NASA / EO-1 / USGS

This view of Tolbachik Volcano on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula was captured in infrared and visible light on Dec. 1 by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA's Earth Observing 1 satellite. The infrared readings in red highlight hot lava flows from the volcano.

Smoke and lava issue forth from Russia's Tolbachik Volcano in a pair of pictures from NASA's Earth Observing 1 satellite. What a difference in the perspectives!

The visible-light view from EO-1's Advanced Land Imager, captured on Dec. 1, shows billows of ash and steam, with a stream of dark lava cutting across the landscape.

In contrast, the infrared-plus-visible view reveals a nightmarish red river, running through a bilious green landscape. This version of the scene gets its eerie look from the false colors used to represent different wavelengths in the infrared part of the spectrum. The blood-red shade reflects the high surface temperatures of the lava, while the shades of green signify colder surroundings on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

A similar infrared-plus-visible image comes from the ASTER instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite. The ASTER image, our third view of Tolbachik's hell, combines a picture of the volcano from July 19 with fresh infrared data from Dec. 3 showing the lava flow.

The outburst marked Tolbachik's return to active status after 36 years of dormancy. The lava flows reportedly destroyed two research camps and forced school closures in nearby villages. Some experts worry that Tolbachik could unleash an eruption as powerful as Eyjafjallajökull's Icelandic blast, which disrupted trans-Atlantic air traffic for weeks back in 2010.

In the past few days, Russian authorities have downgraded Tolbachik's alert status from red to orange. Nevertheless, the mountain bears watching: Denison University volcanologist Erik Klemetti is monitoring the situation on his Eruptions blog.

NASA / EO-1 / USGS

The visible-light view from NASA's EO-1 satellite shows Tolbachik's lava flow as a river of darkness cutting through the snowy scene.

NASA / GSFC / METI / ERSDAC / JAROS via AFP

A false-color view from the ASTER imager on NASA's Terra satellite shows the Tolbachik Volcano and its surroundings in infrared and visible wavelengths. A scene from July 19 provides the background, with vegetation in red, older lava flows in dark gray and snow in white. A nighttime thermal infrared image, acquired Dec. 3, has been overlaid on the earlier image and highlights the hot lava flows in bright yellow.

More vistas from space:

• 2012 Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar
• Day 1: A fantastic Chinese fan
• Day 2: Satellite shows a Grander Canyon
• Day 3: Typhoon stirs awe — and alarm
• Day 4: Glittering nighttime view of Riyadh
• Day 5: Night lights shine on 'Black Marble'
• Day 6: Holy sites seen at night
• Day 7: Blue Marble still leaves its mark
• 2011 Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar
• 2010 Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar
• The Atlantic: Hubble Advent Calendar
• Zooniverse Advent Calendar

USGS

One of the more vigorous vents in Kilauea's Pu'u 'O'o Crater, seen at lower left, is topped by a 20-foot-tall spatter cone. The flow from this vent cascades down several steps, joining the flow from two other nearby vents, before going under a small bridge and into the broad area of ponded lava to the west.

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano is doing a slow burn while the world watches.

Kilauea isn't the kind of volcano that blows its top — as Washington state's Mount St. Helens did in 1980, or as Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano did last year, or as Alaska's Cleveland Volcano is starting to do. Instead, lava rises from fissures on Kilauea, which is part of a national park on Hawaii's Big Island.

The volcano's Pu'u 'O'o cone has been erupting since 1983 with few interruptions. Last week, the U.S. Geological Survey reported a fresh breakout of lava. This video shows what happens as the bright orange lava erupts from spatter cones, then cools and moves down slope:

According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, this current phase of the Kilauea activity, known as the Kamoamoa fissure eruption, began on March 5 when lava began fountaining between the Pu'u 'O'o and Napau craters. When the fountaining stopped, lava began building in Pu'u 'O'o, forming the molten lake that drained in a dramatic collapse on Aug. 3.

Here are a few more pictures from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, released on Monday. It's important to note that the active flows remain entirely within the Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park and pose no threat to the public.

USGS

After the collapse of the crater floor on Aug. 3, Pu'u 'O'o has been filled with thick fume. A very tiny flow, visible only with a thermal camera, was active on the crater floor.

