April 30, 2021

Lave "tornado" caught on video

I don't think this has ever been recorded before:

It's most likely the same mechanism that causes fire vortices in wildfires. You can see it collapse when it strays past the lava stream, only to re form slightly upstream. Fascinating stuff.

April 28, 2021

When you fly a drone into an active crater

Posted for kamikaze video that's real purty. He had said on an earlier video that his drone had been banged up and half the sensors were no longer working, so not a virgin drone and the volcano will continue to erupt.

There is now only one vent active at the surface, but it makes up for the loss of the other 7, shooting spatter 165 ft/50 meters up into the air. I say "at the surface" because there is always the possibility that other vents are sending lava through tubes, increasing the depth of the flow, but this is what we saw in Hawaii 2 years ago, vent 8 becoming the dominant surface event.

Earthquake swarms continue, a cluster northeast of the Geldingadalur event and to the west-sourwest, just northwest of the town of Grindavik.

Full update:

April 28, 2021

Breathtaking New Hubble Image Shows a Giant Star on The Brink of Annihilation

The spectacle of space has our jaws constantly dropping, and the picture that was just released to celebrate 31 years of the Hubble Space Telescope is another incredibly powerful shot that we could gaze at for hours.

It shows the giant, ultra-bright star AG Carinae, 20,000 light-years away from Earth, in a phase that makes it a Luminous Blue Variable (LBV) – where massive stars such as this one go through thousands of years of instability and varying luminosity.
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What you can see around AG Carinae is a gigantic nebula, an expanding shell of gas and dust, around five light-years wide – that's the same distance from our planet to Alpha Centauri, our next nearest star, to give you a sense of scale.

https://www.sciencealert.com/breathtaking-new-hubble-image-shows-a-giant-star-on-the-edge-of-annihilation

April 10, 2021

Another vent opens up in Iceland, total now four

It looks like things will start to progress more rapidly now that hotter and less viscous magma is coming up to the surface. It also looks like public safety people will be stepping in soon to keep people away. Here is a video full of geologic background and some speculation about what might happen next.

I happened to catch the new one opening up around 10 PM MDT. There was absolutely no drama, which should scare the hell out of people who want to do volcano tourism at this thing.

Panoramic live video, new vent is second from right and the only one showing incandescent lava in the lousy weather:

April 8, 2021

Third fissure opens up in Iceland

The second fissure remains the most spectacular, both for it's length and output of lava.

Here is a discussion of what is likely to happen.

April 5, 2021

BREAKING: New Fissure Opens North Of Geldingadalur, Area Evacuated

The fissure is at least 100 metres long, and is spraying lava into the air. This new fissure is as well far from populated areas and infrastructure, but no chances are being taken. As such, the eruption site is closed for the time being.

“We can never know ahead of time how this volcano will behave,” volcanologist Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson told RÚV. “There is a certain amount of pressure, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of material coming to the surface, but it could lead to an increased eruption. But we see no signs that it’s decreasing. This event is not at all over.”

https://grapevine.is/news/2021/04/05/breaking-new-fissure-opens-north-of-geldingadalur-area-evacuated/

This one has spooked the authorities because it opened up without a lot of the drama that preceded the first eruption.

April 3, 2021

One of World's Greatest Hidden Fortunes Is Wiped Out in Days

Hwang and his private investment firm, Archegos Capital Management, are now at the center of one of the biggest margin calls of all time -- a multibillion-dollar fiasco involving secretive market bets that were dangerously leveraged and unwound in a blink.

Hwang’s most recent ascent can be pieced together from stocks dumped by banks in recent days -- ViacomCBS Inc., Discovery Inc., GSX Techedu Inc., Baidu Inc. -- all of which had soared this year, sometimes confounding traders who couldn’t fathom why.

One part of Hwang’s portfolio, which has been traded in blocks since Friday by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Co., was worth almost $40 billion last week. Bankers reckon that Archegos’s net capital -- essentially Hwang’s wealth -- had reached north of $10 billion. And as disposals keep emerging, estimates of his firm’s total positions keep climbing: tens of billions, $50 billion, even more than $100 billion.

It evaporated in mere days.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-29/one-of-world-s-greatest-hidden-fortunes-is-wiped-out-in-days?utm_source=pocket-newtab

This is such a weird story. I've been following it for a few days. The article outlines part of what happened: Hwang was bounced out of the hedge fund industry for playing fast and loose, then set up a company that used every trick in the book to dodge SEC scrutiny, then played every game in the book to inflate its paper worth. It looks like Goldman Sachs was initially the one to pull the plug.

It shows how quickly some of these fast money billion dollar fortunes can go "poof" when somebody notices how much debt is propping them up. I sincerely doubt Hwang is unique, although his degree of brass might be.

The SEC needs to hire him on its forensic team since he knows all the tricks.