Adventures in Isahaya

"You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes" - Winnie the Pooh

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名前:
場所: Burnt Hills, New York, United States

I'm a SAHM to a little girl born October 2003, a little boy born August 2006 and another little boy born January 2012.

土曜日, 4月 09, 2005

Mount Unzen Disaster

Turns out we're only about 50km from a volcano. It's pretty. We called it Mount Snowy Top all winter (when the clouds let us see it).

Back in the early 90s, it erupted. Naturally, it caused quite the stir. The pyroclastic flow was surprisingly slow so they were able to get most of the people in its path evacuated. They lost homes and buildings, but those can be rebuilt.

Well, apparently pyroclastic flow shouldn't be slow. Volcanologists from around the globe came to check it out. They went up the mountain to look. Chrys has been told it was about 95% of them, the best in the world. They studied it and were surprised. They couldn't figure it out. Apparently Mother Nature took the hint while they were up there looking around and sped things up. Next thing you know, 95% of the world's volcanologists aren't around anymore and they're calling up the last 5% to come study what happened. Hmmmm...

In Japan, this warrants the label "disaster" and the dedication of a museum. The museum is in the path of the flow from the last eruption. If I understand correctly, it's built on 'reclaimed land' that resulted from the lava flow into the ocean. You can look up the mountain from the museum and see the walls they erected to direct the flow to that very spot. Hmmmm, again...

They've got interesting information about volcanoes, in general. They've got a HUGE pop-up book on volcanoes. They've got a strip of devastated land down the center with lights that depict the flow rate of the lava - this 'erupts' every 10 minutes or so. They've got another area with various lava destroyed debris. I believe the center strip and the area with debris are actual pieces of land that were isolated and "preserved." (They seem to be big on showing what the actual land looked like before they restored it - Unzen, bomb museum. Interesting.) They have a movie showing the eruption with moving floors, but Roo couldn't go in because she didn't meet the height requirement. They have an outside area with pieces of a redirected stream/river and some of the lava rocks for viewing - very pretty.