USGS

This thermal image, looking southwest, shows the very small flow active in the bottom of Pu'u 'O'o crater. In the upper right, the active flows on the lower west flank of Pu'u 'O'o can be seen.

USGS

This view, looking east, shows the broad area of ponded lava fed by two main channels originating from several individual vents. The fume-filled Pu'u 'O'o Crater is in the background. The darker lava in the foreground is from the Kamoamoa eruption in March.

More about volcanoes:

• Previously on PhotoBlog: Volcano spews lava
• From March: Scientists monitor eruptions at Kilauea
• Volcanoes: The difference between a blurper and a boomer
• Interactive: How and where volcanoes arise

Tip o' the Log to OurAmazingPlanet.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data

The Nabro volcano has been erupting in the African nation of Eritrea since June 13. This image made with data from a NASA satellite is giving scientists one of their most detailed views of the remote, little-studied volcano.

A NASA satellite captured this spectacular false-color image of the Nabro volcano erupting in a remote region of the northeastern African country of Eritrea.

The bright red portions of the image indicate hot surfaces, NASA explains in an advisory. That's why the hot volcanic ash spewing out of the volcano's caldera glows red.

To the west of the ash cloud, portions of the lava flow are visible. The front edge is particularly hot, thus red. The speckled bits upstream in the lava flow are likely regions where the cool, hardened crust is splitting and exposing fluid lava as the flow advances.

The volcano is located in an isolated region of Eritrea near its border with Ethiopia. Scientists believe it began erupting on June 13. Ash from the volcano has disrupted flights and cut short Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's recent trip to Africa.

Despite these impacts, scientists say they know very little about the volcano. When it was first detected, in fact, scientists thought it was the nearby Dubbi volcano. Imagery such as this photo from NASA's Earth Observing-1 satellite acquired on June 24 is providing the most detailed look at the eruption to date.

More on African volcanoes:

• Airlines watching East Africa volcanic ash cloud
• Volcanic eruption cuts short Clinton African trip
• Giant crack in Africa may create a new ocean
• Science explodes at African lake

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Rachel Strohm

Lake Kivu harbors huge reservoirs of methane and carbon dioxide gas that could power Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But gas could also explode, killing everything in and around the lake.

The depths of Africa's Lake Kivu harbor untold quantities of carbon dioxide and methane gases that could provide abundant electricity to millions of Rwandans and Congolese settling along its shores. But those gases could suddenly release, killing everything in and around the lake.

"Understanding whether you can find scenarios that would lead to something like that, a catastrophic release of gas, is of course important," Anthony Vodacek, a remote sensing scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, told me on Monday.

He is leading a two-year survey that aims, for the first time, to provide a scientific portrait of the entire lake system. The team consists of seismologists, biologists, remote sensing specialists, and other scientists who will combine their areas of expertise to provide a baseline understanding of the system.

"If you don't know what the starting point is, you don't know what the change is. And so that is part of what we'd like to establish here," Vodacek said.

Methane extraction
The Rwandan government has already built a power plant along the lake's shores which siphons methane from the depths of the lake to generate 3.6 megawatts of electricity, about 4 percent of the country's needs. The aim, eventually, is to generate several hundred megawatts.

Lake Kivu is one three known so-called explosive lakes in the world. The other two are in Cameroon. Lake Nyos experienced an explosive eruption in 1986 that killed 1,500 people. During these so-called overturning scenarios, something triggers the gases trapped in the depths to burst towards the surface.

The gas is trapped at the bottom of the lake because the streams that feed the lake are slightly brackish. Salty water is denser than freshwater and so, it sinks to the bottom, taking all the organic detritus with it that releases carbon dioxide as it decomposes.

In addition, the lake is in a seismically active region. "It is a rift valley lake," Vodacek noted. "The Africa continent is pulling apart … and that means there are fault lines, there are earthquakes, and those can be tied in to potential triggers for what goes with the lake overturning."

It's possible that people extracting the gases to generate electricity will stave off a catastrophic overturning of the lake, though it could also upset the stability of the lake, Vodacek noted. That's one of the questions the team wants answered.

Extraction of the methane to generate electricity could be a huge benefit for development in the region, Vodacek noted. Currently, most of the cooking fuel comes from forests around the lake, the same forests that are home to endangered mountain gorillas.

"Normally, you don't think of development as having positive impacts, but in this you could because it could turn people away from cutting down the forest and subsistence farming on these steep hillsides in the region," he said.

