The Rosenberg-Scott isolation theory

 Tongariro blows up last night after increasing localised earthquakes and just a few days after Whakaari (White Island) starts becoming more active and belching out smoke. But still we have the NZ scientists telling us there is no connection!

Everytime we have a series or swarm of volcanic/earthquake activity they claim they have nothing to do with each other... even though the same patterns keep presenting themselves each time. They haven't drawn a connection by now in the year 2012AD? Why are they being employed if they keep denying what is pretty bloody obvious to everyone else? They are being paid to wank about on their theories by the looks of it and then at the crucial moment of accountability they say they have no clue and they would never have guessed. What is the point of these people? A volcano only 200km away on the same fault line/plate boundary is going off and that doesn't affect anything else or isn't a symptom of something else... really? The system is totally interconnected and to maintain - in their doctonaire, dismissive and reflexive way - that activity so close together is isolated and disconnected is really quite a preposterous belief contrary to the evidence.

 3News:

GNS volcanologist Michael Rosenberg has ruled out any link between last night's eruption and recent activity at another volcano, White Island in the Bay of Plenty.

White Island's alert level was raised on Monday.

Mt Tongariro last erupted in 1897. Small earthquakes were recorded beneath the volcano late last month.

Mr Rosenberg is concerned there was no warning a full eruption was coming.

"It's unexpected, but it seems to have been a fairly small eruption," he told RadioLIVE.

[...]

"This has taken us by surprise," says Mr Rosenberg. "It's gone from some little earthquakes that seemed to be tailing off, then all of a sudden this has gone boom.

"We really didn't expect that there would be an eruption apparently out of nowhere."

 Rosenberg just looks foolish when denying links to White Island. The reason he thinks there was no warning is because he and the people at the government science lab he works for are fucking clueless. They didn't expect something "apparently out of nowhere"? Most of the eruptions known in NZ come "apparently out of nowhere" following - surprise, surprise - a series of lead-up localised earthquakes and other tell-tail events... like Tarawera:

Te Ara:At Te Wairoa village, 7.5 kilometres from the terraces, people were woken after midnight on 10 June 1886 by a series of increasingly violent earthquakes. Around 2 a.m., a fissure through Ruawāhia Dome on Mt Tarawera erupted, and by 2.30 a.m. the craters along the summit were venting fountains of glowing scoria and a cloud of ash up to 10 kilometres high, through which intense lightning flickered. At 3.20 a.m. the explosions spread. Craters were blasted open on the south-west side of the mountain and through Lake Rotomahana and the Waimangu area. A 17-kilometre rift spewed steam, mud and ash. The eruptions were over by about 6 a.m.

Wikipedia:Shortly after midnight on the morning of 10 June 1886, a series of more than 30 increasingly strong earthquakes were felt in the Rotorua area and an unusual sheet lightning display was observed from the direction of Tarawera. At around 2:00 am^[1] a larger earthquake was felt and followed by the sound of an explosion. By 2:30 am Mount Tarawera's three peaks had erupted, blasting three distinct columns of smoke and ash thousands of metres into the sky. At around 3.30 am, the largest phase of the eruption commenced; vents at Rotomahana produced a pyroclastic surge that destroyed several villages within a 6 kilometre radius, and the Pink and White Terraces appeared to be obliterated.

And - to a lesser extent - like Ruapehu.

Whilst I can acknowledge that the volcanologists aren't just there to provide prediction models, when they keep denying the links and the direct relationships that must exist along a relatively small area of the Earth's crust there seems no possibility they will ever arrive at a suitable model. So really, what is the point of these scientists? Just to tell us after the event what happened - which we all know anyway! Useless. Oh, and in TOTALLY UNRELATED news today:

 RNZ:
The alert level for volcanic eruptions on White Island in the Bay of Plenty has been raised to two.
An eruption on Sunday followed a volcanic earthquake the weekend before and an increase in sulphur gases and the lake level.
The general manager of natural resource operations at the Bay of Plenty Regional Council, Warwick Murray, says GNS does not know whether the increased seismic activity is connected to the Tongariro eruption.
He says it follows two years of relative quiet at White Island.

Two years of relative inactivity and then just a few days before Tongariro blows Whakaari starts belching... but there's no relationship, it's all some sort of an isolated and unrelated coincidence. What would the Council worker know, eh? He's not a proper scientist.

UPDATE: 11:15am

NZHerald:
10.53am - Brad Scott of GNS has said the eruption was a steam-driven eruption, which came from the hydrothermal system rather than from new molten lava coming to the surface. A fly-over the mountain confirmed it was a steam plume only and there was no discolouration of the plume.
[...]
"We've had a small-scale volcanic eruption. It appears to be driven in the hydrothermal rather than the magmatic process, there's been an ash plume, there's been ash-fall down wind.''
[...]
10.43am - Brad Scott of GNS tells a press conference it was just a coincidence that White Island and Mt Tongariro erupted within the same week. 

Brad is another proper scientist from the government lab and gives the same story - no links, nothing to see here, move along. He's going off their standard presumptions more than anything because there is no survey yet.

So, a volcanic eruption that has nothing to do with magma or lava... apparently. Another first for NZ science? Next they'll be saying it has nothing to do with tectonic plates either. All those volcanoes in that string are just isolated, random and unconnected mountains that just happen to be in the same area.