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Fogo eruption intesifies – lava flow destroys Portela, reaches Bangaeira

fogo-eruption-intesifies-lava-flow-destroys-portela-reaches-bangaeira

Eruption of Fogo volcano intensified on Saturday, December 6, and destroyed almost the whole village of Portela. According to news reports, the lava flow has now reached Bangaeira, a village downslope of Portela.

Authorities ordered full evacuation of the area, however, one of the main access roads was again destroyed by the lava flows making evacuations difficult.

The new lava flow advanced at about 30 meters per hour on Saturday. Compared to the slowly advancing lava from the last week, the current flow is much more fluid which makes the front of the new outbreak advance at a higher speed. 

Geologic summary

The island of Fogo consists of a single massive stratovolcano that is the most prominent of the Cape Verde Islands. The roughly circular 25-km-wide island is truncated by a large 9-km-wide caldera that is breached to the east and has a headwall 1 km high. The caldera is located asymmetrically NE of the center of the island and was formed as a result of massive lateral collapse of the ancestral Monte Armarelo edifice.

YouTube video

​Fogo volcano eruption on November 28, 2014. Courtesy of Involcan

A very youthful steep-sided central cone, Pico, rises more than 1 km above the caldera floor to about 100 m above the caldera rim, forming the 2829 m high point of the island. Pico, which is capped by a 500-m-wide, 150-m-deep summit crater, was apparently in almost continuous activity from the time of Portuguese settlement in 1500 CE until around 1760. Later historical lava flows, some from vents on the caldera floor, reached the eastern coast below the breached caldera. (GVP)

Featured image: Fogo's lava flow on December 7, 2014. Image credit: Involcan

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One Comment

  1. I suspect that you will find interesting a hypothesis that most of the large lava flows on Earth and Mars result from disruption of the crust at the antipode (opposite side of a sphere) from a huge meteorite impact. You may see it discussed in http://charles_w.tripod.com/antipode.html for Earth and http://charles_w.tripod.com/dweber/mars_volcanos/mars_volcanos2.html for Mars.
    The chance that there would be a lava flow at the antipode of each of the large known meteorite impact sites of the same age by sheer coincidence is extremely small.
    .
    Sincerely, Charles Weber

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