May 23, 2003

Listen to this story via streaming audio, a downloadable file, or get help.

May 23, 2003: Tiny Anatahan Island is blanketed in ash. Its only inhabitants--thousands of feral goats and wild pigs--have perished. A churning plume of brown smoke reaches 4 miles into the air.

International Space Station (ISS) science officer Ed Lu saw it first.

"Looks like a volcano of some sort on that small island," he said on May 11th when the space station soared over the Pacific Ocean. The eruption had begun less than 12 hours earlier, and Ed Lu--who really wasn't looking for volcanoes--spotted it before any of NASA's Earth observing satellites. (The ability to notice the unusual is a key advantage of humans in space.)

Anatahan Island is a 9-km long member of the Northern Mariana Island chain. Although the island looks like a volcano--its central feature is a caldera--no one had ever seen it erupt. Permanent residents were evacuated in 1990 after a series of strong earthquakes shook the island. Since then visitors to Anatahan have noted a pungent rotten-egg smell and an increasing number of steamy vents in the ground. An eruption seemed likely ... for 13 years.

There was no immediate warning when the blast finally happened on May 10, 2003. Since then ash and dust spread by winds have contributed to lovely sunsets in the region and perhaps to the red color of the May 15th lunar eclipse. And the volcano remains active. Are more surprises in store? No one knows. But Ed Lu will keep glancing out the window just in case....

Astronaut photograph ISS007-E-5366 was provided by the Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory at Johnson Space Center. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA-JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.