The centre of South Africa is an amazing place. The long drive from Cape Town in-land is exciting for the first two hours, while you climbing up through the mountains, past vineyards and valleys full of fynbos. Once on the high interior plateau of South Africa, the landscape becomes dry and monotonous – and it…
People mellow with age. (At least, most of us do.) The emotions of youth become less all-important and less demanding of our attention. Young people feel that every perceived slight needs addressing. The heat goes to the head and mistakes are made. Older people consider more before responding. The Earth, too, went through a youthful…
Rainbow’s end It is an amazing and powerful image. The wide lava fountain in the caldera like a wall flower in full bloom, with the cloud of volcano seeds above, the lava flowing from the bleeding flower, slowly re-filling one of the largest holes on Earth, and the distant rainbow linking the lava, the caldera,…
There are San Andreas faults in many places. They happen where two rigid continental masses slide past each other at fairly rapid pace. The San Andreas fault separates (‘connect’ would be the wrong word) the American plate from the continental edge of the Pacific plate. It runs along the length of California, in-land up to…
The last time I wrote an article here, it was to talk about Afar Region volcanoes, and I promised more to come. This is still a project that I have in mind, but that will have to wait a little longer until I can get an extended period of free time. Today we will go…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
Super-eruptions are rare. That is probably a good thing, even for Tallis. Too many things can go wrong for us in a supereruption. If you need a reminder, a super-eruption is often defined as a VEI-8, erupting more than 1000 km3 of ‘stuff’, leaving a crater 20 kilometers or more in diameter. Hector has written…
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 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…
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…
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,…
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…
