[I don't posts links anymore when we can as well google the text, since the comment will be hung up for moderation.]

Otherwise contact your local museum or astronomy department at your local University.

Anyway, one property of regolith is that it takes footprints very accurately, due to the un-weathered, pointy, prickly nature of the powder at a microscopic level.

Does ashfall take perfect footprints like regolith?

GAry 7

I hope more sites like Big Picture are created. Wonderful!

So glad she has her priorities straight.

Cairnos, I would! But then, I want to be a volcanologist, so…

Menyambal, me too. To see stuff in such beautifully minute detail that, until very very recently, was buried halfway across the world… just amazing.

Friction? I don’t think so. That would require dissimilar materials.

Which we have, likely heterogenous rocks dissolved into the heated lava column, but also ice and water for Mt Redoubt.

While the friction ionization hypothesis appears to me to be dominant on the web (and should be a null scenario vs standard lightning models), there are articles that may support other forms of charge separation as well. Apparently early lightning can be observed:

“The radio receivers at multiple stations pick up the impulses, and the researchers can use them to pinpoint where the lightning occurred in a cloud based on when the impulses arrived at each station, similar to the way seismologists find the epicenter of an earthquake.

“So we can get a picture, in 3-D, of what the lightning looks like inside the cloud,” Thomas said.

Two phases

The lightning in a volcanic eruption occurs because the ash and other debris blasting out of the volcano are highly charged.

Though lightning was known to occur in the debris clouds above the volcano, the researchers found an earlier phase of volcanic lightning that had never before been observed and occurred right at the volcano’s mouth just as it began erupting. The details of the study are described in the Jan. 23 issue of the journal Science.

Thomas described this phase as “big sparks maybe going just from the mouth of the volcano up into the column that’s shooting out of the volcano, and then some lightning that went upward from the top of the volcano up into the cloud that was forming.”

As the debris cloud gathered over the volcano, lightning began to form in the cloud itself.

“That lightning up in the big cloud is much like thunderstorm lightning, with lots of branches and lashing about for about half a second like it does in the thunderstorm,” Thomas told LiveScience. [...]

Thomas suspects that the occurrence of lightning could have to do with the strength of the eruption and the type of volcano. Stronger eruptions produced more highly charged debris and so may produce more lightning.

“In other big eruptions, it seems to be pretty common,” Thomas said.

Volcanoes like those in Hawaii, which for now produce only lava flows, he said, likely do not generate any lightning.”

But the main claim seems to be that no one knows yet what is causing it.

Science is frakking amazing.

So are scientists.

I missed out on seeing the lightning in an eruption cloud though; on one field trip I stayed behind to check instruments instead of going on a flight to survey the volcano – and the volcano put on a great show that day. I’d been to the volcano twice in that week but never got to see an eruption with the lightning.

@ j/p=?

That’s just… Oh, that’s… Oh…dear oh dear oh dear. :O