In spite of being posted on VC, the word ‘volcano’ does not appear in this post. Or at least, it wouldn’t have had I not written this preface. Which is why I wrote it, since we can not have a VC post which lacks the word ‘volcano’. (Of course now that I have mentioned ‘volcano’…
In the previous post we went through some of the background to this post: the structure of the Earth, the change in minerals at various depth in the mantle which change the density, and a bit on seismology which can show how the temperature changes with depth. Now it is time to see what we…
The Earth is alive. Well, not really. At least it is not life as we know it. Appropriately, the origin of this expression – slightly rephrased from the original Star Trek series – is from the second-most-famous non-human in existence, Spock, referring to a living rock. It is only a small step for humankind to…
Today, May 22, 2022, it is five years ago. On May 23 2017, we woke up to the dramatic news of a suicide bomber in our home town. It killed 22 people including children. The target was an Ariane Grande concert. The artist later came back for a free concert, in memory of those killed.…
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May In the previous posts we looked at the Eifel volcanics, the Laacher See (the largest eruption in western Europe for the past 1000 centuries), and volcanic dating of the Younger Dryas. The eruption occurred a bit over a century before the sudden cooling. But what caused…
In the previous post Gijs described the surprising history of Europe’s most underestimated volcanic field. Much of the time the Eifel does nothing. On occasion it does a small eruption, just when you weren’t looking. And very rarely, it goes big, covering the surrounding areas in meter-thick ash. Gijs described the area, the monogenetic volcanoes,…
Have you ever been bitten by a dinosaur? That would be something worthy of Jurassic Park. In those movies it tends to be a lethal experience. But most children will get bitten by the dinosaur bug at some point in their early years. Dinosaurs fascinate; it is the excitement of a lost world, a wild…
Snow is beautiful. It turns the world white and unblemished. Children love it for play, grown-ups love it for what it hides. Soon the snow will melt again, or worse, it will age like the world ages, lose its colour and become pockmarked with dirt. The beauty is temporary, here today, gone tomorrow. What was…
In January, the world experienced the loudest bang of the century – and that of the previous century as well. The sound wave of Hunga Tonga was heard across the Pacific ocean in Alaska. The air pressure wave traveled around the world – and again. And again. The ocean wave caused a tsunami across the…
The Indian ocean can be a paradise. It has tropical beaches, smiling people, and blue ocean. But a paradise does not come out of nowhere; these tropical island paradises form in violence. Peace only comes after turmoil, when the forces of destruction finally give up, having created where they sought to destroy. Every tropical island…