Being in a research group who's current main priority is paleoclimate and the interactions of climate and natural disasters on carbonate systems in Indonesia, its reasonably understanding that we've been rather excited about whats been happening in Indonesia over the last couple of weeks.
At first it wasn't the volcano that gripped the group but rather the tsunami. The Mentawai Islands where the earthquake struck hardest are part of the group's coral field-area. Which is reasonably distressing when you come into contact with the locals there reasonably regularly. In pure science terms, its a great opportunity and the likely located of the group's 2012 field-trip. There'll be a new PhD student arriving early next year to the group, also from the UK(!) whose job it'll be to see if the corals in the area record a record of these tsunami generating earthquakes. Its an exciting project, and I'll guess we'll know the answer in four years time!
As time has gone on though, the Mt. Merapi eruption has got more and more severe, and the exclusion zone has widened and widened and we're seeing widespread covering of the local vegetation in ash. Whilst not in my field-area, how this ash, and the vegetation destruction leaves a chemical signature in the groundwaters and consequently speleothems in such an area is very much what I'm working on. Exciting, if dangerous times!
And whilst these disasters are always tragic, they do make the science more exciting and hopefully our work will go a small way to helping in the future.
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