Tourists in Taal Volcano's crater witnessed start of eruption

[Stevo]

https://youtu.be/7zaQCIxJtG0

Edit: video with some more footage of the aborted trip: https://youtu.be/gdIFWoLH7gU

Luckily, it began slowly, and their guides recognized the increasing steam venting as a "GET OUT NOW!" warning, unlike what probably happened at White Island a few weeks ago. Our MX Guide, JayM, lives in the Philippines, but I gather isn't that close to the volcano. As of today, there are many quakes and fissures opening up around the main Lake Taal, indicating a lot of magma intruding into the system...

[Jerry3904]

That's am amazing video--those people are very lucky.

[JayM]

I'm around 500km. from there. The first I even heard of the eruption was this topic. :)

[Stevo]

Well, I'm sure you have other, closer, volcanoes than you can worry about, though Taal is a very nasty and unpredictable customer. That "Volcano Island" they fled from in Lake Taal is just a minor part of the Taal caldera system, though most historical activity has occurred there. Lake Taal actually fills the 15 x 30 km Taal Caldera, which has had huge eruptions in not-too-distant geologic past that buried the site of present day Manila under red hot volcanic ash flows. If that happened today, it would kill many millions, but currently the caldera system is erupting instead of being plugged and thus building up pressure.

[Stevo]

Drone footage shows that the crater lake they were heading for is either gone or nearly so, with most of the rest of the island heavily covered with ash: https://mobile.twitter.com/raffytima/st ... 1251970050

[JayM]

There aren't any volcanoes in my province, nor known earthquake faults, and we only get a typhoon here once every ten years or so on average (though that may change thanks to the global climate getting warmer.) 2013 wasn't a very good year though: we had a pretty strong temblor in October followed by a category 5 super-typhoon three weeks later. No damage at our place from either one, though the typhoon knocked a neighbor's outhouse over.

[jeffreyC]

If you live in the US and want to scare yourself take a look at the Yellowstone supervolcano, two thirds of the National Park is in the caldera. It erupts about every 600,000 years and the last time was around 640,000 years ago.

[Stevo]

Geologists don't worry that much about Yellowstone at the moment--its last minor eruption was over 70,000 years ago, and the hot spot has moved out of the thinner crust in the west and is now having to chew through the much thicker crust in the North American craton. Ignore what the Daily Fail and the like print about that. There are a lot of "supervolcanoes" around the world that are much more restless and scary, including some that are almost unknown in the Andes, the ones in New Zealand, or the one right next to Naples.

[Adrian]

Video not available... maybe somebody put it on lbry.tv?

[Richard]

Looks like YouTube took down the video from the original post #1?