Long Valley, Mammoth Mountain, and Mono Craters: several contiguous but discrete systems” is the foundation for my field trip to Long Valley.

I could go on … but I won’t. Needless to say, he wrote a lot of great, albeit dense, papers on magmatism. I recall the joke in grad school was that someone’s next NSF proposal was to fund a sabbatical to read Wes’ new paper. This isn’t a diss as much as an acknowledgement of the depth of this work.

In some ways, Wes was a sort of academic grandfather. His wife, Gail Mahood of Stanford University, was my Ph.D. advisor’s (Anita Grunder) advisor. Not surprisingly, much of the theoretical foundations of my work at Aucanquilcha in Chile were from Wes’ work.

I didn’t cross paths with Wes often, mainly at meetings or when I would visit the USGS Volcano Science Center in Menlo Park, CA. I have very vivid memories of giving a talk about my postdoctoral work there and seeing Wes front and center. It scared the living daylights out of me at the time, but he had good questions and seemed to approve.

One time I received an unexpected package addressed to me from Wes with a copy of his volume with Judy Fierstein on the 1912 eruption of Novarupta (Katmai) in Alaska. Scrawled above the address was “Red Sox Nation” — little did I know he was from Massachusetts like me (and I still have the envelope). Sometimes it is the little things have you share with people that are fun — we were both NPS Park Rangers for a time!

Odds & Ends

Japanese Disaster Prediction is Nonsense

So, about this “manga volcanic prediction” nonsense. Supposedly Japan was to be beset with grave disaster on July 5 according to “prophetic dreams” that became a manga book by Ryo Tatsuki. In a shock to no one, there is no way to predict volcanic eruptions like this. However, the grip that these prophecies have on Chinese and other tourists is remarkable. Bookings for trips to Japan from China reported dropped 50% due to fear of Tatsuki’s prophecies.

What makes it worse is the attempts by some in the media to connect normal volcanic activity in Japan to these nonsense prophecies. Yes, Kirishima erupted on July 5. So did a number of other volcanoes in Japan. This happens all the time. There was a noticeable earthquake somewhere in Japan as well. Just like almost every day. Anyone claiming this “proves” the predictions is experiencing confirmation bias. What more, none of the activity was “devastating”. The word “small” comes more to mind. And no, Mount Fuji is not “next”

So, no, don’t change your plans to visit Japan (or anywhere) when a charlatan tries to claim some great insight into the activity of the Earth.

Don’t Play Telephone with Volcano News

In another corner of the internet, we saw some shoddy journalism take place for an Alaskan volcano. This was more a game of science telephone, where the message was garbled as it was rewritten for clicks. The NASA Earth Observatory posted an image of Iliamna, the volcano that experienced some avalanches earlier this summer producing shaking picked up by distant seismometers.

If you checked with the Alaska Volcano Observatory, they did not think those earthquakes were related to volcanism, but they needed to fix the seismometers at Iliamna before being sure. They were fixed and the volcano was officially placed on Green (background) status.

Somehow, one website took all this to mean that NASA was predicting Iliamna was about to erupt and the agency “activated an emergency alert”. So, first: NASA does not monitor volcanoes. Second: NASA does not activity emergency alerts. The headline from the Earth Observatory, “Iliamna Volcano Ready to Rumble” was taken wildly out of context. There evidence? A YouTube video by “Cosmo Academy”. Folks, don’t use YouTube to learn stuff like this unless it is a confirmed, reliable source like the US Geological Survey.

Volcano Tourism and Danger

Again, every week there seems to be news about a tourist dying on a volcano. This time it was a Brazilian influencer who fell into the crater at Rinjani in Indonesia. Unfortunately, it seems that she survived the initial fall but passed away from internal injuries later on before she could be found. The conditions were foggy at the crater making the search extremely challenging. Now, the family is claiming that they should have found her sooner.

Indonesian officials are revamping hiking rules and warnings in an attempt to improve safety for tourists at these volcanoes. Remember, even if you weren’t doing anything off-limits, volcanoes are inherently dangerous places. If you don’t have experience with hiking of difficult, steep terrain, you are putting yourself in harms’ way. When you visit them, you are taking on the risk of the location. It is a tragedy, but they happen.

Finally, you can read the harrowing account of hikers caught in the 2015 eruption of Calbuco in Chile. Even though the volcano was 130 miles (~209 kilometers) away from where the group was hiking, they were covered in volcanic ash, making it hard to see and breathe. This shows how even far away volcanoes might impact your trips to volcanically active areas.

Sounds of the Week

Most as a tribute to Wes Hildreth, here’s “Dirty Water” by the Standells. You know if you know.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment, send me a note or follow me on Bluesky (@erikklemetti.bsky.social).

Be sure to check out my podcast, 5 Minute Volcano and the Patreon page for the Eruptions Newsletter/5 Minute Volcano Podcast.