Skip to content
Guest Thinkers

Large eruption at Karkar in Papua New Guinea?

Volcanoes don't take vacations, and Karkar in New Guinea is keeping me on my toes even in the holiday week - it might have just had an impressive eruption.


Karkar volcano as seen from space.


Eruptions reader The Bobs left a note mentioning that there may have been a ‘significant’ eruption at Karkar in Papua New Guinea. The only place I can find information is John Seach’s Volcano Live:

An eruption occurred at Karkar volcano at 6:39 pm on 25th November 2009. The eruption plume reached a height of 45,000 ft. A magnitude 5.1 earthquake hit 90 km SSE of Karkar volcano 7.5 hours before the eruption.

I don’t know too much about Karkar, but the GVP says that it is a volcanic island made of a pair of calderas, with the inner caldera formed in the last 1,500 years. Volcano Live mentions a 1997 activity at the volcano (in the form of fumarolic activity), but the GVP lists the last eruption as occurring in 1980. Most eruptions look to be fairly explosive (~VEI 2) from the pyroclastic cone in the inner caldera. Weekly volcano reports from the SI/USGS lists some fumarolic activity from the inner caldera in January 2008.

If the reports are accurate for this new activity, it could definitely be a “significant” eruption. More news as I can find it.

UPDATE 5:30PM 11/23/2009: And more information is found, over at the Volcanism Blog.

UPDATE 6:45PM 11/23/2009: This isn’t really an update as such, but I did stumble across these TOMS images of SO2 from a 1979 eruption of Karkar.


Related

Up Next