Sarychev Timelapse

When the International Space Station (ISS) caught the Sarychev eruption a couple of weeks ago, there were a couple of the images that went mainstream very quickly. I posted one myself, and at that post, as well as my last post, there are a number of links to the ISS images. Well, someone has done us a great favor and put the images together in a video clip. One caveat: the features identified as "lahars" are actually pyroclastic flows. Lahars are volcanic mudflows, and are not necessarily associated with active eruptions, though they often are. (For this and other posts where I talk about lahars, click here) I don't doubt for a second that there are lahars down under the dense billowing masses of suspended ash as they tear down the mountain side, but what you actually see in the pictures are clouds of ash suspended in air, not mudflows, and are more accurately described as pyroclastic ("fire-broken") flows.

The next task is to morph between frames to smooth out the jerkyness, as was done with the famous Mt. St. Helens photos, to create this famous (and also very awesome) clip: