image: Eight months of ceaseless activity have covered the landscape around Chile’s Puyehue Cordón Caulle Volcanic Complex in ash. The light-colored ash appears most clearly on the rocky, alpine slopes surrounding the active vent and Puyehue’s 2,236 meter (7,336 foot)-tall caldera. Within the caldera, the ash appears slightly darker, possibly because it may be resting on wet snow that is melting and ponding in the South American summer. The ash plume blows towards the east, carried by the prevailing winds. Evergreen forests on the east side of the volcano have been damaged by months of nearly continuous ashfall, and are now an unhealthy brown. Forests to the west have only received intermittent coatings of ash and appear relatively healthy. This natural-color image was acquired on January 26, 2012, by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. In the false-color image acquired the same day (download available below the main image), heat from the active vent colors it bright red. Just to the west of the vent, a blue-white cloud may indicate outgassing from the slowly-growing lava flow. view more
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data. Caption by Robert Simmon.