Impressive Picture from Space of Volcano During Eruption

The European Space Agency's Envisat satellite captured beautiful pictures of the Mount Gamkonora, a volcano in Indonesia that erupted on July 10, 2007, after more than three centuries after the largest eruption and is now spewing hot ash and smoke into the air.

The highest peak of Halmahera island, Indonesia, violently erupted in 1673 and caused tsunamis which inundated the nearby villages. Now, officials reported over 8,000 people having fled their homes in the vicinity.

On Tuesday, the volcano started spitting hot material, a sign that magma was climbing from beneath and is now approaching the surface of the crater, which will probably cause another violent eruption. The smoke column can clearly be seen from space, as it rises 4 kilometers in the atmosphere.

Indonesia is familiar with volcanic activity, as the country lies in the Pacific "Ring of Fire", a 40,000 kilometer-long fault line with more than a hundred active volcanoes within its territory. Around 50 volcanoes around the world erupt each year and most of them are located in the region.

500 million people live close to an active volcano across the globe and as the population continuously increases more and more people are exposed to one of nature's most dangerous phenomena.

Some supervolcanoes can produce damage on a continental scale and can cause severe cooling of global temperatures for many years afterwards because of the huge volumes of sulfur and ash erupted, thus being the most dangerous ones in the world.

Envisat is a satellite designed to observe the Earth and the largest one ever built by the ESA. It carries nine instruments that gather information about the earth (land, water, ice, and atmosphere) using a variety of measurement principles.

One of them is MERIS (MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer), which was used to record images of the volcano and allows scientists to track small changes in the Earth's movement that improve their ability to predict volcanic eruptions.