Extraterrestial volcanoes I: The lava outflow channels of Mars. Evidence from morphology.

There are eight planets in our Solar System. Of the eight planets three of them have silicate, probably active, volcanism. Mars, Earth and Venus. It is very insightful to compare the volcanism between these three planets in order to find out more about how Earth’s own volcanoes work. Yet I find that extra-terrestrial volcanism is still misinterpreted despite the wealth of data that we have. Some popular ideas are still running around which I think could be disproven easily. Particularly the theory of how the Martian outflow channels were formed.

The Mariner 9 was the first spacecraft to orbit Mars. This was in 1971. After a global dust storm cleared away it was finally able to take pictures of the planet surface. The images it took revealed the existence of giant canyons, and river-like features. Valles Marineris, Ares Vallis, Kasei Valles and other landforms which were interpreted as having formed due to flowing liquid water. But it has been a while since then. Nowadays we have a global mosaic of the surface of Mars, at a resolution of 6 meters per pixel, taken by the Context Camera of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is incredible detail that allows to look closely at these outflow channels and know more about how they formed.

First I should clarify that there are two different types erosive structures that have been attributed to water. One of them is the valley networks. The valley networks occur mainly in the Southern Highlands of Mars and are usually 4 billion years old. They have features like those of river drainage basins on Earth. To me they look water made and clearly have nothing to do with volcanism, could have been rivers of liquid water. Although the idea of water or carbon dioxide ice glaciers should also be considered.

Example of a valley network in the Southern Highlands of Mars. THEMIS daytime infrared mosaic of Mars as viewed in Google Earth.

The second type is outflow channels. These are much younger, some of them only a few millions of years old. They are found close to volcanoes, most of them being concentrated in the Tharsis and Elysium volcanic provinces. They lack sedimentary deposits like deltas or ripples. The channels initiate abruptly from a chasm or depression in the ground which has led to think that they were formed in huge outbursts of groundwater contained in aquifers under the surface. It is also remarkable the size reached by some of the outflow channels. The largest one is Kasei Valles, a canyon with a length of 1600 km, a width of up to 400 km in places, and a depth of up to 3 km.

One of the main problems with the liquid water hypothesis for outflow channels is that Venus has identical valleys to those of Mars. It not possible for liquid water to exist on the surface of Venus. Additionally the youngest canyons of Venus always are seen to channelize lava flows, and they tend to emerge from radial and circumferential fractures around volcanoes.

Head of Kallistos Vallis in Venus. Magellan radar image seen in Google Earth.

Unnamed incised channel in Venus, near the tectonic feature called Muta Mons. Magellan Image seen in Google Earth.

Several outflow channels issue from radial fissures of the volcano Elysium Mons. The morphology is identical to the other examples in Venus. Daytime infrared global map of Mars in Google Earth.

I’m here to explain why there is morphological evidence, unambiguous evidence I’d say, that the outflow channels of Mars are lava made. Not water but lava. The result of giant flood basalt eruptions. I’m not the first person to say so and for example the geologist David Leverington has done some great articles about this aspect. This post will focus only in the morphological evidence, so for a full discussion on why the outflow channels were made by lava, and also why the groundwater hypothesis has many problems, I will leave one of his articles here:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.467.1227&rep=rep1&type=pdf

 

The formation of fossae and catenae

There is something important which is often overlooked and is that lava erosion may occur not only along lava channels, but also along dike intrusions. Magma flows underground through intrusions which for simplicity I simply refer to as dikes, although there may be other morphologies like sills or cone sheets that are involved. In Hawaii, in particular, there exist many features similar to the so called fossae and catenae of Mars, only much smaller, that are related to dikes and their erosive processes. Volcanism on Mars is of a huge scale so that it does the same landforms only bigger in scale.

In the island of Hawaii, during the eruption of Mauna Ulu, in 1969, the pit crater Alae had been filled with a rootless lava lake. Rootless means that it is not fed from below. The lake formed from lava that erupted out of Mauna Ulu and then flowed downslope towards Alae where it collected passively. On August 4 the lake catastrophically drained into a dike intrusion. The lava lake emptied in half an hour at a flow rate of 5500 m3/s. Spectacularly high for terrestial lava flows although probably insignificant compared to Martian effusions. The lake drained through a dike along which erosion took place, a substantial amount of rock was carried away with the flow leaving a chasm that was 10 meters wide, up to 70 meters deep, and 800 meters long.  Similar features are also formed when Nyiragongo volcano in the Congo has its typical catastrophic lava lake outbursts.

