re: #34 Aunty Entity Dragon

Damn. An awful lot of volcanologists and other people (41 in total) were killed by pyroclastic flows on Mt Unzen in 1991.

Stratovolcano eruptions are nothing to fuck with. They are nothing at all like the relatively tame low volatile gas and low viscosity eruptions in Hawaii. A pyroclastic flow is nature’s version of a hydrogen bomb. You do NOT want to be near one.

I’m not convinced that what happened here was a pyroclastic flow; if it were, there are an awful lot of really amazingly lucky hikers. The husband’s rough translations seem to indicate that they were found buried in ash, in one location - possibly in one of the mountain lodges, although that is very much speculation on my part.

The Mt. Unzen tragedy was notable because one of the volcanologists who died - Harry Glicken - had swapped shifts with David Johnston on monitoring Mt. St. Helens.