In view of the current tectonic activity at Katla, we offer our readers a repost. Katla has a reputation among some of the disaster crowd, and any shaking there can lead to predictions of worldwide doom. It sometimes seems like a Yellowstone on ice. Hence this story. Physiology has a dog; physics has a cat.…
The largest eruption of the 21st century happened at sea. And it wasn’t Hunga Tonga. The Comoro islands form a forgotten archipelago, somewhere between Africa and Madagascar with about 200 kilometer of open ocean on either side. On the African side the nearest land is the northern end of Mozambique, close to the border with…
A republication of an older post The dinosaurs would disagree. After owning the Earth, they were now in a bit of a bother. A major re-arrangement of the Earth had taken place. Pangea had split; Gondwana was broken up. The Indian ocean had formed but not in a clean way: a number of parallel rifts…
As has been noted here, little is known about people living near volcanoes which had a VEI-7 eruption. But we do know something about Tambora. The slope of Tambora, on the Sangar peninsula of the island of Sumbawa, was home to the Kingdom of Tambora. The kingdom had been mainly located some distance from the…
Volcanoes can erupt invisibly. A sudden, swift explosion in an isolated location may be unobserved and still have worldwide impacts. The source of the large eruption of 1809 remains unknown. We still don’t know the culprits of the volcanic climate catastrophe of 536 and 540. The link between the year without summer of 1816 and…
Land is precious. The saying goes ‘Buy land – they don’t make it anymore’. We need the land to live on, to grow our crops, to socialise, work, educate, and all other things that makes human life worth living. Even our touch phones won’t work under water. With a growing population, the pressure on the…
Is this the strangest egg in the world? The shell contains no egg white, yoke or embryo, nor even chocolate. No bird will ever hatch from it. Instead it is filled with a stony mineral. Which creature laid it, and what was expected to emerge from it? The only thing that comes to mind is…
Lava flows come in all sizes. The Reykjanes eruption produced flows of several kilometers length. Other volcanoes can do ten times that length, although we do not have a lot of recent experience with such long flows. Flood basalts can do hundreds of kilometers, and volcanoes on Venus manage thousands of kilometers – helped by…
The Martian is a fascinating book by Andy Weir. It is about an astronaut who is accidentally (we hope) left behind on Mars during an emergency evacuation. What follows is a struggle for life, where science, engineering and agriculture(!) are used to keep the astronaut alive long enough to allow for a rescue attempt. There…
The southern shores of Europe have seen their share of geological conflict. Africa is moving north, and Europe is in the way. There have been many skirmishes, which have left scars in southern Europe. Africa is an irresistible force and Europe an immovable object. The next phase of this battle will be at Cyprus where…