Sunday, April 18, 2010

Molten Lava? Freakin' AWESOME!

In honor of the current volcanic eruption in Iceland, and because I think molten lava is beautiful, I am watching volcanoes explode on YouTube.

Here is some cool footage from an old 70s documentary. Check out those plumes!




And here's one with lava and explosions and cool sound effects, shpluck shpluck, gloop gloop hiss. And French, should you know any French.



This one, of the actual current eruption, just shows a big plume of smoke. Kinda boring. Proof why I am not a scientist, if you needed any --- I just want the flashy stuff and don't care how it works.



What I really want is for a cameraman to be engulfed by the flowing lava so I can understand just how hot it is. Surely that's not too much to ask? Maybe we can draft unemployed humanities PhDs for the purpose --- prove that we can be educational and entertaining at the same time. (Lions in the Coliseum are just too too passe.)

Now I am off to find videos of volcanoes exploding underwater. I was looking for them a couple years ago but YouTube didn't have very much. I watched a documentary once back in high school and loved it. I could just loop the footage and stare at it all day and meditate. I think you have to search under some variant of "popcorn." Ahh, beautiful! With a properly arty classical music soundtrack, it becomes like kinetic sculpture.

2 comments:

Tree of Knowledge said...

Try the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park website: http://www.nps.gov/havo/photosmultimedia/multimedia.htm

And they have webcam footage of current eruptions. Of course, those don't work at night.

Sisyphus said...

Ooo!