Volcanic activity at Nishinoshima—an island about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) south of Tokyo, Japan—grew more vigorous in May 2020 and has not subsided as of early August.
When the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image on August 3, scientists estimated that the ash plume reached 4900 meters (16,000 feet) above sea level. That’s just over half the height of a plume in July 2020 that reached 8300 meters into the sky—the highest-altitude plume from the volcano since it emerged above the water line in 2013.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
