A volcanic eruption in Indonesia has prompted an aviation warning in Australia, after ash spewed into the sky.<\/p>\n
Indonesia’s Mount Semeru volcano, Java Island’s tallest mountain, erupted on Wednesday, local time, prompting authorities there to raise the threat level to its highest.<\/p>\n
The country’s volcanology agency says ash clouds reached up to 5.6 kilometres into the sky, roughly 2 kilometres higher than the mountain peak.<\/p>\n
Clouds of hot ash and a mixture of rock, lava and gas travelled up to 7km down Mount Semeru’s slopes several times from midday to dusk.<\/p>\n
It blanketed several villages, but no casualties have been reported.<\/p>\n
More than 300 residents at risk in the district of Lumajang have been evacuated to government shelters, according to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.<\/p>\n
Authorities widened the danger zone to 8km from the crater.<\/p>\n
Local media reported that authorities were struggling to rescue 178 people stranded at a monitoring post 4.5km from the crater.<\/p>\n
The group includes 137 climbers, 15 porters, seven guides and six tourism officials, according to an official with the Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park, TNBTS.<\/p>\n
“They are currently safe,” a TNBTS spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ash clouds rose about 5.6 km into the sky. (Reuters)<\/p>\n
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC) issued a red aviation alert following the eruption.<\/p>\n
The VAAC said the ash was “partially identifiable on satellite imagery”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No flights have been cancelled between Australia and Denpasar airport because of the eruption.<\/p>\n
At more than 3,600 metres high, Semeru is one of Indonesia’s nearly 130 active volcanoes.<\/p>\n
It has erupted numerous times in the past 200 years, but tens of thousands of people continue to live on its fertile slopes.<\/p>\n
Semeru’s last major eruption was in December 2021, when it left 51 people dead and several hundred others burned in villages that were buried in layers of mud.<\/p>\n
About 10,000 people were evacuated, and the emergency prompted the government to move nearly 3,000 houses out of the danger zone.<\/p>\n
Indonesia straddles the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a highly seismically active zone, where different plates on the Earth’s crust meet and create a large number of earthquakes and volcanoes.<\/p>\n
ABC\/Wires<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A volcanic eruption in Indonesia has prompted an aviation warning in Australia, after ash spewed into the sky.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6884,169532,169533,43,4805,44,169528,169529,169530,41,39,42,40,169531,120571,169527],"class_list":["post-295551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-bureau-of-meteorology","tag-denpasar-airport","tag-flight-cancellations-bali","tag-headlines","tag-indonesia","tag-news","tag-semeru","tag-semeru-eruption","tag-semeru-volcano","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-volcanic-ash-advisory-centre","tag-volcano","tag-volcano-eruption"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}