Philex labor union votes to go on strike
December 28, 2021

PHILEX MINING Corp. said on Monday that its labor unit voted to go on strike, citing bargaining deadlock as the alleged ground.

In a stock exchange disclosure, Philex said Philex Mines Independent Labor Union (PMILU) submitted the results of the strike vote referendum on Dec. 27 to the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE).

It said that on Dec. 23, PMILU voted to reject Philex’s “improved” offer in the negotiation of their collective bargaining agreement.

In a Viber message, Philex Public and Regulatory Affairs Head Francis G. Ballesteros said the company “remains focused on resolving this issue in coordination” with the DoLE, reiterating what was said in the disclosure.

Last week, Philex announced its plan for a $224-million copper and gold mining project in Surigao del Norte. It will be ready for commercial use by late 2024 or early 2025, it said.

On Monday, shares in Philex rose 2.24% or 11 centavos to close at P5.01 apiece.

Philex is one of three Philippine units of Hong Kong-based First Pacific Co. Ltd., the others being Metro Pacific Investments Corp. and PLDT, Inc.

Hastings Holdings, Inc., a unit of PLDT Beneficial Trust Fund subsidiary MediaQuest Holdings, Inc., has interest in BusinessWorld through the Philippine Star Group, which it controls. — Luisa Maria Jacinta C. Jocson

A lengthy doctors’ strike over understaffing sparks chaos at New Delhi hospitals.

A protest over staffing shortages at state-run hospitals in New Delhi called by a doctors’ association on Tuesday.

Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters

By Sameer Yasir
Dec. 28, 2021

A lengthy doctors’ strike in New Delhi against staffing shortages at state-run hospitals has crippled health services, creating fears of disaster if the Omicron variant overwhelms medical facilities.

Medical students from across India have joined the protests, which intensified two weeks ago and have grown angrier after police officers were seen beating junior doctors during a march on Monday.

The New Delhi government has expressed concern over a rising number of coronavirus cases and announced new measures, including a nighttime curfew, to slow the spread of the virus. While the country’s overall case count remains low, daily infections in the capital region have risen by more than 300 percent over the past two weeks, according to the Our World in Data Project at the University of Oxford. It is unclear how many of the new cases are of the Omicron variant.

As the doctors’ strike has stretched on, drawing in recent graduates and tens of thousands of the more than 70,000 doctors who work at government medical facilities nationwide, emergency health services have been the worst hit.

Videos from major state-run hospitals in New Delhi have shown patients on stretchers lying unattended outside emergency rooms. Many Indians rely on state medical facilities for care because of the high cost of treatment at private hospitals.

The protests were triggered by delays in placing medical school graduates in jobs at government health facilities, as India’s Supreme Court considers an affirmative action policy aimed at increasing the share of positions reserved for underrepresented communities. Protesting doctors say they are not against the quotas, but want the court to expedite its decision so that graduates can begin their jobs.

During India’s catastrophic coronavirus wave earlier this year, doctors and other medical personnel found themselves short-handed and underfunded as they battled an outbreak that at its height was causing 4,000 deaths a day. Doctors associations say that more than 1,500 doctors have died from Covid since the pandemic began

Protests continued across the country and outside major hospitals in New Delhi on Tuesday, a day after police officers in the capital detained more than 2,500 protesting doctors who were walking toward the residence of India’s health minister.

India’s health ministry said it was saddened over the treatment of doctors during the protest on Monday, but said it could not proceed with job placements while the issue was being heard in the country’s top court.

Dr. Suvrankar Datta, an official for the Federation of All India Medical Association, a doctors’ group that supports the strike, said as coronavirus cases rise in New Delhi and other parts of the country, there will not be enough doctors to handle the crisis.

“We have already communicated to the government so many times that the health care infrastructure is understaffed like never before,” he said. If graduates are not placed in jobs quickly, he added, it creates “a completely catastrophic situation when cases rise.”

Sameer Yasir is a reporter for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 2020 and is based in New Delhi. @sameeryasir

 

BNP's Italian bank, unions spar over strike take-up

12/27/2021 

MILAN, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Italian banking unions on Tuesday challenged the figure provided by BNL, the Italian arm of French banking group BNP Paribas, over the take up of the previous day's strike in a rare show of open confrontation in the sector.

BNL on Monday said 29.8% of its workers had joined the strike - the first such protest since the 1990s.

The bank said it had ensured it could continue to operate thanks to its digital capabilities at time when workers were also absent due to year-end holidays.

