There is a volcano outside my hometown, looking very rumbly and explody, (very scientific geomorphologic terms there) and people are all upset and nervy about it.
So what I'm wondering is if my blase attitude is a result of too much geo knowledge or like, overly chill nihilism. Because I read an article about common questions and concerns and the whole thing came off as vaguely funny to me. It was just increasingly breathless far fetched excuses for panic, like, 'is this eruption gonna be as bad as it mt st Helen's?' And the answer is no, that's a different mountain with different composition and different magma structures and also the only other volcano you've ever heard of. It's not gonna be like Vesuvius and Pompeii either. And it's not gonna be like a Hawaiian volcano. Or Yellowstone. Those are different. It will be very similar to the volcanos on either side of it, which have both gone off several times in recent memory. This isn't a new thing.
The mountain will either go off or not and there is nothing you can do about it. It will impact air quality and not much else. It's its real bad it might shut down the airport. (Which is actually pretty bad, it's the 2nd largest cargo hub in the states) There's nothing you can do about that either.
Sometimes you gotta weather the storm and fussing over drizzle just gets annoying.
It's interesting looking at the ash modeling day-to-day, and it says a lot about the likely eruption when the impacts are measured in "disruptive ashfall" and "perceptible ashfall." (Oooh, it's a disaster! If you look at the shiny hood of your car you'll see... the faint haze of ash dusted over it!). Some days it's projected to make no landfall on the east side of the inlet, depending on the wind, the duration of the eruption, and what altitude it reaches.
We've got our family relic coffee can of the '92 Spurr eruption. Yeah, an eighth of an inch landed on Anchorage and shut down the airport for 20 hours. Yeah, it's bad for drains and you can scratch the hell out of your windshield and other surfaces if you don't clean things up right. But we're not looking at Kodiak, who still get ash re-suspension warnings for Katmai-Novarupta (1912) and no one's built on Spurr the way they did for St Helens or Vesuvius. Lahars and pyroclastic flows just... don't go that far from the vents.