What is also interesting about this event is that it was rootless dike intrusion. It was fed from a surface lava lake. Lava flowed back into the ground making a dike that was probably very shallow, just skimming the surface, as shown by the fresh lava that could be seen in the bottom of the chasm. If there had been someone looking into the fracture while the lava lake drained it would have probably been able to see the raging torrent of lava. I think that rootless dike intrusions might be extremely abundant in Mars from what I have seen.

Chasm-like feature formed during the draining of the Alae lava lake which at a small scale resembles Martian fossae. Photo from USGS.

Later in the Mauna Ulu eruption there was another demonstration of the erosive power of lava/magma. Magma flowing along a dike from the summit of Mauna Ulu to Alae gradually ate away the rock and created a series of pit craters which later merged into a continuous trench 40-60 meters wide.

Lava erosion forms a small canyon along the magma pathway between Mauna Ulu and Alae. Photo from USGS.

Portion of Olympica Fossae in Mars. The canyon here is 1500 meters wide and 200-300 meters deep. It is very similar in structure to the trench of Mauna Ulu, just 30 times bigger in width. Mars likes to do huge eruptions. CTX mosaic in Google Earth.

Other landforms commonly seen in the surface of Mars are the catenae. These are chains of pit craters often related to grabens, and from which lava can sometimes be seen to emerge. On Earth structures similar to the catenae of Mars occur along eruptive fissures and seem to be linked to dikes, possibly another form of dike erosion like fossae, but discontinuous. Certain portions of the dike may widen due to erosion so that the roof collapses into the magma, the rock is carried downstream, then the roof continues to collapse incrementally making a pit crater. Such collapse structures are often located at the upslope end of an erupting fissure that lasts long enough for the erosion to show up.

The Great Crack. Chain of pits and fractures that fed the 1823 eruption of Kilauea. From Google Earth.

Two collapse craters align with an eruption fissure. Lava erupted within the right crater. The location is Alayta volcano in the Afar Depression. Capture from Google Earth.

Slopes of Pavonis Mons showing an area of eruptive fissures, fossae and catenae, which are circumferential to the summit of the volcano. CTX mosaic of Mars viewed in Google Earth.

Interpreted map of the above image.

 

The creation of an outflow channel

Lava is known to be able of eroding into the bedrock it flows over. One of the probably many examples that exist on Earth is the Kazumura lava tube in Hawaii. This is the longest lava tube know on Earth, and formed during overflows from the summit of Kilauea in the 15th century. Speleologists have descended into the Kazumura cave. The lava tube shows meander migration and downcutting into the bedrock, similar to processes that take place in rivers. Some meanders migrated up to 9 meters downstream. Certain parts of the lava tube with a steeper slope were eroded backwards, this back-cutting resulted in the formation of lavafalls, and at the bottom of the cascade the turbulent flow created large pools which expanded laterally through erosion making a wider passage. So yes, lava erosion happens. It is thougth to be due to lava melting the rock that it comes into contact with. On Earth it is a more subtle process and only observed upon close inspection of lava tubes or channels. On the other hand Mars, with its gigantic eruptions that are far more intense, longer, and more voluminous than those on Earth, it can erode spectacular canyons.

The outflow channels have been traditionally attributed to water. Outbursts of water from aquifers. However there are some characteristics of outflow channels that are not consistent with water. First is that there are no sedimentary deposits, there are no deltas, nor ripples, nor any sort of sedimentary structure that is characteristic of flowing water. And second they have features that could have only been done by lava. As an example I will use Olympica Fossae, a 650 kilometres long outflow channel that switches between channel and dike transport. It is located in the volcanic province of Tharsis and it maybe emerges from a fissure of the volcano Alba Mons.

Right below is an image of Olympica Fossae. In this particular spot the canyon is a system of braided channels that reaches 7-8 kilometres wide and 500 meters deep. Here the channel has just emerged out of the large fossa to the right. There are a series of other small fossae visible along the sides of the valley. It doesn’t appear possible that water could have made structures such as these, however lava would. These linear features might be rootless dike intrusions which propagate from the lava channel outwards and have eaten away the rock closest to their source. It can also be appreciated that two smaller channel systems emerge out of these fossae. Lava that was flowing down the main, master channel would have entered the rootless dikes and emerged from fissures located at slightly lower elevations.

Olympica Fossae. CTX mosaic from Google Earth.

Some of the smaller streams from braided channel network can be seen to flow away from the rest and turn into normal looking lava flows. That is where you clearly see that the outflow channels are lava rivers which have been active for so long that they have melted down into the bedrock, farther down however they become normal streams of lava. For example this is a flow that separated from the braided network shown in the previous images, it is no longer erosive and instead has the typical appearance of sheet aa flows like those seen in intense volcanic eruptions:

From Google Earth.

Right below you can see the big picture. The outflow channel in reality is only a small portion of a much larger flood basalt eruption. The eruption of Olympica Fossae I estimate may have been around 3,000 km3 of basaltic lava, perhaps even more since there is a possibility that Olympica Fossae was just one of multiple erupting fissures in the area. The total length of the flow seems to be 1900 kilometres, but only the upper 800 kilometres have experienced significant erosion 

Map of Olympica Fossae. Green indicates fossae and catenae, presumably dikes. Orange shows normal lava channels. Red indicates lava channels that have eroded into the bedrock. Yellow are normal lava channels that probably formed in the eruption but are so far away from the fissure that they cannot be traced up directly to it. Pink represents the master lava channel with has downcut hundreds of meters into the rock. Viewed in Google Earth.

At the start of the eruption lava poured out of multiple fissures making many lava streams. The streams separate and merge again in fascinating patterns and shows that the whole system of channel was active at once. Later activity focused into fewer channels and eventually was limited to the master channel which cuts deeply into the ground. The transition between erosional and non-erosional lava channels is very well visible.

Map of the upper part of Olympica Fossae. Green indicates fossae and catenae, presumably dikes. Orange shows normal lava channels. Red indicates lava channels that have eroded into the bedrock. Pink represents the master lava channel with has downcut hundreds of meters into the rock. Viewed in Google Earth.

There is one location where the master channel goes into a dike and travels 170 km through a fossa before reappearing again farther south. The master channel and the subsidiary streams seem to have a continuation downslope across the fossa as normal lava rivers. It can be seen that in the early phase of the eruption the main channel started a rootless dike intrusion which then diverted the flow of lava 170 km away, changing the path followed by the lava.

Map of the lower section of Olympica Fossae showing the 170 km jump of the lava channel through a dike. Green indicates fossae and catenae, presumably dikes. Orange shows normal lava channels. Red indicates lava channels that have eroded into the bedrock. Pink represents the master lava channel with has downcut hundreds of meters into the rock. Viewed in Google Earth.

Location where the lava stream was diverted away by a dike during the course of the eruption. The master channel still had not started to erode into the ground when this event happened. Viewed in Google Earth.

Thus there is obvious evidence that Martian outflows valleys were created by giant floods of lava. So it is time to discard the idea of groundwater outbursts. There is just better information now. When inspected closely it shows the true lava-made nature of outflow channels.

Just to finish here are some images of the youngest outflow channels in Mars, those of Marte Vallis. The last eruption of Mars took place perhaps as recently as 3 million years ago, it erupted from Cerberus Fossae and created the Athabasca and Marte Vallis.  Dark material is rugged aa-type lava. Bright material is either smooth pahoehoe-type lava or old Martian rock. If you look closely you can appreciate the broken plates of black aa lava carried by the stream, and where they separated from each other molten material rose up from below making a smoother surface of pahoeheoe. The convoluted braided streams of aa lava which at places merge into a spectacular 100 kilometres wide river of lava, can be seen to have excavated banks against the obstacles it encountered. Erosion is slight but noticeable. This was a much more brief eruption than the one that made Olympica Fossae, however it was superior in intensity and volume.

Marte Vallis. Image from Google Earth.

Marte Vallis. Image from Google Earth.

