When you start to study volcanoes you inevitably start by studying the top of the volcano and you inevitably model your understanding about the volcano in reference to the cone or mountain that you see. Some volcanoes are even referred to as “perfect volcanoes” due to them being almost perfectly symmetrical. But, as we will…
In her 1948 novel “Trollkarlens hatt” (Finn Family Moomintroll), Finnish author Tove Jansson describes how on the first day of spring Moomintroll and his friends discover a large, black hat and bring it home without knowing that it is the Magician’s lost hat and that anything that stays in the hat too long will be…
The world of volcanism is not about being equal. There are small volcanoes, there are big volcanoes and then there is Mauna Loa. And until someone actually proves that the Tamu Massif is one single volcano and not a Large Igneous Province or a multiple volcano area I will continue to refer to Mauna Loa…
Guest post for VolcanoCafé by René Goad First of all I would like to thank Carl Rehnberg for inviting me to write a guest post and I will be talking a bit about the Galapagos Islands. For a good few years I’ve been wanting to visit the Galapagos Islands with the Sierra Negra Volcano…
The more you read about volcanism in North America, the more confused you become by the immense complexity of eruptive phenomenae and sequences. As will be clear from my previous article about Mount Tehama (Lassen), it is not always a question about a single central volcano such as Vesuvius or Etna, but about a multitude…
This is the third article in our series of re-posts. It is well worth noticing that it was first published well ahead of the volcanic crisis at Volcan Chilles on the border between Equador and Colombia which taught us that even if a volcano is thought to not have erupted for some 174,000 years, it…
This article began as a regular piece on Lassen Peak but quickly expanded as I discovered how incredibly complex the geology and history of the Lassen Volcanic Complex was. Unlike nearby Shasta, Lassen Peak is but a dacite lava dome, one of the largest lava domes on Earth but only one of the dozens of…
Starting today, we begin to reproduce some of the more popular posts originally published on the old site. But don’t worry! We will continue to produce new posts as and when something of interest crops up! Volcanic activity in North America is surprisingly infrequent. In spite of there being no less than 255 volcanoes or…
The August 24th eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD is the most famous and well-known volcanic eruption of all time. By now, volcanologists have pieced together the sequence of events to form a coherent and comprehensive picture and the only official dilemma is the actual date with meteorological evidence arguing a date towards the middle…
Although the 2,265 volcano-tectonic earthquakes at Planchon-Peteroa as reported yesterday by Georges Vitton (Le Chaudron de Vulcain) is perhaps the more interesting news, our readers are probably more interested in the large earthquake swarms in Tjörnes Fracture Zone. What is happening? Is it an eruption, is an eruption imminent or can an eruption be expected…