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Some updates on current volcanic activity worldwide:

On April 13, Poás in Costa Rica had its largest explosive eruption in years. The explosion was mainly driven by waterheated at the summit crater lake/vent area, generating what is called a “phreatic” eruption. Although water turning to steam is the main player, these explosions can still produce plumes that reach over 1 kilometer (~3200 feet). This eruption at Poás did just that, with plumes 500-1000 meters tall. News reports also mentioned ash fall in the surrounding region, incandescent blocks suggesting magma relatively close to the surface, and boulders two meters wide being thrown from the lake vent. (They broke the floor at the Poas visitor’s center!) Passengers on a flight out of San Jose got quite a view of the eruption. You can watch video of the eruption that was captured by the webcam at Poás. The eruptions have continued, with another blast on April 18.

The fossil fuel fight goes on for USC scientists as they develop a new method for creating reversible hydrogen storage based on methanol, with no carbon emissions, in the last major paper co-authored by USC’s first Nobel laureate, the late George Olah.

Confronting evidence that the global climate is changing rapidly relative to historical trends, researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new statistical model that, when applied to the loblolly pine tree populations in the southeastern United States, will benefit forest landowners and the forest industry in future decades. The research, titled “Optimal Seed Deployment Under Climate Change Using Spatial Models: Application to Loblolly Pine in the Southeastern US” appears in the Journal of The American Statistical Association.

A new study, supported by the Minamata Convention’s Interim Secretariat hosted by UN Environment, reveals that women of childbearing age living in four Pacific Island countries have elevated levels of mercury in their bodies. Mercury monitoring in women of childbearing age in the Asia and the Pacific Region, jointly conducted by the interim secretariat of the Minamata Convention, Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI), and the global NGO network IPEN, examined hair samples from women aged 18 - 44 from Cook Islands, Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and Kiribati, and two landlocked Asian countries, Tajikistan and Nepal. The study found 96 percent of the women sampled from the Pacific Islands contained significantly elevated hair mercury levels. Researchers hypothesized that the Pacific Island participants may have a higher mercury body burden than other locations due to their relatively high consumption of predatory fish species shown to have elevated mercury concentrations in previous studies

High concentrations of tiny pollution particles near the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the western United States invigorate cloud formation and boost snowfall on the mountains, according to a new study by scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and their collaborators at Colorado State University.