Volcanoes.

November 6th. This week's lab was dedicated to learning about volcanoes utilizing the program ArcMap. We started by observing where the majority of volcanic activity occurs, which is the "Ring of Fire." The Ring of Fire is a series of volcanoes that encompasses the Pacific Ocean from New Zealand, along the coast of eastern Asia, up to Alaska, all the way down to the bottom of South America. A large amount of the world’s earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire, as well. We also saw that many of the volcanoes tend to be clumped together along the tectonic plates. This also creates a pattern of open spaces where there tend to be little-to-no volcanoes. By using this program we were also able to overview what year volcanoes occurred, where they occurred, how powerful they were (their magnitude), and the name of the volcano. This is helpful because it allows experts to know when, where, how many, and how powerful volcanoes have occurred and are occurring in a certain region. This data can assist in learning when and where future volcanoes will erupt as well as provide a good picture as to when specific earthquakes will occur. Fun facts: the most active volcano since 79 AD is Mt. Etna in Italy, which has erupted a total of 143 times since then. Also, the top 5 countries with the most volcanic eruptions are: Indonesia, Japan, the U.S., Russia, and Italy (a map of this is shown below).

After analyzing the world, we took a closer look at something more specific: Mt. Rainier. We observed what are known as lahars, which are types of mudflow or flows of debris formed of rocky debris, water and pyroclastic material. One such disaster was an eruption that occurred at Mt. Pinatubo, Philippines in 1991. A few days after the eruption, a typhoon hit the shores and washed much of the volcanic debris downslope as lahars. In terms of the Seattle metropolitan area, we found that many of its rivers run directly into the city and were the lahars tend to flow in the event of a volcanic eruption. In addition to this, major highway cross the path of the lahars. The map below shows this quite well.