"Holy smoking toledos!"

September 7, 2014 5:00 PM

Awesome footage of Papua New Guinea's Tavurvur volcano eruption. [slyt | via]
posted by quin (36 comments total)

Sonic boom from a stationary object! Awesome.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:05 PM on September 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

I wish I knew what a "smokin' toledo" was.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:12 PM on September 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

I love that you can see the shockwave hit the clouds.
posted by sbutler at 5:14 PM on September 7, 2014 [15 favorites]

Saw this yesterday, and watching it again just now I still said "Wow!" out loud.
posted by nevercalm at 5:17 PM on September 7, 2014

Fuck people who can't even manage to swear properly at things that 100% deserve some fucking swearing.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:25 PM on September 7, 2014 [12 favorites]

OH MY GOD THE HORIZON DOES NOT BELONG IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FRAME

I couldn't finish watching. I was trying SO HARD to use the power of my mind to tilt the camera up just a little bit. Just a LITTLE BIT.
posted by komara at 5:28 PM on September 7, 2014 [13 favorites]

I fucking love swearing, but I appreciate folks who have the temerity to say something silly like "gee willikers" or "holy smoking toledos". More memorable imo.
posted by stinkfoot at 5:29 PM on September 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

Holy Toledo was the Kingdom of Toledo, the juridical definition of a Christian medieval kingdom in what is now central Spain.
posted by srboisvert at 5:34 PM on September 7, 2014 [7 favorites]

Can a pyroclastic flow move over water? I found myself wondering whether that cargo ship over there was at risk of being sunk by all this.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:34 PM on September 7, 2014

Those cargo boats were a lot farther inshore than I would be if passing under the shadow of a volcano that is erupting.
posted by tavella at 5:36 PM on September 7, 2014

The flow will sink but they're probably in some danger from flingin' ass boulders.
posted by stinkfoot at 5:36 PM on September 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

komara, I am assuming that the camera was on a fixed platform, not hand held, thus the lack of panning up as the cloud grew.
posted by tavella at 5:37 PM on September 7, 2014

As they're known in geological circles.
posted by stinkfoot at 5:37 PM on September 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

whenever I see stuff like this I always imagine all the volcano gods high fiving one another in a hot smoky bar and spilling their pints of magma ale everywhere
posted by poffin boffin at 5:40 PM on September 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

That was really cool. I'd love to experience something like that IRL. At a safe distance, of course.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 5:48 PM on September 7, 2014

That is a great clip.

I watched the part between seeing the eruption and the arrival of the sound over and over again but could not see any sign of a shock wave in the water traveling toward the boat, which surprised me.

Also, what I thought I saw in the air above the volcano was a wave of condensation in the wake of the shock wave due to decompression.
posted by jamjam at 6:00 PM on September 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Um, this is clearly from Skyrim, and it's backwards. It's a dude using the dragon shout sodelot gnikoms yloh to force an ash giant back into its underground lair.
posted by oulipian at 6:01 PM on September 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

That was a hell of a thing.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:05 PM on September 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

tavella: “Those cargo boats were a lot farther inshore than I would be if passing under the shadow of a volcano that is erupting.”

InsertNiftyNameHere: “That was really cool. I'd love to experience something like that IRL. At a safe distance, of course.”

I counted between the explosion and the sound arriving and I gotta say that's closer than I would want to sail to an erupting volcano.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:22 PM on September 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

That was fantastic.
posted by rtha at 6:28 PM on September 7, 2014

stinkfoot: "I fucking love swearing, but I appreciate folks who have the temerity to say something silly like "gee willikers" or "holy smoking toledos". More memorable imo."

