Mt. Cleveland is a 1730-m-high volcano in the Aleutian Islands. It is also known as Chuginadak, in reference to the Aleut Goddess of Fire. Cleveland has many historical records of eruptions, with the most recent large eruption occurring in 2001. Smaller explosive events have occurred since then, including on four occasions so far during 2006. The latest event occurred this past weekend (28 Oct 2006).

The KMZ file is an isosurface model of one of these explosions that occurred on 6 Feb 2006. The model is based on data measured from satellite monitoring of the volcano and use of ash-dispersion simulation programs. A photograph of a similar eruption, on 23 May 2006, was captured by astronauts on the international space station:

Examples of the use of Google Earth for volcano monitoring along with many other uses by scientists can be seen at the virtual globes sessions at AGU in San Francisco, CA , December 12-14.

Presenters include members of the Google Earth and Maps development teams, and Google Earth Community's Valery Hronusov (Valery35).

JB

Note: KMZ uses time-tags. Set the time slider to the minimum possible width.