I expected that at least one of the many active volcanoes on caldera-ridden Kyushu would land on the New Decade Volcano Program at Volcano Café, though I wasn’t sure which it would be: Aira, Aso, or one of the less-publicized ones. This weekend NDVP #4 turned out to be the Aso Caldera and, yes, it is potentially extremely nightmarish.
There are three more to go. From the comments to the Café post:
BillG: So this is #4…. I can’t imagine there are three worse scenarios..
Henrik: Trust me Bill, there are. One marginally more so, one decidedly worse and the final one so utterly mind-blowing that eventually Hollywood will make a blockbuster movie of it.
I would guess that one of those three is either Campi Flegrei or Vesuvius; the other two, I have no idea. I note that five of the volcanoes announced in the NDVP so far are in Asia and none in South America, and there are a lot of interesting mountains and lakes in Central and South America.
You can watch the Nakadake crater at Aso at the JMA site. The link to the camera is highlighted here (“Aso grass Chisato,” according to Giggle Translate):
You can usually see a plume of steam and gasses when the weather is clear, and occasionally some incandescence.
Update (9/13/15): Aso had a bit of a cough today (or tomorrow, depending on which side of the International Date Line you’re on).
Update II (9/18/15): … and coming in at #3, it’s Campi Flegrei.
I doubt they’ll pick Vesuvius. This seems to be intended to be an alternative to the official list of “Decade volcanoes”, and Vesuvius is on that list.
(But I could be wrong. They included Taal, and it’s also on the list of Decade Volcanoes.)
The compilers did admit that at least one volcano on the original list is also on the new list, and I will be astonished if something in the neighborhood of Naples isn’t included near the top of the list. I think the Phlegraean Fields or Ischia (which I should have mentioned) are more likely candidates, but I can’t rule out Vesuvius.
Carl and Henrik have both specified that anything in their list will need to meet the “MDE” criteria. Capable of generating a million deaths if things go wrong in a bad way. Carl has written on Ischia in the past, so I imagine that your supposition about the Naples area showing up is a pretty good bet, though I do not have an inside track of what Carl and Henrik are up to with the list.
I was expecting Iwo-Jima. I was wrong again.
I agree that something in the vicinity of the Bay of Naples would seem likely (or the whole enchilada) would be likely but they specifically stated that they were looking at developing countries….and then went with Japan because the potential for this one to kill LOTS of people is just so horrific. .
Not terribly likely, but in the U.S., Mono-Inyo or Clear Lake might be candidates since I’ve seen them both described as similar to what some vulcanologists think Long Valley was before it went “poof!” Mono-Inyo is also rumbbly.
Well.
Today’s remedial lesson in social media participation is that I should always re-read my comments and see if their sentences are diagram-able before hitting “post”.