This week is about as busy as it gets - finals here at Denison and I will be giving a talk on Friday at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. So, the posts might be a little scant unless something big happens. I did want to pass along this piece of news I saw this morning on Merapi in Indonesia. Dr. Masako Iguchi from the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University has been studying deformation at Indonesian volcanoes using GPS for the past two years, specifically targeting Merapi, Sinabung and Guntur. Of those three, it looks like Merapi has already entered in a cycle of inflation after the impressive (and deadly) eruptions of 2010. Sadly, the article in the Jakarta Post does not offer any sense of magnitude of the inflation, but Dr. Iguchi does say that Merapi appears to experience rapid inflation before a new eruptive cycle begins. In other Merapi news, Gadjah Mada University (UGM) and the National Space and Aviation Agency (Lapan) released images of the summit area of Merapi taken by a styrofoam drone - one of the first uses of drones to image active volcanoes that I've seen. The images from the drone that feel ~400 meters above the summit will be used to create a 3D map of the volcano. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more news on Merapi. One other thing that snuck up on me: today is this blog's fourth birthday! Eruptions started back on May 1, 2008 and I think it is still going strong. Thanks to all you readers (and commenters) for making the blog such a vibrant community - keep it up!
Image: Dharuk Man / Flickr