 

Relevant links

Development and morphology of the Kazumura Cave, Hawaii.

Volcanic rilles, streamlined islands, and the origin of outflow channels on Mars

Mars interactive maps.

286 thoughts on “Extraterrestial volcanoes I: The lava outflow channels of Mars. Evidence from morphology.

  1. Fantastic Article Hector!

    Mars lower gravity, means also less bouyancy than on Earth, that means that magma chambers haves to be large to even erupt.
    Magmatic bouyancy is much less on Mars than on Earth. So Marsian magma chambers are much larger than terestrial. Explains the Big size of these eruptions.

    These Marsian eruptions woud be disasterous on Earth! I doubt even Earths Lips got to this scale.

    Mars is only 1/10 th of Earths mass, so it have cooled much more, Marsian litosphere is almost 600 kilometers deep by now, confirmed by InSight.

    Althrough Mars been geologicaly active for its entire history, Only now its slowing down.
    It will with certainly erupt in the far future

    • Hector Do you think Earths LIP s those since complex life began was in Marsian scale in eruptions?

      • I’m not sure. In terms of volume perhaps they are comparable, the Roza lava flow of the Columbia River basalt has 1300 km3, and it was a small LIP. But Roza was a slow eruption with inflated pahoehoe. If there is a type of lava that is almost impossible to find on Mars that is inflated pahoehoe. Martian eruptions are always too intense for inflated pahoehoe to happen. Even Martian shield building uses aa and sheet pahoehoe, and those are the lowest eruption rates you find. So maybe the eruption rates are not comparable, but who knows.

        • I think it may have been actual shield building, but with magma supply rates out of this world. You can see ring fissures on the slopes of the Tharsis Montes, but in Olympus there are no visible ring fissures as far as I could see. Lava just overflowed from the top (before the caldera formed),

    • Mars is between .. the Moon and Earth in size, so cooling rate should be too .. Not competely dead yet.

      Athabasca Valles are indeed one of Mars youngest lava superfloods.

      If these eruptions happens on Earth the gas woud kill everyone for 100 s of kilometers, crazy

      I guess these Mega lava floods, happens in Planets with Thick Litospheres, where the heat haves difficult To get out. They get infrequent huge volcanism, with long rests of between. Earth haves a thin tectonic litosphere, and does heat loss by lots of small eruptions constantly

      • The eruption of Cerberus Fossae was intense even for Mars, makes Earth’s lava flows look insignificant.

    • We have not explored Olympus Mons in detail yet, Not with rovers, air is too thin up there, parachutes hardly works there. Its entirely possible, that there maybe some kind of geothermal activity in the caldera walls, althrough nothing have been seen yet. The calderas on Olympus Mons probaly formed during the Jurassic Era on Earth. No sulfur been measured by mars artifical satelites, althrough volcanism on Mars is highly episodic these days

      But giant lava floods like Athabasca Valles and Olympia floods are much younger than Olympus Mons, because of lack of impact cratering.
      Some of the Athabasca Valles lava flows, looks like They been emplaced yesterday! CTX Image mosaic is great in Google Mars Mode on Google Earth

    • Very Impressive volcanism on Mars
      There are channelized Aa tounges from Olympus Mons that are 900 kilometers long, and haves Aa flow fronts that are 200 km wide, even souch a flow emplaced in weeks woud be a total disaster on Earth

      Its Mars low magmatic bouyancy as well as thick insulating litosphere that makes the eruptions so large.

      Now with thickeing litosphere..
      Mars maybe is at current only doing Catastrophic Lava floods, rather than building giant shields like Olympus Mons.

      Athabasca Valles Maybe the most recent eruptions on Mars, as well as the Cerberus Fossae looks very recent. One ash deposit on Cerberus Fossae is estimated to be Only 50 000 years old by now

      • The last episode of shield building in Olympus Mons is fairly recent. And quite an episode it must have been, all the surface looks very homogeneous so perhaps the entire volcano was resurfaced with those super-thick perched channels and tubes that Martian shields have. Then there were a series of flood basalt eruptions from the eastern foot of the mountain.

        • There has also been ice cover at regular times, possibly as often as every few million years

          • There are some huge moraines on the flanks of the three Tharsis Montes.

