Kamchatca Kuril Islands Volcano Raikoke Erupted On The Longest Day Of The Year

Will it’s iron-rich ash, now falling on the North Pacific, be manna from heaven for all of ocean life?

The dust will convert the dying clear blue ocean desert into a flourishing garden of Eden

Billions of baby fish that were sure to starve will now be treated to a feast.

Raikoke Volcano on the Kuril Islands very rarely erupts, most recently it did so 95 years ago in 1924 and before that back in 1778.  But this blessed eruption began at 4 am June 22, 2019 as a vast plume of ash and volcanic gases shot up from this sleeping giant. Many satellites— as well as astronauts on the International Space Station (that’s their photo above) — observed as a thick dusty cloud rose nearly 10 miles into the air and then streamed east as it was pulled into the circulation of a storm in the North Pacific. We are watching to see if this volcano brings life to the ocean as so many in the past have.

“What a spectacular image. ” said Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Tech.

Heavy ash falling from the eruption has already spread over 30,000-50,000 km2 of the western Pacific. This ash fall could not have come at a better time nor in a better place to assist the many species of salmon that spawn in the rivers of far eastern Russia. The far northern summer growing season has just started and now their ocean pastures are almost certain to respond to the mineral-rich ash. They will now become a spectacular and long-lived ocean pasture bloom of plankton.

Billions of baby salmon that have hatched and reared in the rivers and are just now making their way out of the Okhotsk Sea into the vast North Pacific Ocean pastures. The question of whether they starve or survive is dependent on the plankton blooms. This year instead of mostly starving they will be treated to a feast.

Volcanic ash carries iron that is missing in the sea, feeding ocean pastures, making them rich and green. That lush green plankton, like grass of pastures or forests on land, is made of CO2 scrubbed out of the air by photosynthesis and made into ocean plant life. Previous research suggested that early 21st century eruptions might explain up to a third of recent slowing global warming effects but this new research shows the effect is even greater.Click to read more

Mother Nature is doing what she can to sustain her oceans.

At times her blessed help comes in the form of volcanoes that explode with the power of a thousand H-Bombs. Volcanoes like the one erupting now along Russia’s North Pacific Coast have at times been Pacific salmon’s saviors.  Raikoke is just such a miracle of Nature. It is sending its life-giving dust at just the right time and place.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired the second image on the morning of June 22. At the time, the most concentrated ash was on the western edge of the plume, above Raikoke. An oblique, composite view based on data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP, shows the plume a few hours later. After an initial surge of activity that included several distinct explosive pulses, activity subsided and strong winds spread the ash across the Pacific. By the next day, just a faint remnant of the ash remained visible to MODIS.

Tens of thousands of km2 of Russia’s ocean salmon pastures are receiving manna from heaven in the form of mineral-rich dust from Raikoke. Hundreds of millions of fish, and I, are singing in joy.

There is good cause for optimism and hope regarding this volcanic eruption.

That hope is supported by two dusting events of recent years where the fish were helped and came back, not at recent decades near-extinction levels, but rather in historic abundance!  The first of these two recent events took place in the late summer of 2008. A near-by volcano on the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, Kasatochi, erupted and for a few days sent a similar plume of ash to the south-east onto the salmon pastures of the NE Pacific. This is certain proof that volcano bring life.

Kasatochi volcanic bloom – plankton blooming in the NE Pacific – top image is 2007 without volcanic ash – bottom image shows same ocean pasture after the 2008 clouds of life-giving dust

The North Pacific is legendary for being enshrouded in clouds most of the year and almost no one took note of the eruption. Only a few satellite glimpses of the effect of the Kasatochi volcanic ash were seen. But within weeks the NE Pacific ocean pastures produced a richly nourishing and vast bloom of plankton.

As there were no researchers working in the region no oceanographic research boats went out to study the dusted and thriving ocean pasture. But for the ocean observatory satellite fleet, the bloom might have been missed. We now know the Kasatochi bloom captured hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2, converting these deadly fossil fuel/fool age emissions into life itself.

Two years later, 2010, in Western Canada the government had commissioned a Royal Commission to investigate why the iconic Sockeye Salmon of British Columbia seemed to be nearing extinction. All of the experts had, in sworn testimony before the judge, forecast that only 1.2 million of the gorgeous scarlet Sockeye salmon would return from their NE Pacific salmon pastures to spawn that year. News reports were non-stop doom and gloom.

Salmon pay no attention to the judge

While Canadian Supreme Court Justice Cohen was commanding experts to try to find the reason for the demise of salmon something completely unexpected, and wonderful, happened. By the way, Judge Cohen ended up spending more than $37 million on his hearings which did absolutely nothing to help the salmon whose real crisis is they are starving at sea. Read the Cohen report here.

But what did the fish have to say.

Instead of the disastrous 1 million Sockeye expected, upwards of 40 million of the beautiful fish returned to the Fraser River at Vancouver, British Columbia while Judge Cohen was listening to his witnesses and experts. This was a return of Sockeye not at near-extinction levels but in numbers equal to the largest returns of salmon in all of history. Those fish survived and thrived as abundant dusted ocean pastures and  plankton repurposed hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 into becoming new life in the oceans. It was an inspiring moment, I even wrote a song and produced a video with musician friends about the miracle of the volcanic salmon – 40 Million Salmon Can’t Be Wrong.

It’s not a new idea, Mother Nature has been dusting her ocean pastures forever… This fabulous painting by my dear friend, artist Leanne Hodges, took my description of an image in my mind’s eye and made it last forever. Keep this image in your own mind’s eye as an inspiration and intention to help restore the ocean pastures to health and abundance!

