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"We felt strong tremors last night. It was a volcanic quake," Red Cross worker Muhammad Isral told Indonesian news agency Antara. "After that, the crater of Mount Sinabung spewed glowing lava. And trees in the mount slopes were burnt. It was followed by thick clouds that caused visibility to be only about five meters."
Indonesian authorities issued a red alert following the eruption of Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra in the early hours of Sunday morning. "It's clearly dangerous so we've raised the warning to the highest level," the head of the nation's volcano disaster alert center, Surono -- who uses only one name -- told Agence France-Presse. "From the crater, it shot smoke and volcanic ash 1,500 meters [5,000 feet] into the sky. Initially we thought the ash and smoke were triggered by rain but now we know the driving pressure was from magma."
The Jakarta Post reported Sunday that the volcano has so far claimed one victim, a 54-year-old man who died from respiratory problems as he abandoned his village home.
Mount Sinabung has been inactive since the 1600s, but started to rumble back to life on Friday. At the first sign of activity, emergency workers began evacuating a 4-mile radius around the volcano, and so far some 12,000 residents from 14 villages have been moved to safety, according to Antara.
The volcano's long history of inactivity means that officials are unsure how long the current eruption will last, or whether it will get any worse. "We don't know the character of this volcano because it's been dormant for so long," said Surono, according to CNN. Based on the data gathered by his agency so far, though, Surono said that the chance of a large, destructive eruption was unlikely.
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is an eruption hot spot and home to at least 129 active volcanoes. Those volcanoes are formed by the the Indo-Australian tectonic plate subducting -- or sliding underneath -- the Eurasian plate that Indonesia sits on. As the Indo-Australian crust sinks down, it starts to melt and its water content turns to superheated steam. That high-pressure mix then forces its way to the surface, creating volcanoes along weak spots in the Earth's crust.
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