          • Ice means water. Then I found this:
            “Even if a planet orbits its star in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, at just the right distance to be warm enough for liquid water without being too hot to support life, it could still be too small to keep hold of the water.”
            https://text.npr.org/1039288432

            Next, I’m asking myself, of course, why Ceres, even smaller and further away, can hold its water.
            https://www.volcanocafe.org/dawn-over-ceres-the-journey/

            And basically I think that the secrets of the solar system will be unlocked little by little in the Asteroid Belt and Jupiter’s moons, but also on the planet Venus.

      • Ceres is at the frost line and Thats why its holds on its water well, the outer solar system is icey

    • InSight been an extraodinary valuble mission.

      Mars core have been revealed and its larger than then earths moon, the entire core maybe liquid. InSight coud only see a liquid core. The core is keept liquid by lower pressures than Earths as well as having lots of sulfur in the Iron to lower the melting point. Mars haves an Iron Sulfide Core. Earth haves an Iron – Nickel core

      The Marsisn core maybe molten, But not hot enough to produce a magnetic field

    • Mars is with certainly still alive..
      But sadely We wont see any activity during our lifetime on Mars, more than Marsquakes and faulting

      InSight lander detected most Earthquakes near Cerebrus Fossae
      Coud it be magma moving deep below the crust? Marsian magma chambers are located much deeper than Earths too.

  2. Wow, this is amazing.
    I have a question to the valley networks. They do not at all look like rivers on earth. You go up to a mountain pass, and there you can see that the water just jumps down pretty straight in a cascade. Then it collects somewhere to a small river, then bigger river, and then I looked for the size of those valleys up there, up to four kilometers. It’s then already on Earth a pretty stately river and not a network.

    Then you have those round structures on the pictures. Those look like old volcanoes. Frankly, I think, the whole thing could also be lava, very old.
    Maybe I’m wrong, but first somebody has to show me a tree-like river like this in a valley.
    Or I’m wrong with dimensions.

    I’ve seen a structure like this tree though. It’s in the Delta of the Indus and Ganges. It’s sediment. Still different though. Like a fan. Running straigt into the Indian ocean in several directions.

    Could it be lava? This looks like something that has once been viscous. Water is more or less straight.

    • Yeah the pattern looks more like a delta than a river basin, though more like the Mississippi delta than the Ganges.

      • That fits more, slow flowing river. And the round structures?

    • It could have been glaciers too, which would make wider valleys. I don’t know, but I don’t think it was lava, there are no signs of volcanism near the river networks.

  3. Interestinhg activity beside hekla

    Ps: hector l love your post

  4. Frozen CO2 clouds on Mars
    Stratocumulus clouds. Mars haves Only
    1/100 th of Earths surface pressure, yet Thats enough atmosphere for clouds and sky

    • Mars gets its sky color mainly from mineral dust in the atmosphere, thats called mie scattering

      Surface air pressure is same as
      35 kilometers above Earths surface!
      And there the dayskies are black on Earth.

      Without Mars dust, Mars woud perhaps have black noon skies, with kind of blue sunsets

  5. Mars Litosphere have now been confirmed
    To be around 570 kilometers thick, means that entire Mars litosphere is thicker than Earths deepest cratons. Measured by InSight Lander seismometer. The core is still liquid.

    Makes sense Since Mars have cooled more than Earth have done.

    This thick Litosphere and combined with low bouyancy sets up the conditions for Mega lava flows. Althrough the litosphere is thickening. Mars volcanism been declining ever since the planet formed, althrough still magmaticaly active, The planet is in dying phases of its volcanism. Soon the planet will Only loose heat by litosphere conduction like the moon

    Mars will still erupt again in the future with certainly, But the planet is starting to shut down magmaticaly. But its not dead yet .. by any means.

    Is there any Geothermal vents on Mars?
    The Marsian Methane is a great mystery.. that coud be from underground biological life

    • Still Mars been volcanicaly active for most of its history .. all of its history
      Amazonian Age is full of volcanism.

