When in doubt-Redoubt!

(Edit #5 31JAN09 8:30 pm)You are all up to speed on Mount Redoubt--no doubt! It's going to blow. It's not a matter of if, simply when.

In the meantime, perhaps this would be a good time to review "volcanic lightning. Yep, there really IS such a thing! Google it and then select "images." The above image is that Big Volcano in Chile whose name I can never spell or pronounce. From what I've been reading, it's a major motion picture show!

OK, back to Redoubt. In case, you've been sleeping under a basalt rock, Redoubt's a big volcano 100 miles upwind from Anchorage. It's last eruption gig spanned from December 1989 to April 1990. It also erupted in 1966 and 1902. This particular volcano has the potential to really shake up North American weather patterns.

A Google News search using simply the word "Redoubt" will yield hundreds of articles.
Here's a pretty cool article from late Saturday evening.In a column called "Talk of the Tundra," a writer lists a long bibliography about Redoubt.

The northern latitudes are already still filled up with a major dose of volcanic gas from the 3 Aleutian volcanic eruptions this summer. All that gunk is still up there. That's the primary reason it's been so much colder than normal up there this winter. Here's a nice NASA link on volcanic cooling. The Alaskan Volcano Observatory is taking this event very seriously. As of Friday morning the AVO's web servers were totally overwhelmed and the site was inaccessible. As of Saturday morning AVO was back online and fully functional.

I've been reading about Redoubt's impact on the Cook Inlet oil facilities back in 1989-1990. Get this: at it's peak flow, the Drift River was running 2.1-MILLION cfs! That is more than the Mississippi. Here's where I read those figures.