If the lake becomes a source of fuel, then conservationists can focus reforestation efforts in the surrounding hills and help protect the gorillas, Vodacek added.

Explosive history
Team member Robert Hecky, an aquatic biologist at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, performed an analysis of a sediment core from Lake Kivu in the 1970s and found evidence for catastrophic overturns about once every 1,000 years beginning about 5,500 years ago.

This finding corresponds with genetic evidence from cichlids, freshwater fish that first evolved in the lake. Today, only about 15 species are found in the lake, though thousands more species are in other lakes.

People looking at the molecular clock of these fish put two and two together and realized the Lake Kivu fish experienced an extinction about 5,000 years ago, "which coincides with the analysis of the sediment and the overturning of the lake," Vodacek said.

Hecky and other team members will bring advances in the study of lake sediment cores to refine the timeline of the overturning events and perhaps gain insight to the triggers such as landslides or volcanic activity.

Seismologists on the team will embrace advances in GPS sensors to get a detailed read on the rifting process in the valley to understand where fractures and fault lines are located.

Vodacek, who is leading the effort, will take a view from the sky to piece all the data together.

In particular, he is embracing recently released data sets of satellite imagery from NASA that provides nearly 40 years worth of data on the region, showing how the landscape has changed as people settled on the lakeshore and cut down the forests.

"You're always hearing these horror stories of natural resource development without any regard to the environmental impacts of that," he said. "Here's a case where we would like to go in and make sure there's necessary due diligence to make sure that things aren't destroyed as a resource is developed."

More on Africa energy and conservation

• Rwanda harnesses energy from exploding lake
• Deal struck to protect Congo mountain gorillas
• Scientists say eruption in Congo imminent
• Scientists: Inbreeding helps African fish

Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

Public information officer Theresa Mendoza walks on a ridge top as the Wallow Fire burns behind her outside of Eagar, Ariz., Wednesday, June 8, 2011.

At a glance, images of the forest fire raging in Arizona and the volcano erupting in Chile seem to suggest they are filling the atmosphere with gases and debris that will mess with the global climate, but experts say this week's events, in isolation, aren't much to worry about. 

The Willow fire in Arizona has charred at least 336,000 acres so far, filling the atmosphere with smoke, soot, and the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It joins a string of fires that have raged elsewhere in the U.S., including Texas and Florida.

The amount of greenhouse gases from these types of fires "can be quite substantial," Matt Hurteau, a forest ecologist at Northern Arizona University told me today. 

To illustrate how substantial, he pointed to work led by Christine Wiedinmyer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, that shows forest fires in the U.S. between 2001 and 2008 accounted for six to eight percent of total annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

One fire alone, however, is a blip compared to the emissions from burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal to power the global economy.

"A common misconception is that fire emissions are huge compared to fossil fuel emissions," Beverly Law, a forest ecologist at Oregon State University told me today. "They are not, really. Fossil fuel emissions trump everything."

Fire projections
But the fires burning in Arizona and elsewhere along the southern tier of U.S. do fit projections from models of global climate change that suggest the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cause the southwest, over the long term, to become drier, Law added.

"We just can't say there is a direct cause and effect right there," she said.

In fact, historical forest management decisions in Arizona play a major role in the severity of fires there, Hurteau said. In the ancient past, the ponderosa pine forests burned frequently and, as a result, were open and had a grassy understory. The grass, in turn, served as fuel for forest fires.

Beginning in the 1800s, pioneer settlers moved west and grazed the forests with their livestock, which reduced the fuels. Then, in the 1900s, a policy of fire suppression led to increased forest density. "Now we've got these really dense forests that are prone to this type of wildfire event," he said.

The effect of this management on forest fire ecology is independent of the climate signal. What's more, it is the weather on any given day that drives the severity of fire.

"To say that climate change is causing that weather on that day, we can't do that because climate is the longer term trend," Hurteau said.

Nevertheless, long term climate trends suggest the southwest will become drier, thus more prone to wildfire. More wildfire, in turn will put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which should lead to more changes in the global climate, he noted.

Ho / Reuters

A plume of light-coloured ash stretches along the edge of the Andes in this natural-colour satellite image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Terra on the morning of June 6, 2011, as the eruption at the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano chain continues.

