Indonesia's Most Active Volcano Acts Up

JAKARTA, Indonesia—One of Indonesia’s most dangerous volcanoes spewed material a kilometer into the air near Yogyakarta, a university town and center of Javanese culture, sending hundreds of villagers fleeing.

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A resident of Cangkringan district in Indonesia’s Central Java province wore a mask to protect himself against volcanic ash from Mount Merapi.

A short, massive rumbling was heard from Mount Merapi in the predawn hours Monday, the country’s disaster agency said, after which a cloud of ash and fine sand fell for several hours as far as 14 kilometers from the peak on the island of Java. By afternoon all activity had ceased and most of the evacuees from the mountain’s slopes returned to their homes.
“This was not an eruption, just the sliding-down of volcanic material from the top of the volcano,” said Agus Hendratno, a geologist and lecturer at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. He said this is a common process in which part of the volcano’s lava dome collapses, releasing ash and volcanic material.
“I went outside my house at 5 a.m. and was surprised to see the terrace covered in a fine ash,” he added. “It kept falling until around 8 a.m.”
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the disaster agency, said Merapi’s alert level remains normal, and that scientists are monitoring the volcano to gauge whether the activity could presage a lava eruption.
Merapi, nearly 3,000 meters high and about 25 kilometers north of Yogyakarta, is Indonesia’s most seismically active volcano. An eruption in 2010 released poisonous gases and blanketed the region in ash, killing more than 300 people and temporarily displacing hundreds of thousands.
Indonesia, which sits along a series of major fault lines dubbed “the ring of fire,” is home to more than 100 active volcanoes. The United Nations lists Merapi as one of 16 world-wide that pose especially serious threats because of their activity and the size of nearby populations. Millions of people live in the region around Merapi.

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