This high-resolution, natural-color satellite image shows details of the roiling plume of Eritrea’s Nabro Volcano. The thick plume obscures the site of the eruption, and most of Nabro’s 8-kilometer (5-mile) wide caldera. The bright white color of the plume indicates it contains a large amount of water vapor, with a slight blue tinge that hints at the presence of sulfur dioxide. Measurements from the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) aboard the European Space Agency’s MetOp-A satellite confirm sulfur dioxide from the plume over Northeast Africa and the Middle East.
This image was acquired by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite on June 14, 2011. Nabro began erupting for the first time in recorded history on June 12th. Satellite observations a day later revealed the exact site of the eruption.
References & Resources
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data. Caption by Robert Simmon.
