Copahue volcano on the border of Chile and Argentina has started erupting, with an ash plume reported to be over 30,000 feet (9.5 km) tall. I cropped the satellite image below from the NASA Terra/MODIS imagery site. It’s about 8 hours old as I write this.
There’s not a lot of online information about this eruption, yet, and, if the eruption is short-lived or doesn’t impact the public, it may not hit the main stream media. The only article I could find is from today’s Buenos Aires Herald.
One might think that, with the infrequent reporting, volcanoes eruptions are a rare occurrence. Actually, it would be safe to say that there are always volcanoes erupting somewhere. There’s an estimated 1,500 active volcanoes and about 50 of them, on average, will be erupting at some point during a calendar year. (In Focus in the Atlantic has a great image collection of volcanic activity from 2012.)