Volcanoes and cooling
Volcanoes, on the other hand, can potentially cool the climate by spewing the gas sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere where it blocks sunlight from reaching Earth, thus causing cooling. The eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile, however, doesn’t appear to have done that.

"It wasn't a massive injection of SO2," Alan Robock, an environmental scientist who studies the connection between volcanoes and climate, told me today. "While it shut down air traffic over Argentina and Chile because of the ash, we won't be able to see the climate effect."

The last time a volcanic eruption cooled the climate was the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which caused global temperatures to cool by about half a degree Celsius for a couple of years.

The dramatic images of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle show a giant ash cloud. The particles will fall out quickly, creating havoc locally, but they don't have a long-term climate effect.

A cooling effect will eventually comes from an explosive eruption that puts sulfur into the stratosphere, Charles Stern, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder told me today.

"And that's good, we could use a little cooling right now," he said.

In fact, scientists have begun to discuss the idea of intentionally filling the stratosphere with sulfur to mimic the cooling effect of a Pinatubo-style eruption. Stern and Robock, though, said this geoengineering approach isn't a good idea due to the costs and other side effects.

"I think we are just going to have to wait for a volcano to do it," Stern said.

More stories on fires, volcanoes and climate change

• Photos: Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano eruption seen from space
• Photos: Raging Arizona fire continues to blaze
• Volcano could mean cooling, acid rain 
• Could warming trigger volcanoes, quakes
• U.N.: Warming makes for bigger forest fires
• Forests in flames: Scientists see warming ties 

Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Italy

Simulation of the May 18, 1980, blast at Mount St. Helens at 380 seconds.

A new 3-D model that realistically mimics the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens is helping scientists understand the dynamics of such blasts and may help them map potential blast flows at dangerous volcanoes around the world.

The eruption of the volcano in Washington killed 57 people, leveled forests and sent a torrent of mud and debris down rivers that wiped out hundreds of homes and dozens of bridges.

The damage stems from a fast-moving current of superheated gas and hot rock and debris that was blasted out sideways from the volcano, Barry Voight, an emeritus professor of geology at Penn State, explained to me today.

For more than 30 years, he and other researchers have been trying to understand the physics behind the devastating nature of this blast. "It has always remained enigmatic and something that was hard to explain," he said.

Beginning about five years ago, the scientists harnessed state-of-the-art computers to create a 3-D model of the blast, including the mass, momentum and heat energy of the gas, as well as properties of the solid particles. They then compared the results of the model to what was observed in the field. 

"The matchup is quite good," Voight said, noting that the topography around the volcano and the energy of the flow were the most important factors determining where the blast traveled. Such blasts, for example, are blocked by mountains and channeled down river ravines and canyons.

Now that the researchers have accurately modeled the Mount St. Helens blast from 1980, they can use the same technology to model blast flows at potentially dangerous volcanoes around the world. Already, it is being used to model the Montserrat volcano in the Caribbean.

"We can put in a couple of different [gas] pressures, for example, and see where the area of devastation is and then use that to influence zoning decisions," Voight said. 

More stories on volcanoes:

• Mount St. Helens: A 30-year mystery
• Why was Mount St. Helens so destructive? 
• Mount St. Helens: Then and now
• Sounds of volcanic eruption recreated
• Montserrat volcano shoots ash 9 miles into sky

Findings appear in the June issue of Geology. Other researchers on the team are Tomaso Esposti Ongaro and Augusto Neri, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Pisa, Italy; C. Widiwidjayanti, formerly at Penn State but now at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and Amanda B. Clarke, Arizona State University.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Getty Images

The potential for a catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius is stirring up debate among scientists and civil authorities in Italy.

Vesuvius, the Italian volcano that famously erupted in AD 79 and destroyed Pompeii, may awaken sometime in the future with even more catastrophic results, according to some experts who consider the volcano the most dangerous in the world.

The prospect, which could spell disaster for nearby Naples, a metropolis of 3 million people, is stirring up a vigorous debate among scientists and civil authorities on how to prepare, journalist Katherine Barnes reports for Nature News. 

Part of the debate centers on the risk and scale of future eruptions. Some studies suggest the volcano is capable of massive eruptions, such as one some 3,800 years ago that triggered pyroclastic flows that buried Naples under 12 feet of ash and debris.

