Roars from the Mountain: Colonial Management of the 1951 Volcanic Disaster at Mount Lamington

Johnson, R. Wally

doi:10.22459/rm.2020

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…The Lamington eruption, therefore, was labelled as peléean, a type of volcanic eruption not yet recognised in the Rabaul area and one quite different to those of 1937-43. Taylor soon established an effective working relationship with the administration officers-including the administrator himself-all of whom came into the Lamington area as part of the post-disaster rescue and relief effort, as described in greater detail elsewhere by Johnson (2020). BMR geologist John G. Best visited Taylor in the Lamington area but soon moved to Rabaul where he ran the volcanological service in Taylor's absence as part of the administration's resident staff.…”

Section: Influence Of the Mount Lamington Eruption 1951mentioning

confidence: 99%

Return to Volcano Town: Reassessing the 1937–1943 Volcanic Eruptions at Rabaul

Johnson,

Threlfall

2023

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This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence.The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU PressFront cover: This photograph of simultaneous eruptions at Vulcan (left) and Tavurvur volcanoes, Rabaul, was taken from Nangananga village by Torsten Blackwood overlooking Karavia Bay on 22 September 1994 (see Figure 8.3 for further details). The statue is of a tubuan (masked ritual figure) called 'Ia Patarai' from the Ralalar Clan who handed over this piece of land to the Catholic Church in 1882. The Nangananga Monument was built in 1982 to mark 100 years of the Catholic Church in the Rabaul area . The transaction from the Catholic Church to the Ralalar Clan was made using traditional Tolai shell money (tabu) and is acknowledged by the Christian cross on top of the tubuan statue. This information on the Nangananga Monument was kindly provided by Steven and Jennifer Gagau, Robin Bangin and Ia Kaum.

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Section: Influence Of the Mount Lamington Eruption 1951mentioning

confidence: 99%

Return to Volcano Town: Reassessing the 1937–1943 Volcanic Eruptions at Rabaul

Johnson,

Threlfall

2023

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“…Transition from the pre-climactic vulcanian activity to the climactic explosion occurred suddenly at 10:40 am on January 21 (Taylor, 1958;Johnson, 2013Johnson, , 2020. The long continuous roar which with time increased in volume was heard during the first 3-4 min in Issivita and black cloud whirling was seen in Sangara.…”

Section: The January 21 Climactic Explosion and Pdcmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 1951 eruption of Mount Lamington, Papua New Guinea: Devastating directed blast triggered by small-scale edifice failure

Belousov

Belousova

Hoblitt

et al. 2020

Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research

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The catastrophic explosion of Mount Lamington volcano, Papua New Guinea on January 21, 1951 produced a devastating pyroclastic density current (PDC) that knocked down dense tropical rainforest over an area of 230 km 2 and killed approximately 3000 people. We present results of a field reinvestigation of the 1951 PDC deposit combined with an analysis of the available photographs and eyewitness accounts of the eruption first published in the fundamental work of G. A. M. Taylor (1958). We have concluded that the six-days-long pre-climactic activity before the 1951 eruption (which included felt local seismicity, frequent ash-laden explosions of vulcanian type, bulging of the volcano slope accompanied with landslides) was associated with shallow-level intrusion of a highly viscous magma body (cryptodome/ dome) of andesitic composition with a volume of approximately 0.01 km 3. This intrusion destabilized Mount Lamington's prehistoric intra-crater lava dome. On January 21 the destabilized dome gravitationally collapsed and produced a relatively small-volume debris avalanche, the deposit of which was not recognized during Taylor's original investigation. The debris avalanche had a volume of approximately 0.02-0.04 km 3 , travelled a distance (L) of 8.5 km and had the ratio of vertical drop (H) to runout (L) of 0.14. The edifice collapse decompressed the intruding cryptodome and triggered its explosive fragmentation. Photographs of the climactic explosion show that the eruptive cloud initially rose vertically but subsequently collapsed upon the terrain around the vent, and formed a PDC which flowed radially outward. The enhanced northward propagation of the PDC to a maximum distance of 13 km reveals that the northern breach in the ancient crater's high walls influenced the distribution of the deposit. In the studied NE-N-NW sector of the devastated area, in the zone proximal to the volcano, the PDC emplaced a normally graded layer of coarse ash and lapilli mixed in the base with picked-up soil and plant fragments. The layer gradually becomes thinner and finergrained with distance from the volcano. The PDC deposit has a volume of approximately 0.025 km 3 and consists of approximately 80% juvenile rock fragments derived from the explosively fragmented cryptodome. The remaining 20% consists of accidental clasts derived from the old volcanic edifice. The juvenile material is crystalrich andesite with a unimodal vesicularity distribution (4 to 36%). The reconstructed eruption sequence, the PDC tree blowdown pattern and characteristics of the PDC deposit are similar to those of catastrophic laterallydirected blasts of volcanoes Bezymianny in 1956, Mount St.Helens in 1980, and Soufriere Hills, Montserrat in 1997. In contrast to the cases of these "classic" lateral blasts, the blast cloud of Lamington was initially vertically-directed before collapsing to produce a PDC. We speculate that the climactic explosion of Mount Lamington was initially vertical because the rupture surface of the triggering sector collapse intersected the ...

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“…Although Lamington had been recognised by van Bemmelen (1939) as an active volcano, the VEI 4 eruption caught the local population by surprise since they did not know Lamington was a volcano (Johnson 2013). As a result, people attributed the signs of unrest and volcanic activity that preceded the paroxysmal phase to religious origins or warlike explosions, and the blast killed approximately 3000 people (Johnson 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is the probability of unexpected eruptions from potentially active volcanoes or regions?

Burgos

Jenkins

Newhall³

et al. 2022

Bull Volcanol

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Since the start of the twentieth century, 101 potentially active volcanoes have produced their first Holocene eruption, as recorded in the volcanoes of the world (VOTW) database. The reactivation of potentially active volcanoes is often a surprise, since they tend to be less well-studied and unmonitored. The first step towards preparing for these unexpected eruptions is to establish how often potentially active volcanoes have erupted in the past. Here, we use our previously developed FRESH (First Recorded EruptionS in the Holocene) database to estimate the past regional Average Recurrence Interval (ARI) of these unexpected events. Within the most complete portions of the FRESH database, a FRESH (i.e., the first recorded eruption from a potentially active volcano) has occurred as frequently as every ~ 7 years in the Pacific Ocean region (~ 50 years of relatively complete record) and ~ 8 years in Izu, Volcano, and the Mariana Islands region (~ 150 years of relatively complete record). We use the regional frequency to estimate the annual probability of a FRESH at individual potentially active volcanoes in selected regions of Asia–Pacific, which ranged from 0.003 for Izu, Volcano, and Mariana Islands to 1.35 × 10−5 for Luzon. Population exposure around potentially active volcanoes showed that at volcanoes such as Kendeng (Indonesia) and Laguna Caldera (Philippines), more than 30 million people reside within 100 km of the summit. With this work, we hope to establish how often potentially active volcanoes erupt, while identifying which regions and which potentially active volcanoes may require more attention.

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Roars from the Mountain: Colonial Management of the 1951 Volcanic Disaster at Mount Lamington

Cited by 5 publications

References 47 publications

Return to Volcano Town: Reassessing the 1937–1943 Volcanic Eruptions at Rabaul

Return to Volcano Town: Reassessing the 1937–1943 Volcanic Eruptions at Rabaul

The 1951 eruption of Mount Lamington, Papua New Guinea: Devastating directed blast triggered by small-scale edifice failure

What is the probability of unexpected eruptions from potentially active volcanoes or regions?

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