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Indonesia's Mt Merapi erupts, spewing ash 6 km high:
Indonesia's Mount Merapi, one of the world's most active volcanoes, erupted twice on Sunday, sending clouds of grey ash 6,000 metres into the sky, the country's geological agency said.
The two eruptions lasted around seven minutes, according to the agency, and prompted local authorities to order residents to stay outside a three-kilometre no-go zone around the rumbling crater near Indonesia's cultural capital Yogyakarta.
The volcano had a similarly-large eruption on February 13 of this year. Eruptions there are not uncommon but it is dangerous to drop one's guard:
Mount Merapi's last major eruption in 2010 killed more than 300 people and forced the evacuation of some 280,000 residents.
It was Merapi's most powerful eruption since 1930, which killed around 1,300 people, while another explosion in 1994 took about 60 lives.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:53AM
If the ash plume only reached 6 km high, it almost certainly did not reach beyond the troposphere. It's not clear if the 6 km is the extent of the plume above the almost 3 km height of the volcano. Even so, 9 km is generally below the tropopause, especially in tropical regions. For comparison, Mt. St. Helens had an ash plume that was 22-23 km high, which extends well into the stratosphere. Temperatures rise with height in the stratosphere, which has the effect of inhibiting ascent in pyrocumulus clouds. This is good news because smaller ash plumes that don't reach high into the atmosphere should spread ash over a much smaller area and be less of a hazard to aircraft flying in the region. It's certainly dangerous for the region right around the volcano, but thankfully this isn't a particularly large ash plumes