Unions on Tuesday said BNL should clarify how it had calculated the number given than 80% of branches had remained shut.

"Embracing the clear challenge launched by the company unions will strive to render even louder workers' cries of protest," Fabi, First-Cisl, Fisac-Cgil, Uilca and Unisin said in a joint statement.

Such a degree of confrontation is unusual in Italy's banking sector, where workers are only laid off through early retirement schemes offered to older employees on a voluntary basis and very costly for lenders to fund.

Under such schemes, workers receive up to 80-90% of the salary from a fund financed by the banks laying off staff until they actually qualify for pension.

Employees' requests to join the scheme normally exceed the number of departures planned by banks.

The animosity highlights the difficult phase the industry is enduring with negative rates making lending unprofitable, while it faces a digital challenge from non-banking players which are not subject to the same tight regulation and oversight.

Workers at BNL protested against its decision to use external providers for IT and back office services, a move that unions said affects 900 out of a total of 11,500 BNL employees in its central offices and around 700 branches across Italy.

Unions have also voiced grievances about BNL's sale to Worldline in July of an 80% stake in its card payment processing business Axepta Italy. (Reporting by Valentina Za; Additional rpeorting by Giulio Piovaccari; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

From essential status to strikes, 2021 was the 'year of the worker'

As the pandemic wore on, the year was dominated by strikes, unionization efforts and worker mobilization.

Union members hold signs during a  strike against Kellogg's in Battle Creek, 

Michigan, on Dec. 17, 2021.

Dec. 28, 2021, 9:23 AM MST
By Ahiza García-Hodges

The months long Kellogg’s strike that ended last week capped a year of national unrest among workers in industries from entertainment to health care and manufacturing, as the country continues to grapple with the effects of the pandemic.

“There have been years where we thought we could see potential for ‘Year of the Worker’ but arguably it’s hard to see a year that’s been so full of worker activation,” said Ariel Avgar, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “This year happened really quickly but it happened on the foundation of a slower shift. I think there are factors that are economic and attitudinal that have collided in a way that’s rare.”

Essential work

Many of the workers who mobilized for better working conditions this year were deemed essential by their employers, lawmakers and the media. However, after nearly two years of balancing their health and safety working on the front lines of the pandemic, some of these workers began to question that classification.

“There’s a huge gap between the claimed essentiality and the actual working conditions and lived realities of these workers,” Avgar said.

Low-wage workers suffered disproportionately during the pandemic and began demanding improvements in the form of increased wages, meal and rest breaks, better benefits and shorter shifts. The pandemic served as a wake-up call of sorts for them by exacerbating existing issues and highlighting the fact that work could literally pose a threat to their lives.

“The pandemic has shown that working conditions have clear implications for workers’ health and safety and that a lack of voice can affect workers’ health,” he said. “It gave it a much clearer sense of the stakes.”

Bad behavior

The pandemic has placed incredible strain on workers risking their lives to go to work. But for those in the service industry, it’s added an additional stressor as they’ve had to enforce mask mandates — in many cases, facing resistance from customers and forcing them to make hard choices that may compromise their safety

“My employees are so afraid to come to work,” said a restaurant owner in the Midwest, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. “The people who come in don’t want to wear masks even though it’s mandated. They get violent. They spit on waiters. One person who got spit on quit and went to a bar where they don’t enforce the mandate, which is against the law, but they feel safer.”

The year has also seen extreme weather and natural disasters that have further endangered workers. In one extreme example, workers at a factory in Kentucky said they were threatened with termination if they left their shifts early even as a tornado approached their city. There has also been a recent increase in smash-and-grab robberies that has added to concerns about safety.

“Keeping my employees safe — that’s what’s keeping me on edge,” said Nicole Denny, owner of the J’Adore Boutique in Cary, North Carolina, which was hit by a smash-and-grab robbery in December. “My employees don’t want to work alone, so I don’t open if I don’t have two people to work. It’s not fair to them. We also don’t stay open past 5 p.m., because nobody wants to work once it’s dark.”

Push for unionization

The importance of having a voice led workers at numerous businesses, including Starbucks and Amazon, to push for union representation in their workplaces. While not all the efforts have been successful, the increasing mobilization is evidence of shifting attitudes, according to Avgar.

In Buffalo, New York, workers at three Starbucks locations pushed for the ability to join a union. One store won its unionization vote, making it the first company-owned location in the country to organize successfully. Starbucks workers at other locations, including Seattle, have also pushed for unionization votes.


The U.S. has traditionally seen a decline in support for unions ... but the last two years and seeing the importance of workers has shifted broad public opinion on this.

Amazon warehouse workers have also pressed for unionization. After an initial push at an Alabama warehouse was unsuccessful, workers at that location will be allowed to redo the election. Amazon workers at a location in Staten Island have also started to organize.

“The U.S. has traditionally seen a decline in support for unions and labor movement, but I think the experience over the last two years and seeing the importance of workers has shifted broad public opinion on this,” Avgar said. “That external support provides legitimacy and support for these numerous examples of collective action that we’re seeing.”

"Striketober"

In several instances, workers who'd had enough threatened or decided to go on strike when they couldn’t reach an agreement with their employers. Nearly 100,000 workers from health care to Hollywood challenged their working conditions, demanding higher wages and better benefits. The simultaneous worker activism, known as a “strike wave,” culminated in October and was dubbed “Striketober.”

Kellogg’s workers started their strike in October in order to prevent the adoption of a two-tier wage and benefit system, where new hires are paid less and receive fewer benefits than existing workers. The new agreement does not include a two-tier wage system but does include a moratorium on plant closures, an increase in pensions, and cost of living raises.

More than 10,000 John Deere workers went on strike for nearly five weeks over wage increases before approving a new agreement. Nabisco workers were also on strike for weeks in opposition to proposed changes in shift lengths and overtime rules.

About 60,000 workers in Hollywood, members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, narrowly avoided a strike after voting on a new contract at the eleventh hour. Roughly 32,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente ratified a new contract just hours before a strike was set to take place.

“There’s the labor shortage and the great resignation putting pressure on employers, giving more power to individual workers,” Avgar said. “But there’s also the contagion effect where employees see the successful effects of strikes or unionization pushes elsewhere. There’s a way in which these feed off each other.”

Look ahead

As the new omicron strain spreads quickly across the United States, threatening to draw the pandemic out even longer, it’s unclear what that will mean for workers. Many essential and low-wage workers suffered greatly during the pandemic on an individual level but were able to leverage their position collectively in select cases.

“The labor shortage, the attitude shift on the part of workers in terms of expectations for working conditions, the shift in public attitude for workers unionizing, the pandemic is at the heart of all of those,” Avgar said. “There’s been a slow decline of labor over the past 60 years, but this year feels like there’s been a swing of the decline, like a whiplash.”

Still, even if the perfect storm of conditions continues into 2022, workers will face challenges as they advocate for themselves.

“The examples of success are more numerous than in the past but this is not happening without some of the traditional opposition that companies and management have applied,” he said. “There are still serious structural and embedded forces that make it hard for employees to join a union or collectively bargain in the U.S. It’s not an unobstructed path.”

San Diego sanitation workers continue strike for wages and safe working conditions

Melody Isley
28 December 2021
WSWS.ORG

Sanitation workers at Republic Services in Southern California are continuing a strike for safe workplace conditions and a livable wage. Republic Services is an Arizona-based nonhazardous waste disposal company, with more than 35,000 employees who carry out waste collection for residential areas and commercial businesses across the United States.

In San Diego, some 300 workers remain on strike since December 17. These workers are part of the Teamsters Union Local 542 and take care of trash pickup in Chula Vista, Bonita, Eastlake and some neighborhoods of San Diego County. Their strike came on the heels of a strike by Republic service workers in Orange County, who went out on December 9th. Following discussions between the company and Teamsters Local 396, a tentative agreement was reached on December 16th. Just one day after Local 396 had ended the strike in Orange County, Republic workers in San Diego County began their action.

Teamster sanitation workers picket Republic Services In Chula Vista California 

(Source: Teamsters.org)

Like their fellow workers in Orange County, San Diego Republic workers face low wages, grueling 14-hour shifts, staff shortages, and management harassment. The strike has caused delays in garbage collection during the holiday season, and a great deal of complaints by local politicians and business owners.

Workers are demanding new vehicle and equipment improvements, a livable wage, adequate staffing, reasonable workloads, and improved safety conditions. Workers held a rally on December 26th following continued negotiations by the union and Republic.

The San Diego strike is part of a larger movement of both sanitation workers and the global working class in general. According to the Teamsters, contract negotiations with Republic are currently taking place in eight locations: San Diego; San Francisco; Stockton, California; San Jose, California; Richmond, California; Seattle; Pittsburgh; and New Orleans.

In November, refuse collection workers across the United Kingdom began similar strikes, demanding better wages and safe conditions as COVID-19 spreads unabated among the British working class. All over the world, sanitation workers face unsafe conditions, low pay and overwork, and the unions representing them have enforced contracts with wage increases below the rate of inflation.

In an interview by local news at a rally on Sunday, one Republic driver explained, “We’re ready to stay here for however long it takes,” and that he and his coworkers are prioritizing a fight for workplace safety, especially regarding unsafe and outdated vehicles and equipment, and COVID-19 measures. The worker went on to share his frustration with the fact that their demands had not yet been met, and that his community is being stressed by the cessation of sanitation services.

The media has been quick to highlight frustrated residents and business owners who have been forced to take their own trash to the landfill or are watching it pile up and wash away as heavy rains hit the region.

While the workers show determination to fight for better safety and working conditions, the pro-corporate Teamsters union is working to isolate San Diego workers from their counterparts in Orange County in order to enforce concessions. San Diego sanitation workers have been given details of a new offer that Teamsters Local 542 had agreed to, but many workers indicated they would reject the offer which they deemed “disrespectful,” and made clear their disapproval, demanding that negotiations continue until their demands are met.

Republic Services is the second largest waste management company in the United States. It has also been engaged in frequent struggles with its workers since 2019. But despite encompassing up to 20 percent of Republic’s total workforce, the Teamsters continue to refuse to carry out a national strike against Republic and other waste management companies.

Figures from the local Democratic political establishment have feigned support for the strike, and pickets have been attended by San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, and Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez-Fletcher, to name a few. Despite these photo ops, they oversee a highly socially unequal city with the fourth highest rates of homelessness and thirteenth highest of poverty in the country. They have also worked to turn the San Diego Convention Center into a jail for immigrant children, supporting the Biden administration’s continual imprisonment of children. These “progressive” Democratic party officials also kept schools open during the pandemic and at every instance prioritize corporate interests over public safety.

This is a local manifestation of the strategy of the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party nationwide to use the services of the union bureaucracy in suppressing the growth of opposition in the working class and enforce substandard contracts. The Teamsters union occupies a central place within this strategy. This summer, it announced it would undertake a national campaign to expand its presence into nonunion Amazon, where it would bring workers the “benefits” of collective bargaining agreements which are as bad as or even worse than what currently exist at the low-wage employer. Warehouse workers at logistics competitor UPS, who are members of the Teamsters, are part-timers who start out at only $13 per hour, under the terms of a contract which the union “ratified” in spite of a majority “no” vote in 2018.

The election of new union president Sean O’Brien this fall, with the supporter of the pseudo-left opposition group Teamsters for a Democratic Union, is an attempt to overcome the discrediting of the Teamsters by decades of sellouts and its notorious thuggishness. But O’Brien is himself a former ally of his predecessor, James Hoffa Jr., and is widely hated for his use of threats of physical violence against his opponents. O’Brien was elected amid the lowest voter turnout since the union switched to direct election of its top officers in the early 1990s.

The struggles of waste management workers in Southern California cannot be left in the hands of the Teamsters, which functions as an agency of management. Instead, waste management workers must begin building their own independent rank-and-file committees, where workers can fight for their own interests, untethered from the corporatist relations between the trade unions and the corporations.

CALDERA CHRONICLES

Caldera chronicles: Why drilling the Yellowstone volcano to stop eruptions or generate power is a bad idea

Dec 24, 2021

Research drilling in Yellowstone National Park. (A) is an image from Fenner (1936) of the drilling setup in the Upper Geyser Basin during the 1929 field season. (B) is an image from White et al. (1975) of the USGS drill rig set up in the Norris Geyser Basin in 1967-68 during a steam eruption.

Courtesy photos



Mammoth Mountain, on the edge of Long Valley caldera (California), is the dominant peak on the skyline, and the jagged peaks to the right of Mammoth Mountain are the Minarets. The Casa Diablo Hot springs are just beyond the power facility along the western edge of a down-faulted block at the southwestern margin of the caldera’s resurgent dome. The low ridge in the middle right of the photo marks the western edge of the down-faulted block.

Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles is a weekly column written by scientists and collaborators of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. This week's contribution is from Michael Poland, geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey and scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

It’s a common question – why not just drill into Yellowstone to relieve the pressure? And it seems like a reasonable idea given the way that magma chambers are often depicted: as caverns of expanding liquid magma that just need to be tapped, like letting air out of a balloon.

Magma reservoirs are much more complex than this simple depiction, however. Instead of huge balls of liquid magma, they are a mushy mix of rock, melt, crystals and various fluids and gases, with poor interconnectivity and often no sharp boundary between the reservoir and the surrounding rock.

Yellowstone provides an excellent example. Seismic imaging techniques (like taking an MRI of the Earth) have revealed two huge magma reservoirs beneath the caldera system: one at 5–17 kilometers (3–10.5 miles) beneath the surface, and a deeper one at 20–50 kilometers (12.5–31 miles). The speed of seismic waves through these reservoirs suggests they are mostly solid – the upper reservoir appears to be only 5-15% molten, and the deeper 2-5% molten.

Pressure within this type of system is not like air in a balloon, and it cannot be easily dissipated by poking a hole, or even a hundred holes, into the complex structure. Within a magmatic system, pressure accumulates because magma and associated fluids are accumulating. It would be as if a balloon were filling with mostly solid cement, with some poorly connected regions that were wet and contained some gases. Poking a hole in that balloon would not cause the cement to disappear, nor would it reach all parts of the poorly connected “wet” part of the system. Moreover, the drill holes intended to tap the gases in a magma reservoir would plug shut with dense taffy-like magma without constant intervention.

But what about cooling the magma reservoir by pumping water into the subsurface? This was the subject of a 2015 report by Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers, who calculated that the magma chamber could be cooled if a sufficient supply of water were pumped through the subsurface over the course of thousands of years, generating geothermal energy in the process.

While this proposal might seem to make some sense, the calculation overlooked a number of complicating factors. For example, the hotspot fueling volcanism at Yellowstone provides a steady supply of heat. Cooling the magma body by pumping water into the subsurface would be like attempting to cool a pot of boiling water by steadily adding droplets of cold water but leaving the burner on.

For all of these magma quenching and tapping concepts, there is also the issue of unintended consequences. Rapid depressurization and freezing are factors that can drive magma toward the surface by stimulating dissolved gases to come out of solution – like opening a can of soda or putting a can of soda in the freezer (please don’t try this unless you enjoy cleaning up messes!) – so attempts at cooling and depressurizing magma systems might even make an eruption more likely.

But what about power generation, which usually involves drilling into areas often near magma reservoirs and extracting hot water that becomes steam and can be used to drive turbines? Geothermal power is used in many places worldwide – in Iceland, it accounts for about 30% of all power generated in the country.

Geothermal power exploitation in Yellowstone, however, is illegal by act of Congress – the Geothermal Steam Act of 1970 (amended in 1988). This act requires the Department of Interior to preserve and monitor hydrothermal features, like Old Faithful, in units of the National Park Service. There is a good reason the law exists. In many places – including California, Nevada, Chile, New Zealand, and Iceland – geothermal power production has altered the behavior of nearby hydrothermal features. There is still quite a lot we don’t understand about how water moves beneath the surface in the Yellowstone area, and it is likely that even geothermal development outside the park would impact features within the park.

Drilling does have a role to play, however, in better understanding how volcanoes work, including at Yellowstone. In 1929-30, and again in 1967-68, limited drilling was done in some of the geyser basins of the park, to a maximum depth of about 330 meters (1,080 feet), to better understand the shallow hydrothermal system. And in 2007-08, boreholes up to about 250 meters (820 feet) deep were drilled in several locations to host sensitive monitoring instruments. These studies have been invaluable in better understanding how Yellowstone’s hydrothermal and magmatic systems work.

At other volcanoes, drilling has accidentally penetrated active magma bodies. In 2005, drilling in Hawaii encountered magma along the East Rift Zone of Kīlauea Volcano. The hole rapidly closed as liquid magma flowed in and froze. A similar process occurred when magma was unexpectedly encountered during drilling at Krafla volcano, Iceland, in 2009, and in Kenya in 2011. These encounters have motivated a research project – an international magma observatory – that aims to drill into the magma body at Krafla that was encountered in 2009, and to install equipment that will help scientists better understand the conditions in and around magma reservoirs.

Drilling has an important role to play in better understanding and monitoring volcanoes, and in some places it can be a means of generating geothermal power. But as a means of stopping or slowing an eruption, drilling is very unlikely to be helpful. In any case, there is no concern of impending eruptive activity at Yellowstone, so drilling to stop an eruption is an example of a non-solution for a non-problem.

NZ
Mud volcano erupting on Gisborne farm threw large rocks 50 metres

Marty Sharpe

Dec 20 2021

A mud volcano that burst to the surface on a farm near Gisborne threw large rocks 50 metres and is continuing to “bubble away”, 10 days after it erupted.

Gisborne District Council scientist Murry Cave​ said the mud volcano appeared on Monowai Station in the head of the Waimata Valley, about 25km north of Gisborne, about 7.45pm on December 10.

“It was accompanied by a sound that the landowners initially thought was thunder,” Cave said.

He said mud volcanoes were a natural but rare phenomenon in New Zealand, and Gisborne/Tairawhiti had quite a few. This latest one is about 2km from the last mud volcano eruption in the area, which occurred in December 2018.


MURRY CAVE
The mud volcano on Monowai Station spewed large rocks 50metres.

“This latest one is a bit smaller than that one. It happened over about an hour, but is still bubbling away. There's quite a bit of bubbling going on, but it’s not ejecting any more mud at this stage,” he said.

This mud volcano is on farmland a long way from any houses or structures, unlike the 2018 one, which was only 150 metres from the nearest house.

“Despite their name, they are not related to volcanoes or to geothermal mud pools such as at Rotorua. Instead, they relate to faults and often have a delayed reaction to major earthquakes. This event is probably a delayed response to the March 5th Te Araroa earthquake,” Cave said.

MURRY CAVE
The mud volcano near Gisborne.

Mud volcano eruptions eject gas, water and rocks into the air “and in this instance quite large rocks were thrown around 50m clear of the mud volcano itself”, he said.

“The rocks ejected can come from many kilometres underground and is generally a mix of many types of rocks not typically seen at the surface.

“The gas associated with the mud volcano is dominated by methane, but can include other gases such as ethane, propane and butane. Sometimes, there is oil associated with such eruptions but not in this case.”

Kilauea Volcano Summit Eruption Resumes Overnight

image from USGS webcam at night showing the west vent in Halemaʻumaʻu crater

by Big Island Video News
on Dec 28, 2021 

STORY SUMMARY

HAWAIʻI VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK - The summit eruption of Kīlauea Volcano resumed on Monday evening, ending a 2-day pause in activity.

thermal image from USGS webcam showing Halemaʻumaʻu and lava lake

(BIVN) – Kilauea volcano is again erupting lava at the summit in Halemaʻumaʻu crater, ending a two-day pause in eruptive activity.

“New breakouts on the surface of the Halemaʻumaʻu lava lake appeared at 7:10 PM last night following a resumption of strong volcanic tremor around 6:50 PM,” reported the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on Tuesday morning. “About half an hour after the lava breakouts appeared, the summit began to deflate, reversing the strong inflationary episode of the prior day leading up to the return of eruptive activity.”

Lava lake activity “resembles that observed prior to the recent eruptive pause”, the scientists say, and remains confined within Halemaʻumaʻu crater in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park.

“There are no indications of activity migrating elsewhere on Kīlauea,” the USGS said. “No unusual activity has been noted in the Kīlauea East Rift Zone.”

From the Tuesday’s USGS Halemaʻumaʻu lava lake observations:

New breakouts of lava began issuing from the western vent in Halemaʻumaʻu at 7:10 PM last night. The renewed input of lava has rejuvenated the lava lake that was active prior to the recent eruptive pause, occupying the same footprint as before. However, the newly reactivated lake has also been overflowing and feeding substantial lava flows to the north and south over inactive, crusted portions of the lake surface. The lake has seen a total rise of about 70 meters (230 feet) since lava emerged on September 29. Measurements from a helicopter overflight on December 21 indicated that the total lava volume effused since the beginning of the eruption was approximately 38 million cubic meters (10.0 billion gallons) at that time.

The Kilauea USGS Volcano Alert Level remains at WATCH, and the current Aviation Color Code remains at ORANGE.

How a volcano and flaming red sunsets led an amateur scientist in Hawaii to discover jet streams

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 sent volcanic dust and gases circling the Earth, creating spectacular sunsets captured by artists. William Ashcroft via Houghton Library/Harvard University

On the evening of Sept. 5, 1883, people in Honolulu witnessed a spectacular sunset followed by a period of extended twilight described as a “singular lurid after sunset glow.” There were no signs of anything else out of the ordinary, but these exceptional twilight glows returned each morning and evening over the following weeks.

Among the mystified Honolulu citizens was 56-year-old Rev. Sereno Edwards Bishop, who in his varied career in Hawaii had been a chaplain, school principal and surveyor, and who had a keen interest in science. Over the subsequent weeks and months, the exceptional twilight glows occurred around the whole globe. Remarkably, as scientists first grappled with understanding the origin of the twilight glows, Bishop’s efforts would lead to the first convincing explanation.

Rev. Sereno Edwards Bishop (1827–1909) Wikipedia

His discoveries led to scientific investigations of the winds high above the ground and ultimately yielded information that today is used to forecast weather over extended periods.

I am a meteorologist in Hawaii who helped revive appreciation of Bishop’s seminal contribution to the scientific exploration of the upper atmosphere.
A volcanic eruption half a world away

Today we know that the 1883 glows were caused by the sun below the visible horizon illuminating a mist of small liquid droplets in the atmosphere high above the ground.

The mist was made of sulfuric acid droplets that were formed by reactions of the massive amounts of sulfur dioxide gas produced by the explosive eruption of Mount Krakatoa close to the equator in Indonesia on Aug. 27, 1883. The eruption sent the droplets high into the atmosphere, where the winds transported them around the world. They spread gradually, and it was November before people in London began to notice the glow.

Much later, scientists observed similar effects after the June 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The material Pinatubo injected into the upper atmosphere could be followed in detail with satellite observations, and their connection with spectacular sunsets and twilight glows was clearly established.

Sketches of twilight and afterglow on one evening in 1883 in London following the Krakatoa eruption. William Ashcroft via Houghton Library/Harvard University

In 1883, Bishop had no idea that there had been a volcanic eruption until the San Francisco newspapers arrived. Very quickly, he formulated a hypothesis that he published as a letter in his local newspaper.

“I am disposed to conjecture that some very light element among the vapors of the Java eruptions has continued at a very great height in the atmosphere, and has been borne … across the Pacific into this region,” Bishop wrote.

He realized that he could connect the eruption to the glowing skies most credibly by gathering reports of the first appearance of the glows elsewhere and tracking the initial spread of the “vapor” from Krakatoa. Bishop continued his letter: “I earnestly invite, in behalf of science, all shipmasters and mates to publish what they may have observed at sea.”

Bishop assembled a dozen such reports over the first three weeks after the eruption and was able to show that the “vapor” that produced the glows had moved westward from Krakatoa, along the equator to reach Honolulu 10 days later. This implied that there was a wind high in the atmosphere blowing steadily with an extreme speed that, at ground level, is seen only in hurricanes.

Tracking the red sunsets following the Krakatoa eruption. The stars mark the initial reports and dates of seeing the exceptional twilight colors in 1883.

Bishop published his observations in The Hawaiian Monthly, concluding that there was “a vast stream of smoke due west with great precision along a narrow equatorial belt with an enormous velocity, around the globe.”

The equatorial jet stream

Bishop called the motion of the volcanic aerosol a “smoke stream.” In fact, the equatorial winds transporting the aerosol were the first discovery of what meteorologists now call a jet stream.

A half-century would pass before the experiences of pilots flying at heights of several miles revealed the existence of the extratropical jet streams lower down in the atmosphere that are now familiar from TV newscasts. Jet streams are strong, typically narrow bands of wind. The more familiar lower atmospheric jet streams move weather systems in the middle latitudes from west to east. By contrast, Bishop’s jet stream circles the equator at high altitudes and actually can blow from east to west.

Bishop’s work opened further exploration of the equatorial jet stream that culminated in the 1961 discovery that the equatorial jet stream varied from strong east winds to strong west winds roughly every other year. This so-called Quasi-biennial Oscillation has been shown to connect with weather near the ground, particularly in Europe and the North Atlantic, a fact that is now routinely exploited in making long range forecasts for the weather.

Bishop’s contribution was acknowledged by the scientists who first followed him, and he won a prize from New York’s Warner Observatory in a contest for essays explaining the post-Krakatoa glows. Bishop even merited a brief obituary in an American meteorological science journal.

Bishop, who was the son of missionaries, could also be a divisive figure in Hawaii. He supported the U.S. annexation of the islands, and his religious views opposed some native Hawai'ian traditions, such as the hula dance. His contributions to science were largely forgotten in the 20th century.

An international scientific committee’s celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Quasi-biennial Oscillation discovery is an opportunity to remember Bishop and his discovery.

August 16, 2021
Author

Kevin Hamilton
Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Hawaii

How Do You See Inside a Volcano? Try a Storm of Cosmic Particles.

Muography, a technique used to peer inside nuclear reactors and Egyptian pyramids, could help map the innards of the world’s most hazardous volcanoes.

Volcanic lightning over Mount Sakurajima as it erupted in Kagoshima prefecture, Japan, 

in December. Researchers have used muography to peer inside.

Credit...Kyodo, via Reuters

By Robin George Andrews
Nov. 10, 2021

The next time the sun is shining, go outside. There may not be a cloud in the sky, but you will be standing in the middle of a spectral rainstorm.

Cosmic rays, emanating from all sorts of high-energy entities, constantly bombard Earth’s atmosphere. Their collisions with gases make tiny particles named pions, which speedily decay into muons, subatomic blobs more than 200 times heavier than electrons. Trillions of muons are shooting toward the ground at close to the speed of light every single second.

When muons encounter an object, some pass right through while others get stopped in their tracks. That means muons can be used to see inside things that would otherwise be inaccessible, from nuclear reactors to the depths of Egypt’s pyramids.

Scientists have long suspected that this technique, named muography, could be applied to volcanoes, whose anatomies determine when and how they will erupt. And researchers show in a paper, published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, that muons have been used to successfully map out some of the arteries and organs of volcanoes across the world, including some of the world’s most hazardous magmatic mountains.

One day, volcanic muography could become the “ultimate detection system for magma,” said Giovanni Leone, a geophysicist at the University of Atacama in Chile and the study’s lead author. He and his colleagues say if you can use muons to track the movement of molten rock in real time, you should be able to forecast when an eruption is about to transpire.

When muons zip through material, their momentum is sapped. The denser the material is, the more likely these muons will lose all their energy, grind to a halt and decay into neutrinos and electrons.

Objects are rarely equally dense throughout. That includes volcanoes, which are made of either magma-filled or vacant passageways, a diversity of rock types and countless cracks, crevasses and chasms. To perceive these features, volcanologists could use muon detectors, which range from the size of a suitcase to the area of a small apartment. Scientists could place detectors around a volcano’s flanks, or even fly one around the volcano with a helicopter.

A multi-wire proportional chamber-based muography observation system in the Sakurajima Muography Observatory.

Credit...Leone et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2021


The endless muon rainstorm will shower the volcano at an angle. Some of the muons passing through one side of the volcano’s flanks will reach detectors on the other side; those that don’t will cast subatomic shadows on the detectors, revealing which parts of the mountain’s insides are denser and which are more vacuous.

With one detector, you can get a two-dimensional image of a volcano’s innards, “similar to a medical X-ray,” said David Mahon, a muography researcher at the University of Glasgow who was not involved with the study. “By using multiple detectors positioned around the object, it’s possible to build up a crude 3-D image.”

After using muography to see inside an innocuous Japanese mountain in 1995, the technique was eventually deployed at active volcanoes. One of the first successful campaigns was Mount Asama in Japan, where researchers found a buried lava mound sitting atop a Swiss cheese-like magmatic passageway. It has since been used to see into, among others, Italy’s Etna and Stromboli volcanoes, Japan’s hyperactive Sakurajima volcano and the La Soufrière de Guadeloupe volcano in the Caribbean.

Muons have found weaknesses that hint at the site of future flank collapses, landslides and lava escape routes. They have also found fresh pockets of magma that may be primed to erupt and that were overlooked by other instruments.

Volcanic muography isn’t flawless. The detectors can only see the parts of the volcano that the muons are penetrating. “You can only watch from below towards the sky,” said Marina Rosas-Carbajal, a volcano geophysicist at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics who was not involved with the study. Muons are unable to penetrate deeper parts of the volcano, leaving those areas largely off-limits to muographers.

Placing detectors around dozens more volcanoes, and subjecting volcanic rocks to muons in laboratories, will improve the technique’s precision as it vies for mainstream use. But even if it does become commonplace, it won’t solve all our volcanic woes.

“Volcanoes are super complex,” said Dr. Rosas-Carbajal. Their labyrinthine innards and complex chemistries mean their magma will occasionally evade even the savviest of detectors. Unpredictable eruptions will remain a fact of life, no matter how well scientists wield the magic of muons.

And muography is unlikely to make obsolete the other various instruments used to study volcanoes, like seismic waves and satellite observation. “It may not replace existing techniques,” said Vitaly Kudryavtsev, a particle physicist at the University of Sheffield who was not involved with the study. “But it may complement them.”

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A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 16, 2021, Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Molten Innards: To Get a Glimpse Inside a Volcano, Think Cosmically.