Humanity has a long history of living on this Earth. During the days and years, our world continuously changed. We grew up in the shadows of the approaching ice ages. We left Africa when the changing sea opened up a road to Asia, and followed an ever-changing coast line to the far East. And throughout…
A quick overview of my current VCMap project, which can currently be found at http://www.volcanocafe.org/vcmap I would like to start off by thanking Spike Page for being the inspiration for this project. A couple of weeks ago, Spike wrote on Spike’s Facebook page asking for someone to test out a Google Earth file. This file…
This is based on an old post by Carl, The World’s most ill begotten piece of real estate – Part III, which has been slightly reworked. The Chinese have a saying, “May you live in interesting times”. And it is in no way a friendly thing to say; on the contrary it is a rather…
Ever since I began plotting earthquake data for Iceland and generally for the world (where data is available), I was planning to do a monthly review of the seismicity in Iceland, so we can keep track of it on a monthly basis. Of course, if there is any stronger activity or something unusual happens, usually…
In this article, we move away from the usual suspects in Icelandic volcanism and turn our attention to a feature many of us have noticed over the years. This feature has only been revealed from seismicity, but here I try to unravel the past and future activity as well as give this feature a sense…
The signs were unequivocal. It started with earthquake swarms. A phreatic eruption followed, and than the ground began to swell. Magma was approaching the surface. An eruption was on the cards and evacuation plans were put in place. An exclusion zone kept people safe but not their possessions – and as always some people could…
Although I’m more of an unseen hand (Volcanonati?) behind the scenes at VolcanoCafe and the VC Facebook group, I wanted to step out the shadows and give the Dead Zone article some new light. It’s an area I’ve always been fascinated with and it was this very area, along with its fissure eruptions, that first…
The Mississippi valley had once been densely inhabited, but it was so no longer. The Indian cultures had been decimated by disease; their lands were emptied and their villages deserted. The area had just become US property, and American settlers were moving in but it was still early days, here on the western frontier, in…
It is a wonderful, and funny place. New Zealand has more than its fair share of the world’s beauty. You want volcanoes, rivers, beaches, forests, mountains, liveable cities, it has it all. Its history is out of this world. Apart from a few bats and some dolphins, the first mammals to arrive were human. In…
Rome is an ancient wonder. It feels strange, walking along a street next to the heart of the world city, but surrounded by old ruins. Here the old survives next to the new. There was extensive damage done by the Vandals, the people who overran Italy in the 5th century. They cut off the water…