© Agence France-Presse
Graphic showing Mount Tongariro in New Zealand’s North Island, which erupted Wednesday sending a plume of ash into the atmosphere.
Graphic showing Mount Tongariro in New Zealand’s North Island, which erupted Wednesday sending a plume of ash into the atmosphere.
The official GNS Science monitoring service issued a potential threat alert after the 1:25 p.m. (0025 GMT) eruption at the volcano which became active in August this year after lying dormant for more than a century.
Civil Defense authorities described the eruption as minor but said conditions could be hazardous in the vicinity of the mountain and nearby areas could experience ashfall.
The August eruption, the first since 1897, hit domestic flights and closed highways but Air New Zealand said it did not expect the latest activity to disrupt services, although it was closely monitoring the situation.
Local resident Clint Green witnessed the eruption and said it sent ash spewing about two kilometres (more than a mile) into the air.
"It was pretty spectacular. All of a sudden a towering black plume just began erupting very quickly, skyrocketing up," he told Radio New Zealand.
"At first I didn't believe what I was seeing."
There were no immediate reports of injuries.
[Link]Cosmology as Myth
Today’s cosmology, in attempting to give us the biggest picture, competes with religion by investing in an alternative creation myth, one that shatters the observed laws of physics. The myth is called ‘the big bang’ and it makes no sense. What we observe is that matter ‘locks up’ electromagnetic energy, which manifests as mass according to E = mc2 (no hypothetical Higgs boson is required). But we have no idea how energy can create matter (whatever that ultimately is). So we can say nothing about creation of the universe. Though it purports to explain observed phenomena, the big bang requires one to rationalize an immense field of accumulating anomalies, forcing cosmologists to devote most of their time to inventing ways around the contradictions by introducing purely theoretical constructs like dark matter, dark energy, black holes and much more. The exotic vocabulary that has emerged fails every reasonable test of Occam’s Razor. Unexpected results are met with ad hoc solutions. There is always an answer.
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One measure of a successful cosmology is its ability to predict probable new discoveries and avenues for research in other disciplines. Big Bang cosmology fails this test. Today, incessant surprise at discordant astronomical data never causes a radical rethink of basic assumptions. “Back to the drawing board” never means starting afresh. The mysteries mentioned earlier are untouched. No one reads the original papers from which dogma sprang. Surprises merely drive the science-media-funding circus to further improvised absurdities — ‘proven’ by computer models. But computer models cannot prove anything. Most are based on invalid concepts, such as treating space plasma as a magnetized gas, and have so many adjustable parameters that the models are not falsifiable.