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…
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…
The Ethiopian volcanic situation keeps escalating. A viral video is circulating of an eruption from the Dofen volcano: https://x.com/volcaholic1/status/1875137887160672670 To me, it’s an eruption because it’s throwing rocks and it’s on a volcano. It could be phreatic or magmatic. It’s phreatic if it’s driven by heated groundwater, or magmatic gasses from an intrusion, without fresh…
The activity in Kilauea in the last year has been, A LOT. Not much may have happened on the surface, but underground the developments have been many, including dike intrusions, changing focuses of inflation, and seismic crises. One year has seen a shift from a rapidly inflating Mauna Loa to an overactive Kilauea. It has…
Lately, I’ve been busy with a project that has precluded me from posting in VolcanoCafe. I have wanted to post about the ongoing awakening of Kilauea’s East Rift Zone, but that will have to wait for now. Instead, I thought of posting something about what I’ve been working on lately. For reasons, I’ve found it…
Indonesia is a country of volcanoes. An impressive amount of subduction-related volcanoes. The country features four different volcanic arcs, chains of volcanoes above subducting oceanic plates. The most important one is the Sunda Arc, home to way too many famous volcanoes like Toba, Krakatau, Galunggung, Merapi, Semeru, Bromo, Kawah Ijen, Batur, Agung, Rinjani, or Tambora.…
Due to the ongoing Reykjanes activity, I’ve grown interested in subglacial Icelandic lava flows. When lava is erupted under an ice cap, it tends to pile up rather than flow away. It makes a conical or ridge-like mound of pillow lavas known as a tindar. When lava reaches the surface of the glacier, it starts…
Six months of episodic earthquakes and ground swelling along the Southwest Rift Zone of Kilauea have finally culminated in a major event. As I write, the volcano rifts. We have a dike. A blade of magma cuts its way across the rift zone generating earthquakes outside of the SWRZ connector, the usual area of seismic…
We are still learning. There is much we humans don’t know about volcanoes or about how they behave. The past few years have been enlightening. It all started in January 2020, the Svartsengi region started rising, and an elliptical area of inflation appeared that encompassed Mount Thorbjörn, the Svartsengi Power Plant, and the 800 years…
I feel fascinated by volcanoes and I think that’s quite obvious, but there’s also room for other natural phenomena, like weather. In Spain, my home, volcanoes are rare. We do have a ~10,000-year-old monogenetic volcanic fissure in northern Spain, part of the Catalan Volcanic Field, a cluster of weak alkaline volcanic fields that have been…