Eruption surprises Japanese volcanologists

Nature : When the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice was filmed on the slopes of Mount Shinmoedake in 1967, the Japanese volcano had been dormant for eight years and hadn’t expelled lava for three centuries. As Nature‘s David Cyranoski reports, the volcano’s current eruptions of mud and steam have surprised volcanologists—even though the volcano and the range it belongs to were being monitored with seismometers, tiltmeters, magnetometers, thermal imagers, and other instruments. Now, Japanese authorities have increased their surveillance of the volcano. A major eruption is not out of the question.