Magma rising

In 1864, three people set out on the journey of a life time. Starting at Snaefellsjokull, Hans, Axel and Otto descended into the crater, found openings to the depth and started on a journey to the centre of the Earth. At least, so Jules Verne told us in his book Voyage au centre de la…

A new large open conduit lava lake at Nyamuragira

  Report by Jesper Sandberg Forewords 2025 has so far been an exciting year with volcanoes, definitely so with Kilauea which is in many ways Earth’s most impressive volcano. It continues its caldera filling episodes at the previous Halemaumau crater area. If Kilauea keeps going like this for years the whole caldera will be filled.…

A Railgun design to launch drones with

Mount Rainier development

Welcome to our April-1 story which has the untruth, the whole untruth and nothing but the untruth. Nothing in here is real. Although even that is not true. The mentioned rocket propulsion methods all exist or are under development. Even the rocket railgun launcher, which we carefully made up for this post, suffered from a…

Mount Spurr

Since April 2024, Mount Spurr has shown increasing signs of activity. These are now at a level where an eruption is plausible. Nothing is ever guaranteed with Alaskan volcanoes: they can always decide to go back into the freezer. Eruptions are decided on the Spurr of the moment. (Yes, I had to get that one…

Source: Howard Hitchcock

Visiting the Big Island. Part II

Visiting Big Island and seeing live lava at Kahauale a 2 lava flow of Kilauea part 2 Into the belly of the beast Jesper Sandberg Introduction It is hard to describe how incredibly special for me those days in Kilauea were and the insanely strong nostalgia for that. In part two I will take up…

Visiting the Big Island

Visiting the Big Island and seeing live lava at Kahauale a 2 lava flow of Kilauea. Part 1 The first days on the Big Islands western side Introduction Its hard to describe how amazing it was for me to see Kilaueas lava flows live in action ( Pele cursed my own future by touching her…

Afar Holocene volcanoes I: Volcanoes in an ancient lake.

After Albert’s explanation of Afar’s volcanic and tectonic past, I will look into this region’s Holocene volcanism, and try to create the first comprehensive volcanic history of this very unstudied volcanic area. I like Afar because the volcanoes are “naked”, what I mean is that due to a desertic environment, the lava is slow to…

Santorini shaking

Tourists have left, schools are closed. Santorini, source of 2% of the Greece GDP, has been evacuated. There has been continuous shaking for two weeks. The epicentre is 20 km from Santorini and the earthquakes are mainly below M5, but there is a risk that this could lead to a larger event. In any case,…

The making of Afar

Africa is broken. It is being dissected by the famous East African Rift which extends over a length of 5000 km along the eastern side of Africa and seems poised to destroy Africa as we know it. Some say a new ocean will form here. In that case a new name will be needed. Suggestions…