I like that too, if it's what they normally do. In this case, it's pretty clear they want to swear, but catch themselves for whatever reason and just replace it with some weak shit they come up with on the fucking spot.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:48 PM on September 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

The video of the dude rappelling into a live volcano would suit this thread. Close enough to the ferociously boiling magma that bits of it were landing around him. Insanity.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:52 PM on September 7, 2014

that is so cool. does anyone know the mechanics of the white cloud that appears at 00:13 and disappears at 00:14? i'm assuming its water vapor but it seems to deform sooner than it forms. what would cause that? is it a mechanism of the sonic boom? similar to the vapor clouds that form around jet planes? it appears to expand before the initial ash cloud and then the energy seems to be subsumed by the ash and then get transmitted a few hundred feet away into the actual sonic boom.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 7:05 PM on September 7, 2014

In this case, it's pretty clear they want to swear, but catch themselves for whatever reason and just replace it with some weak shit they come up with on the fucking spot.

"Holy, Toledo!" is a swear replacement. He paused to consider "smoking" since that is what the volcano is doing.
posted by stbalbach at 7:14 PM on September 7, 2014

Phil Plait talked a bit about this yesterday--he said that the clouds formed were from the air compression of the eruption.

He also points to this page from NASA's Earth Observatory, which offers before-and-after photos of the island. (The first photo is from April, the second is September.)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:26 PM on September 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

The badassness of volcanoes was driven home for me on the way to Mt. St. Helens, when I started to see the trees broken in half and realized we had about 45 more minutes of driving to do.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:27 PM on September 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

the white cloud that appears at 00:13

It's a blast wave.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:35 PM on September 7, 2014

i understand the blast wave but don't get what causes it to subsume so quickly. does the subsequent ash cloud exploding just steal al the energy?
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 7:38 PM on September 7, 2014

Look closely at the ridge of the volcano left of where the explosion/venting occurs, from 0:07 to 0:13 of the video. It may just be video artifacts from the motion of the boat, but it sure looks like there are some crazy earth movements happening up there before it erupts.
posted by CosmicRayCharles at 7:55 PM on September 7, 2014

stbalbach: ""Holy, Toledo!" is a swear replacement. He paused to consider "smoking" since that is what the volcano is doing."

It sounds to me like he's starting to say "Holy shit!", but stops at the "s" in shit, and comes up with "smoking Toledo".
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:39 PM on September 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

i understand the blast wave but don't get what causes it to subsume so quickly.

Are you talking about the blast wave cloud? As I understand it, when the shock spreads through the air, it compresses it, but right behind the wave of compression there's a wave of decompression. Just like how waves in water move up and down. The decompressed air can't hold as much water vapor, so the water suddenly condenses out. Same way clouds form, just much faster. It disappears quickly as the air pressure returns to normal.
posted by echo target at 9:43 PM on September 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

The flow will sink but they're probably in some danger from flingin' ass boulders.

"Flingin' ass boulders" is my new euphemism for taking a shit.
posted by dudemanlives at 9:45 PM on September 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

Ocean looks great.. too bad he didn't pan up.
posted by ReeMonster at 10:09 PM on September 7, 2014

Hebbo!
posted by Homemade Interossiter at 6:20 AM on September 8, 2014

"is it a mechanism of the sonic boom?"

You don't even need a sonic boom to cause that phenomena - water vapor forming and quickly disappearing. I was working very near the airport and you see the same thing, when weather conditions are right, trailing the flaps of larger commercial planes as they are landing.

From scientificamerican: Because aircraft wings generate both low-pressure regions (because of lift) and amplified low-pressure disturbances, large low-pressure regions exist near the aircraft, especially under sonic flight conditions. The lowered pressure condenses the water in the air, creating a vapor cloud.

Also I grew up in Washington State and no freaking way could get me that near to a smoking volcano [unless it's a shield volcano].
posted by vapidave at 7:10 AM on September 8, 2014

Fuck people who can't even manage to swear properly at things that 100% deserve some fucking swearing.

Now, I will say I'm a fan of the well-placed epithet, to wit, in two recent films an apposite, standalone "Fuck!" (All is Lost, and Dallas Buyers Club). But if you're taking a video that you have a sense you are going to YouTube, potentially even shown in classrooms, maybe going with TV/newspaper language is best.
posted by dhartung at 2:25 PM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]