A Nothingness of Gray after Volcano Taal in Philippines continues spewing lava, more to come

January 15, 2020 12:35 PM | Skymet Weather Team

Philippines for the past few days has been spewing lava as Volcano Taal has erupted a while ago. With the eruptions affecting the region, the evacuation has been in thousands. In fact, over 40,000 people until now have been evacuated. It has been sending some ash and lava with the ash being sent up to 14 km into the atmosphere.

In fact, everything around has turned into a gray carpet, a carpet that you would never want to walk on. Taal at present is not at all habitable.

Due to the upper winds, the ash and smoke will even be taken around the Globe. Moreover, during the time of eruptions, even some tremors are being observed which amount to 466 since Sunday. Taal is a very popular volcano site and has erupted 33 times since 1572, however, it had remained dormant for quite a while and the last time such an eruption occurred was in 1977.

In Philippines alone, the last major volcanic eruption that took place was Pinatubu in 1991, which is 140 km from Taal and had a similar spew of ash and lava injected into the atmosphere.

Major change that took place across was that the Global temperatures fell by 0.5 degrees for the next three years. Reason was that with the eruption, lot of poisionous gases including sulphur dioxide are emitted, which reacts with water to turn into aerosols that are mostly acidic in nature. Those aerosols send back the radiation from sun, reflecting them back to space not letting the temperatures rise at all.

With these changes, they even threaten to damage the global ecosystems. At present, the alert level has been raised to 4, on a scale from 1-5.

There are no signs of any kind of end for the volcanic eruption. Moreover, it is affecting the belt of Indonesia. More dangerous eruption may be seen soon, which will only worsen the situation there. When the height is up to 14 km, and if the winds carry across the Globe, it ends up causing some major threat to aviation, and if the ash is injected into the engine it can even lead to stoppage of engines.

Image Credit: NYT

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