Article#494 - Pyrocumulus

The ultimate reason behind the generation of this particular post is simple: I was awestruck by the picture of Etna (upper) I found while I was doing my daily activity. (When I said "activity", in reality I refer to my daily schedule of rolling and whatnot on the bed as if there's no tomorrow, but it is not up for discussion here.) Granted, I have been strolling around photos of volcanic eruptions from years to years. But it seems that as time progress, either volcanic eruptions become more photogenic, or daredevil photographers had enough of its time to hone their skills to perfection. Well, technically nothing was perfect, but it seems that this particular photo was more than enough to help Etna build its own monument of volcanological honour.

Ultimately, a single post dedicated to an eruption column would be so blatant that it can be considered a form of worshipping. Therefore, I reckon that it would be a nice gesture to introduce another eruption column—which, albeit is different enough to be distinguishable, is still worthy of its own might. So there it was, Calbuco (lower), which precedes the eruption of Etna by about 7 months.

I didn't manage to find another display-worthy eruption column from this year's eruptions to be put into this exhibition, so I'll leave you guys up with these fellows. Enjoy while it lasts. Gosh, of course I 'm not talking about the eruption.

It has been a while since the last posts bragging about any sort of volcanological expertise in this web log. So, to spice things up, I let a nice chunk of etymological approach to end this post: while many of us will easily draw the lines connecting the term pyrocumulus to the somewhat more infamous pyroclastic flow (which, then again, scientifically is a pyroclastic density current) due to the pyro- prefix, the term simply comes from the bilingual compound of Greek pyro ("fire") and Latin cumulo ("heap" or "pile"; subsequently used to refer to "cloud"). Which translates to "fire cloud", and yeah, it means any kind of fire, not exclusively of volcanic origin.

But they look awesome, though. I won't argue on that.

So see you on the next posts, perhaps.
Cheers!