Kaboom in Alaska!
Alaska's Mount Redoubt Volcano has gone kablooey.
To be more accurate it has blown its top FIVE times.
The volcano, 106 miles southwest of Anchorage, has errupted big time, sending a cloud of volcanic ash to a height of 50,000ft.
Scientists monitoring Redoubt first detected a rise in seismic activity last week when a small explosion produced a plume of gas and ash that rose to about 15,000ft.
Ash from Alaska's volcanos is like a rock fragment with jagged edges and has been used as an industrial abrasive. It can injure skin, eyes and breathing passages.
Luckily, the ash fall so far has been very light but flights have been cancelled between Anchorage and Fairbanks as planes do not get on very well with the dust.
Just check out the tale of British Airways Flight 9 which includes one of the finest examples of a stiff-upper lip ever.
Quote from Captain Moody to his passengers: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress."
What a guy!
Weird Science Factoid: In space, astronauts cannot cry properly, because there is no gravity, so the tears can't flow down their faces. No-one could hear you blubber anyway.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
