Sometimes a project becomes remarkable. Some years ago we started thinking about what to do with the James Webb Space Telescope, whenever it would become available. An idea was developed and we worked out what kind of data would be needed. It turned out to be feasible, so we proposed it. That is harder than…
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.…
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…
One of my fondest memories of South Africa (apart from being shot at by police) is the bird of paradise. Not a bird: the birds of this name live in a different continent and a very different habitat. In South Africa, birds of paradise are plants with banana-like leaves growing a meter or more tall.…
An eruption has started at the summit of Mauna Loa. It has been a long wait! The inflation over the past month was notable, though not exceptional, but it was the drip that made the volcanic bucket overflow. We now need to see what happens. Commonly, eruptions migrate down the rift zone, in this case…
Volcanology is filled with moments when you look at your favourite volcano doing something interesting, and you hope that it will erupt. There is no shame to admit it, we are secretly cheering our favourites on towards the inevitable eruption. Time and time again we are though let down by our volcanoes, and if you…
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…
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…