Other scientists argue that the eruptive nature of Vesuvius has changed over time and that smaller eruptions akin to one in 1631 are more the norm. That one killed 6,000 people but affected a much smaller area.

The course of disaster preparation planning depends on which scenario civil authorities choose as their basis. The worst case scenario would mean evacuating 3 million people from Naples. Other scenarios would delay such a complicated evacuation unless prevailing winds shifted and put it in harm's way.

"It's an extremely complex problem to solve," Augusto Neri at the National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology's lab in Pisa told Nature News. "We simply do not know how the volcano works." 

Barnes notes that the type of debate swirling around the potential catastrophic Vesuvius eruption is becoming more common in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. These types of disasters, called black swans, are unlikely but potentially devastating.

Another example is how to prepare for a potential devastating quake along the Cascadia subduction zone along the west coast of North America. There, experts say, the science pointing to a future earthquake and tsunami is clear, but planning for it is lagging behind.

More stories on Mount Vesuvius:

• Experts say heat, not suffocation, killed Mount Vesuvius' victims
• Pompeii family's final hours reconstructed 
• Ancient quake raises risk for modern Naples 
• Eight dangerous volcanoes around the world

University of Utah

This image, based on variations in electrical conductivity of underground rock, shows the volcanic plume of partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano. Yellow and red indicate higher conductivity,green and blue indicate lower conductivity.

The volcanic plume beneath Yellowstone is larger than previously thought, according to a new study that measured the electrical conductivity of the hot and partly molten rock.

The findings say nothing about the chances of another cataclysmic eruption at Yellowstone, but they give scientists another view of the vast and deep reservoir that feeds such eruptions.

"It's a totally new and different way of imaging and looking at the volcanic roots of Yellowstone," study co-author Robert Smith, an emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of Utah, said in a press release. 

Supervolcano history
The supervolcano has erupted three times over the past 2 million years – 2 million, 1.3 million, and 642,000 years ago. While researchers don't expect another eruption any time soon, it could eventually explode, destroying life for hundreds of miles around it and blanketing North America in ash.

In recent years, scientists have detected an unprecedented rate of rising for the caldera and increases in seismic activity, including a peculiar swarm of earthquakes.

The U.S. Geological Survey has ranked the Yellowstone caldera as a high threat for volcanic eruption, calling it the 21^st most dangerous of 169 volcano centers in the U.S.

While the new measurements don't raise the threat level, scientists are keen to gain a deeper understanding of the plume beneath the national park renowned today for geysers and hot springs.

"We are just getting more and more understanding of what is going on," Michael Zhdanov, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah and lead author of the study, told me today.

New measurements
In previous work, published in 2009, researchers used seismic waves from earthquakes to image the hotspot plumbing that feeds the supervolcano. Seismic waves move more quickly through cold rock than hot rock. By clocking seismic waves, researchers made 3D images of the plume.

Those images showed the plume of hot and molten rock dips downward from Yellowstone at an angle of 60 degrees and extends 150 miles west-northwest to a point at least 410 miles under the Montana-Idaho border, which as far as the imaging could "see."

In the new study, scientists used images of the plume's electrical conductivity that is generated by molten silicate rocks and hot briny water that is naturally present and mixed in partly molten rock. This shows the conductive part of the plume dipping more gently — an angle of about 40 degrees to the west and extending about 400 miles from east to west. The geoelectric image can only see 200 miles deep.

"It looks a little bigger," Zhdanov said. "It looks like our image put an envelope around this seismic image."

Geoelectrical data
The geoelectrical data was collected by Earthscope, a National Science Foundation-funded effort to collect seismic, magnetotelluric, and ground deformation data to study the structure and evolution of North America.

Magnetotelluric measurements record very low frequencies of electromagnetic radiation — about 0.0001 to 0.0664 Hertz, which is far below the frequencies of radio and TV signals and electric power lines. The low frequency, long wavelength field penetrates about 200 miles into the Earth.

Data for the study was collected by 115 stations in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho — the three states straddled by Yellowstone National Park. It was crunched by a supercomputer, which produced the geoelectric plume picture.

The study has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

More stories on the Yellowstone supervolcano:

• Yellowstone eruption threat high
• Huge volcano under Yellowstone park rising
• Activity discovered at Yellowstone supervolcano
• Quakes feed fears of Yellowstone eruption

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).