Volcanoes & the Milky Way August 27, 2011

Today we had a special talk by geologist and explorer Jon Vidar Sigurdsson on the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano that caused so much trouble for travellers last year. Volcanoes erupt on an average of once every 5 years on Icelnad. Jon lives in Reykjavik and was near the volcano before, during, and after its eruption. It was amazing how the Icelanders just hiked up to it and got SO close to the crater. Jon and his family were within 300 meters from the crater as it was spewing red hot lava. His photographs were amazing. Red lava falling into a snow-covered canyon. Hot red rocks bursting out of the crater like fireworks. At one point he and his family were standing between 2 vents when earthquakes began and they decided to leave, urging the other people up there to come along. They didn’t and had to be rescued by helicopter 10 minutes later.

The most amazing photos were taken at twilight and showed the glowing red magma, the Aurora Borealis, and lightning WITHIN the ash plume. The main volcano burst on April 13 spewing 2000 tons of ash per second into the atmosphere. This is when all the trouble started for European travelers—17,000 flights were cancelled in Europe. Their airspace was closed, but in Iuceland, no airports closed at all because all the ash blew south because of the way the winds were blowing. Only farmlands south of the glacier were affected with thick layers of ash which weill take years to recover. The eruption ended on May 24.

This year on May 21, a volcano in the SE of Iceland erupted for 4 days. It was ten times bigger than last years but the ash fell straight down into the ocean and caused no real problems for Europe.

This afternoon we had another special lecture by Bud Murch, a professor and rocket scientist, on the Milky Way. This is the frist in a series of 8 lectures on this cruise by him. I learned that the Hubble telescope didn’t work at first and they had to fix it with a corrective lens.

Now for some astounding numbers: There are 200 billion galaxies, 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the known universe. And our universe is 13.5 billion years old.

Our galaxy is a spiral one with a galactic bulge in the center. Andromeda is like our galaxy but is 50% larger. It is rushing towards us and will eventually merge with the Milky Way galaxy. Andromeda galaxy is visible to the unaided eye even though it is 2 ½ million light years away. At the center of the Milky Way galaxy is Sagittarius A, a small black hole that is 4 million times the mass of our sun. And the old mnemonic device for remembering the order of the planets has to be changed ever since Pluto got demoted to a MINOR planet. So now it’s: My very earthly mother just served us nachos, instead of nine pizzas. Today our lecturer ended with telling us that we probably WON’T get to see the northern lights on this cruise and quoted a poem for us: Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learned Astronomer.” Very interesting stuff.

Delicious dinner at table for 2 in the Rembrandt Dining Room this evening.