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Nature is truly incredible, and its forces continue to impress us and scare us every day. Volcanic eruptions can represent the recklessness of nature and they have always been both terrifying and intriguing, but also a great object of study for scientists.
The most recent news comes from some researchers that managed to obtain some interesting information from Bogoslof’s eruption that took place in Alaska last year. Bogoslof is a volcano that is mostly underwater. One of the most fascinating things was a recording of the eruption.
Volcanic thunder
A volcanic eruption might be more similar with a storm than you would believe. The booming sound is very similar with a thunder. Researchers managed to capture this sound and now you can hear it as well. And they noticed another thing.
While they already knew about the existence of the volcanic thunder, they also discovered that their recordings had pops and cracks that took place at the same time with volcanic lighting. For those who do now know, volcanic lightings happen during eruptions, each time a lot of ash is thrown in the air. Lightings happen when the ash particles rub against each other and cause electric charge.
This is the first time the volcanic thunder was recorded, and the recordings were announced in a paper by Matt Haney, who is a seismologist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory. The paper was published in Geophysical Research Letters, and you should be also able to find the recordings here.
Decoding the recordigns
When you listen the recordings, you will notice some cracks right after the eruption sound stops. Those cracks are thunder. Ironically enough, researchers managed to record thunder by coincidence, as their microphones were set up there in order to monitor the volcanoes that existed in that region.
