Dramatic Pics of Chile’s Volcano Eruption

Last Wednesday, June 1, 2011, a forceful 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck Chile off the country’s south-central Pacific coast.

The same area was badly damaged in a major 8.8 magnitude quake that struck Chile on 27 February 2010, which was followed by a tsunami that devastated coastal communities. The 2010 disaster – the 6th largest earthquake on record since 1900 — killed 524 people, left 220,000 homeless and caused an estimated $30 billion in damage. [Source]

5 days after last Wednesday’s quake, on June 6, 2011, a Chilean volcano erupted for the first time in 50 years. Ash was thrown 6 miles up into the sky and some 3,500 residents were evacuated.

Chile has a chain of about 2,000 volcanoes, which is the world’s second largest volcanic chain after Indonesia. Some 50 to 60 of Chile’s volcanoes are on record as having erupted, and 500 are potentially active. [Source]

Here are some dramatic pics of the volcanic eruption:

Photo sources: Daily Mail; Terra.

Hmm. Since when do volcanoes erupt in a nuke-bomb-style mushroom cloud?

Here’s another pic, taken by market analyst Clive Maund several hours after the volcano had erupted. You can see more of Maund’s volcano pics here.

Update: Wikipedia says any very large explosion, not just an atomic bomb, can produce mushroom clouds:

“A mushroom cloud is a distinctive pyrocumulus mushroom-shaped cloud of condensed water vapor or debris resulting from a very large explosion. They are most commonly associated with nuclear explosions, but any sufficiently large blast will produce the same sort of effect. They can be caused by powerful conventional weapons like the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb. Volcano eruptions and impact events can produce natural mushroom clouds.“

~Eowyn

As Americans Worry About Nuclear Fallout From Japan, Where’s Obama’s Energy Czar?

The Obama administration grows stranger by the day. It has become a “Where’s Waldo?” administration.

The disaster in Japan goes from bad to worse to worser every day. Entire villages and towns have been demolished by the 9.1 earthquake and the 32-ft tsunami. Thousands are reported dead, with more thousands missing. Radiation is leaking from explosions of several units in the Fukushima nuclear plant. There is human suffering on a scale unprecedented since World War II.

What is Obama’s reaction? A strangely affect-less statement, read from a prepared script (that someone else wrote for him), displaying not a whiff of emotion, even less of anguished empathy:

Empathy — the ability to put ourselves in someone’s shoes and feel the emotions they’re feeling — is what makes us human. Psychologists have found that sociopaths/psychopaths (now called by the PC name of “anti-social personality disorder”) lack empathy. I worry about a person who does not have empathy, especially if this individual is president, commander-in-chief, and the most powerful man in the world.

But Obama had no problem showing plenty of affect as he yucks it up at the Gridiron dinner. Well, at least he’s being consistent. As oil spewed from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico last year, Obama also yucked it up at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. 

That’s what we get for electing a joker to the White House.

Now, with radiation leaking from Japan’s exploded nuclear reactors and rising concerns of an imminent core meltdown, Americans are more and more worried that the radiation will be carried by the jet stream to the U.S. west coast. The MSM are scrambling around, consulting this nuclear expert and that nuclear scientist….

Amidst this confusing mess of fears and uncertainty, the man who should know is strangely Missing In Action.

Where's Waldo?

That man is Secretary of Energy, physicist Dr. Steven Chu, the winner of a 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics and a vocal supporter of nuclear energy. Chu is an advocate for more research into alternative energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming. As Iain Murray wrote in “Japan’s Nuclear Crisis. Where Is Steven Chu?,” March 14, 2011: (h/t my friend Sol)

He has the authority and the credibility to be all over our airwaves and the Internet telling Americans that their nuclear installations are safe and this terrible but extraordinary incident is no reason to slow down our move to speed up new nuclear construction. Yet he is absent without trace.

Americans expect leadership from their leaders. Chu has the track record to provide it in this case, yet he is failing to do so. If he is being hamstrung by special-interest pressure within the administration, one would expect that to be a resigning matter. I fear it is more likely that he has succumbed to pressure from his erstwhile allies, the greens, and is simply displaying a lack of backbone.

Yet he should consider what this means for his own plans. The administration’s energy plan, based on the EPA’s draconian regulations against greenhouse gas emitters, depends on a hundred new nuclear power plants being built. The administration knows that that powering America by wind and solar energy is as likely as extracting sunlight from cucumbers, which is why nuclear figures so heavily in the plan. If that option is now off the table — and the Left has been so successful in its opportunistic framing of this issue that it might well be — then there is a massive gap in the plan that can only be filled by coal or natural gas. Secretary Chu will be forced to argue that, if there is a nuclear ban, then the EPA’s beloved greenhouse-gas regulations will also have to be taken off the table. This is a circle that simply cannot be squared.

Again, it is up to Steven Chu to provide leadership here. It is his job to be realistic about America’s energy needs. If he fails to perform his duty, the American people must demand someone who is up to the job.

~Eowyn