Volcanoes Only Rarely Dust The Ocean At The Right Time and Place

Two earlier volcanic eruptions that dusted the eastern Pacific where I did my work at the perfect time and place so that their ash fell on ocean pastures that would put the ash minerals to good use. One was in the early 1950s and the other in the 1920s. Such perfectly timed volcanic dustings are few and far between. Tragically the NE Pacific ocean salmon pasture has once again fallen into a terrible state of collapse, last year, 2015, saw the lowest number of Sockeye salmon return to the Fraser River ever, even worse than the near-extinction event levels that had resulted in the Royal Commission of 2010.

Can we become like Mother Nature

Following the record volcanic salmon return of 2010 my work which had begun years earlier to develop and delivery methods and technologies to restore ocean pastures around the world became even more focused on the North Pacific Salmon pastures. After years of work in collaboration with Canadian government ministries, scientists in academia, and native people in the region I was ready to try a grand experiment. If we dusted a large ocean pasture of some 10,000 km2 with vital mineral dust, would it safely and sustainably restore that ocean pasture? Was it possible to intentionally restore and revive such a vast pasture targeting salmon in the region and in doing so help the baby fish that inhabited that pasture to survive and thrive and swim back home to us in large numbers?

Restoring Life To A Dying Ocean

Deploying our MocNess multi-net plankton sampling net system from my research vessel Ocean Pearl, a task done many times every day and night to study our ocean pasture before, during, and after restoration

By July of 2012 I was ready, I had chartered a large fishing vessel – the Ocean Pearl, the same vessel frequently chartered by Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans to conduct research voyages in the NE Pacific. We loaded the Ocean Pearl with 100 tonnes of vital mineral-rich dust and set sail to a region of the Pacific hundreds of miles out to sea in the Gulf of Alaska. The home and pasture of both the Pink Salmon and Sockeye salmon. As we sprinkled our treasured load of ‘simulated volcanic ash’ onto our ocean pasture, over the course of two weeks the ocean turned from a lifeless blue to a life filled green. Some of my friends now refer to our dusting of that ocean pasture the volcano Russatochi 🙂

Where before our work we studied and collected a vast library of oceanographic data we observed precious few living things in that barren ocean pasture. We might see one or a few seabirds on any given day, but never large numbers. Every few days we saw one or perhaps at most two whales sending their misty spumes into the air. And we were fishing constantly as well as conducting extensive plankton trawls and data collection – very little life was apparent.

In the days and weeks that followed our success at creating a vast thriving ocean pasture blooming in abundance with all manner of plankton, everything changed. We began seeing seabirds, not in ones and twos, but numbering in the thousands perhaps tens of thousands. One particular morning I was on deck as the dawn was breaking and flying in great circles around the brightly illuminated ship were flocks of thousands of seabirds, their morning birdsong drowned out the roar of the ships mighty diesel engines. Every day we saw great herds of whales often counted by us by the score, not mere ones or twos.

One day the captain of the ship who in his early 70’s had spent 50 years in this ocean called me excitedly to the side window of the bridge deck. There he excitedly pointed to two mother Fin Whales with calves saying, “Look, look, they are coming right up to the side of the boat… look they are looking us right in the eye… they’re smiling at us.”  Fin whales are known as the shyest of all whales but these had decided we were their friends, after all, we had brought their ocean pasture to a condition of health and abundance rarely seen in recent decades.

We were able to catch salmon with fishing rods from the deck of the boat and even more surprisingly in this incredibly cold northern ocean, vast schools of albacore tuna arrived on my restored ocean pasture. My and their ocean world had become a ‘Garden of Eden.’ It was a humbling experience and I thought back to my tutorial by the master ocean scientist, John Martin, who proposed in the 1980’s that we not only could but must work to restore our dwindling ocean pastures.

What happened as a result of Russatochi?

click to read more

The year following my work to restore the salmon pastures of the NE Pacific the forecast for the catch of Pink Salmon, the most abundant of 5 species of salmon in Alaska, was that between 50-52 million ‘Pinks” would be caught. That prediction made everyone happy, it meant a very good catch!

But unexpectedly to most, there were a lot more of my pasture-fed Pink Salmon than the ‘authorities’ could ever know. When the fishing began it was immediately reported that the salmon were everywhere in never before seen abundance.

By the time the catch season had ended at least 226 million Pink salmon had swum into the nets and into the hands of Alaska fishers, fish processors, and into the mouths of both humans and marine life in the largest numbers in all of history.

Join me in cheering this Russian volcano on to deliver vital mineral micronutrient-rich ash to the dying ocean pastures of the NW Pacific.

GO GO GO RAIKOKE – BRING BACK THE FISH!

New volcanic eruption with massive ash plume in Papua New Guinea June 2019

UPDATE: 29 JUNE – Papua New Guinea, A second volcano on the island of Manam in the Madang Province began to erupt with a ‘thundering noise’ at around 1:00am Friday (local time). While the pair of PNG volcanoes now active are sending ash plumes into the air the winds are taking the ash across the major landmass of PNG where almost all is settling. There is unlikely to be much ocean pasture mineral nourishment from these eruptions. For the ocean pastures, new life from volcanoes (or man) requires the right time and place.

UPDATE: Following communication with satellite operators and scientists the eruption and dust of the NW Pacific by Raikoke is now of the watch list. That part of the world is very cloudy, but if the clouds part we are at the ready to gather the ocean color images that define how the ash is helping the ocean plankton grow. Check back from time to time as soon as we get a lucky break in the clouds and satellite image I’ll be posting it here.