January 26th, 2012 in Daily
pay attention to the car headlights in the lower left and the still glowing boxcar sized bomb cooling on the slope
I was going through the “eruption highlights” daily video uploads from the JMA webcams pointed at Sakurajima the other day and this frame stood out to me. Now that Sakurajima is very strongly audible (some 45km away), I usually hop up to check the cameras after my apartment gets hit with the shockwave from the blasts. Most of the time you’ll be able to catch the ejected lava cooling on the well eroded slopes around the active Showa Crater. Though, with the ramped up scale of the explosive activity over the past few months, the distance some of these lava bombs are covering is huge.
At the location shown in the photo above, I know of at least one (populated!) area where you would have seen that massive chunk of lava flying in your general direction. The main ring road is not too far away either. While still “safely” up the side of the mountain, and likely within the 2km exclusion zone, I imagine it does put the residents on edge. Being well documented since the 50’s, there are many reports of ejecta making it’s way to civilization as more than a cloud of ash. Most notably the 5+ metric ton bomb which fell through the roof of a hotel straight through to the basement.
Crazy.
