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As midnight is approaching: Happy New 2021


Ssnake

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3 hours ago, Soren Ras said:

You are clearly a hopeless optimist.

He has reason to be. As 2021 turns into a bloodbath, many of those city folk escaping London will pass through Stuart's quaint, murderous small town. He's probably been hoarding willow branches for years in anticipation of urban exodus.

 

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2021 starting off with a bang?

https://www.sciencealert.com/carribbean-people-warned-to-ready-for-evacuation-as-decades-dormant-volcano-springs-to-life
 

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Residents of St. Vincent and the Grenadines have been told to remain alert after a Caribbean volcano came back to life.

La Soufrière is the highest point in St. Vincent and is located near the northern tip of the country but remained dormant for decades before beginning to spew ash on Tuesday this week, AP reported.

 

 

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1 minute ago, Ivanhoe said:

Those unhappy volcanoes: 

La Soufrière ... a 1902 eruption led to 1,600 deaths.

Mount Pelée also erupted in 1902 and killed almost 30,000 people, making it the deadliest eruption in the whole of the 20th century.

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La Soufrière is fairly active, it seems to go off at least once a century (1718, 1812, 1902, 1979) and the eruption in 1902 probably should be considered part of the same eruption that hit Martinique (Mt Pelèe), given that they happened simultaneously and are part of the same fault line.  The 1979 eruption did not appear to have any companion effects on other nearby islands, so hopefully it is the same this time.

We really don't need another major eruption down there. Population of Fort de France on Martinique (under the shadow of Mt Pelèe) is 80.000+ these days and there are close to 400.000 people on the whole island, whereas in 1902 there were IIRC appx 50.000 inhabitants on the island, 30.000 of which lived in Fort de France, nearly all of which died.

I remember as a bored child one summer discovering that my grandparents had a magazine with a series of articles covering the 1902 Pelèe eruption (some of them deliciously lurid) and one of them covered the sudden onset of all the wildlife (insects and snakes) fleeing the mountain just prior to the eruption, which apparently included some impressive centipedes and vipers that killed a number of domestic animals and possibly even some people (that imagery was too good to check, so I don't know how true that last bit was, but as a kid I was thrilled to read that kind of stuff on a sunny summer's day in boring Denmark).

--

Soren

 

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3 hours ago, Soren Ras said:

La Soufrière is fairly active, it seems to go off at least once a century (1718, 1812, 1902, 1979) and the eruption in 1902 probably should be considered part of the same eruption that hit Martinique (Mt Pelèe), given that they happened simultaneously and are part of the same fault line.  The 1979 eruption did not appear to have any companion effects on other nearby islands, so hopefully it is the same this time.

We really don't need another major eruption down there. Population of Fort de France on Martinique (under the shadow of Mt Pelèe) is 80.000+ these days and there are close to 400.000 people on the whole island, whereas in 1902 there were IIRC appx 50.000 inhabitants on the island, 30.000 of which lived in Fort de France, nearly all of which died.

I remember as a bored child one summer discovering that my grandparents had a magazine with a series of articles covering the 1902 Pelèe eruption (some of them deliciously lurid) and one of them covered the sudden onset of all the wildlife (insects and snakes) fleeing the mountain just prior to the eruption, which apparently included some impressive centipedes and vipers that killed a number of domestic animals and possibly even some people (that imagery was too good to check, so I don't know how true that last bit was, but as a kid I was thrilled to read that kind of stuff on a sunny summer's day in boring Denmark).

--

Soren

 

Me too, Mount Pelé was a terrible, fascinating thing, a modern equivalent of Pompeii, with one survivor being a guy that was in jail and which was saved from the pyroclastic flow because he was in jail! The Spanish wiki entry is as lurid as it gets...

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