The Sunday morning shift was always full of yawns and stretches, together with several gallons of bottled water, after the previous night's festivities. No one was taking much notice of the screens as the banter seemed much more interesting. Station three had a satellite just coming off of Syria and Israel and dusk was falling over that part of the world. The Mediterranean Sea was not of great interest, but the satellite's imaging camera switched to its infra-red mode on its automatic cycle through the visible and invisible spectrum. It was just as the satellite switched to UV that station three operator noticed something. Graham Tyndall, switched to manual control and flicked back to infra-red. Tyndall, pressed the button on his station that summoned his supervisor, a few seconds later the senior monitoring officer was at his side.
“Trouble Graham,” he asked, “what am I looking at?”
“This is Crete, and that is the new volcano, there,” Graham pointed to the desk screen. “It's just this heat signature to the south, it stretches about five kilometres to the south-east, I think that fissure is on the move again.”
“OK, Graham, well done, I get a report up to the DDTS and he can get the info to the Europeans,” the SMO said, “can you continue to monitor it please?”
“Certainly, should I bring a GSO in?”
“That may be a good idea, until we know where it's going, see to it.”