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IMAGE ADVISORY -- BREAKING NEWSAug. 10, 2000

PRE-ERUPTION 3D IMAGE OF JAPANESE VOLCANO ONLINE

       A volcano on an island off of Tokyo, Japan, that erupted violently today was imaged in 3-D by a special radar during a recent Space Shuttle mission, and the image is now on line.

       Mount Oyama on Miyake-Jima island began erupting at 6:59 a.m. in Japan (10:59 p.m. GMT Wed., Aug. 9), and shot ash as high as 3,000 meters (almost 2 miles), according to meteorological reports. Hundreds of residents have been evacuated.

See the image at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/srtm

       The 3-D image, created with data from the JPL-managed Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), launched on February 11, 2000, shows the Japanese island viewed from the northeast. This island is about 180 kilometers (110 miles) south of Tokyo and is part of the Izu chain of volcanic islands that runs south from the main Japanese island of Honshu. Dominated by the 820-meter- high (2,700 feet) volcano Mount Oyama, Miyake-Jima is home to 3,800 people. In late June 2000, a series of earthquakes alerted scientists to possible volcanic activity. On June 27, authorities evacuated 2,600 people. On July 7, the island was hit by a typhoon passing overhead, and on July 8 the volcano began erupting and erupted five times over that week.

       Detailed topographic information provided by SRTM can be used to predict the directions that lava flows will take. The previous major eruption of Mount Oyama occurred in 1983, when lava flows destroyed hundreds of houses, and an earlier eruption in 1940 killed 11 people.

       The mission is a cooperative project between NASA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, and the German and Italian space agencies. It is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, Washington, D.C.

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