Volcanoes
According to reports, a stream of smoke reached some 1.2 km (about .7 miles) above the volcano's crater and incandescent rocks spewed out under the moonlight.
El Reventador is located near Quito's Amazon region and is the country's most active volcano.
It's a popular site for hikers but authorities have warned tourists to stay away from the area.

CCTV image shows Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra spewing ashes into the sky on Tuesday morning.
The first eruption happened at 7.48 a.m. and lasted for more than 40 minutes.
The Volcanic and Geological Disaster Mitigation Center (PVMBG) said thick, gray volcanic ash spewing out of Sinabung's crater had moved eastward and southeastward this morning.
Dr. Sweatman has done our planet and history a tremendous favor by writing Prehistory Decoded. By employing the hard science of probability, he has managed to demystify the world's very earliest and most mysterious art.
Prehistory Decoded begins by documenting Sweatman's initial discovery, reported worldwide in 2015, of an empirical method for decoding the world's first art using pattern matching and statistics. Guess what? The code is a memorial and date stamp for our favorite subject here: the Younger Dryas Catastrophe, and its associated Taurid meteor traumas.
Sweatman has managed to produce a synthesis explanation for the previously indecipherable succession of artistic animal figures at Gobekeli Tepe in Turkey, Chauvet Cave in France, Lascaux Cave in France, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, among others. Unsurprisingly to the open minded, the ancient artists are communicating using a universally handy and persistent reference set: Stars. Or, more precisely, the appearance of constellations as adjusted over time according earth's precession.
(Don't you love the internet? One hyperlink and no need to explain all that!)
It seems reasonable then to the Tusk that, if there were a code, someone, somewhere, would break the code soon given the global availability and intense interest in the information. In fact, if I waited much longer without someone cracking it, the Tusk may have become convinced the oldest art is simply stunning cave paintings, and heavy carved rocks, with no relevant common narrative (other than horses are pretty, and moving rocks is cool).
The eruption comes as Australians flock to the island for school holidays but flights have not been impacted with Denpasar airport still operational.
The active volcano erupted at 3.21am on Sunday and the thick ash column was blown to the southwest, causing a drizzle of volcanic ash in Karangasem, Bangli and Klunglung districts, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency, said.
There were no immediate reports of casualties but the volcano's status remains on alert or level three of four possible levels and authorities continue to impose a four-kilometre exclusion zone.

Smoke and ash spews out of Mount Aso in Kumamoto Prefecture on April 16.
From about 1:30 p.m. on April 14, the agency detected volcanic tremors at Mount Aso had begun intensifying and a large volume of volcanic gas was also being emitted.
The alert level for Mount Aso was raised from the lowest 1 to 2, meaning restrictions would be placed on approaching the crater.

The re-establishment of species diversity following an extinction event is consistently slower than evolutionary theory predicts.
Yet, the paleontological record suggests that this doesn't happen at anywhere near the expected pace. Now, research published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution argues that understanding something called "morphospace" might help us find the cause.
Extinction events happen with alarming regularity: there's the "big five", but a host of slightly smaller, yet still devastating extinctions have peppered the planet's history.
Scientists now worry that we might be in the middle of one of our own making, so this makes it all the more important to understand how the natural world bounces back from such catastrophes.
Perhaps the most well-known of the earth's mass extinctions is the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event. This took place 66 million years ago when an asteroid smacked into the earth next to what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, creating the nearly 200-kilometre-wide depression known as the Chicxulub crater. This impact drove the extinction of all the non-avian dinosaurs, and much else besides.
Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC) Tokyo warned of a large volcanic ash plume rising to 33,000 feet (10.1km), or flight level 330, and moving 45 kts to the south.
Particulates ejected to altitudes above 32,800 feet (10km), and into the stratosphere, have a direct cooling effect on the planet.
The KVERT observatory warns that ash explosions of up to 49,200 feet a.s.l. could occur at any time.
This unstable stratovolcano, with a recent eruptive history littered with VEI 4s and 5s, has seen a tremendous uptick in activity so far in 2019.

A view of the Lower Falls at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone National Park on May 11, 2016. Yellowstone, the first National Park in the US and widely held to be the first national park in the world, is known for its wildlife and its many geothermal features.
Experts at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory found what appeared to be a previously unknown pocket of warmth nestled between West Tern Lake and the Tern Lake thermal area after studying the latest thermal infrared images of the National Park taken in April 2017, according to the U.S. National Geodetic Survey.
The team then checked high resolution aerial photos of the same spot captured in 2017 by the The National Agriculture Imagery Program, and noticed dead trees and bright soil. These were the signs of a thermal area they were expecting to find. In contrast, a 1994 picture showed a crop of healthy trees which started to fade in a 2006 image.
Researchers therefore believe the thermal area near the northeast border of the Sour Creek resurgent dome first emerged in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
The Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (PVMBG) maintained the volcano's alert level at siaga (stay on alert), the third level of the four-tiered alert system. The center also set the danger zone at a 4-kilometer radius from the crater.
The latest eruption occurred at 1:31 a.m. on Thursday, the Mount Agung observatory post reported. A seismograph recorded an eruption amplitude of 25 mm and a duration of 3 minutes and 58 seconds, with a thundering sound that could be heard from the post.

A general view of the Popocatepetl volcano from the city of Puebla, Mexico. Mexico's National Disaster Prevention Center raised its alert for the Popocatepetl volcano due to increased activity on Thursday.
The agency raised the warning level from yellow Phase 2 to yellow Phase 3 after an eruption occurred at 6:50 a.m. sending a plume of ash more than a mile and a half into the air.
It also recorded 61 exhalations at the volcano within the past 24 hours.
"The CENAPRED urges NOT TO APPROACH the volcano and especially the crater, because of the danger involved in the fall of ballistic fragments," the agency said.
Yellow Phase 3 is the highest level of warning before the red phase, which would include an advisory for people around the volcano to evacuate.









Comment: That record breaking year wasn't limited to just the Steamboat geyser and, when taken together, these events are likely to be a sign that there is an unusual uptick in activity at Yellowstone. And it's not only Yellowstone: