The NASA Earth Observatory Natural Hazards site frequently publishes satellite images of volcanic activity: Kilauea, Karymsky, Rabaul and Anatahan are among the volcanoes recently featured. There’s been nothing so far, however, to match the stunning image of Chaitén volcano in eruption which has just been released. As it’s a public domain image I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it, slightly reduced, below, and excerpting a close-up of Chaitén volcano itself from the full-size version of the image.

The picture was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite at 16:35 UTC on 3 May 2008. The plume can be seen stretching south-east from Chaitén itself (in the top-left of the image), right across the width of Chile and Argentina and into the South Atlantic Ocean.

To see the original image on the NASA Earth Observatory web site, click here. A large version of the image can be accessed directly by clicking here (jpeg, 3200 x 2400 pixels, 1.07MB).

Above: the eruption plume from Chaitén can be seen flowing south-east away from the volcano across the whole width of South America, to disperse over Golfo San Jorge on the Argentine coast. (NASA Earth Observatory image: source)

Above: a close-up, taken from NASA’s original large image, of the Chaitén region, showing the eruption plume ascending from the caldera and blowing away to the south-east. The thin dark line on the left is the Pacific coast of Chile; the similar line on the right is the Chile/Argentina border. (NASA Earth Observatory image: source)

For all our Chaitén coverage: Chaitén << The Volcanism Blog