      Tharisis Boulge is the largest lava pile in the solar system, it makes even the Hawaiian lip look insignifcant.
      Tharisis boulge is sometimes referd to as one single ”Mega Volcano” with the 4 tharisis shields just being vents .. of this mammoth volcano 🙂

  6. Is Taal still getting to operating temperature or has the worsening stopped?

  7. Elon Musk and the crashed nose of the
    BFR Starship number SN8 remains.
    Space Xs moon and mars program is going well, but not without failures, and development is slower than they expected. Still the space – ship starship is under construction. Starship will be the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, with the ability to carry in excess of 100 metric tonnes to Earth orbit.

    • BFR will haves No problem with landning in Olympus Mons caldera
      Since it does not use a parachute at all. Althrough Olympus Mons haves souch low air pressure and is so dusty so not a good place for a mars city.

      • It cant do that actually, Starship still needs atmospheric breaking to slow down enough to land. The caldera of Olympus Mons is probably going to be one of the hardest places to get to on Mars.

        • Actually, *IF* Starship has the performance claimed (delta/v of 6.9 kps) it could land at the summit of Olympus Mons. It’s be problematic to do from Earth, but it’d be easy if the starting point is Mars.

          Their currently-stated plan is to set up in-situ resource extraction to make the propellant required to return to earth. (sabatier reaction, mainly.) No matter where on Mars they do this (and it’ll almost certainly be a lowland area) with 6.9 KPS delta/v, you can do a suborbital hop to most anywhere on the planet, and return. So, an expedition from their propellant-making facility to Olympus Mons is technically feasible, though I doubt they’d even consider it unless they were at a point were they had 3 or more Starships on Mars. (risking your only ride home might not be appealing). 🙂

          Major caveat; SpaceX changes its mission profile quite often, so any spec, such as Starship’s delta/v potential, is pretty much speculative.

          On the other hand, they do have a contract with NASA regarding a lunar version of Starship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS
          And landing on the moon is definitely propulsive only, because the only other option is lithobraking, which is best avoided. 🙂

      • Mars atmospheric entry is just as bad as the Earths..
        If you enters at similar speeds. Density is similar at entry altitudes.

        Mars probe capsules haves thick heat shields

        Its just that Mars lacks a lower denser atmosphere

        Still 1/100 th of Earths surface pressure is still a substational atmosphere

        Althrough Super Earths coud have many Earth bars in pressure at their surfaces

    • And If he trys to land on Venus, then that BFR will be crushed like a
      Tin – can 🙂 entire thing woud implode instantly on Venus surface…

    • The good hing about it is that we will soon have enough garbage in orbit so that the ubiquitous aliens and their UFOs will find it very difficult to get through to earth’s surface.

    • What a waste of metal and resources.
      Surely he would save cash just by better design and testing? Boeing managed it with their prototype 777.

      • That approach is far more wasteful, look how many billions of dollars it has cost to make SLS, and that is going to be entirely discarded, Starship is going to be reused. The steel is going to be reused anyway, possibly directly back at SpaceX given I think it is a custom alloy that would be more expensive to make new.

      • I would not in any way use Boeing of today as an example of good engineering principles. Remember that they tend to design deply flawed airplanes that has cheated their way through certification.
        It will be interesting what corners they cut on the 777X, one thing is though certain, I will not fly on it for the first decade of operations.

        Edit: Boeing of Yesterday was a fantastic company on the forefront of engineering and safety. I wish that old Boeing would return to life.

        • Concerning cheating it’s not only Boeing. It’s car companies and Pharma as well. Morals have broken down.

          • True, but I would say that the really sad part is not Boeing, it is the moral bankrupcy of FAA. Some companies will cheat, that is inevitable. That is why we have organisations like the FAA to keep them in check, when they grow so darn lazy that they let the company do the checks themselves we have a moral collapse.

        • Agree with your there, Carl. The 737Max is a shining example of corner-cutting and managerial stupidity.
          The old Boeing were far better.

      • That was testing. Personally I am amazed that a startup can leapfrog through to achieve so much so cheaply. Whether the starship design is a step too far is perhaps another issue, we shall see.

        • They have been good on doing it on a shoestring.
          A lot of saving was done by reusing a lot of development done previously by NASA and a bunch of other companies, and much of the components are standard components bought off the shelf from suppliers.

          I am not mentioning this to lower the achievement, I would state that it is an achievement in and of itself since it makes things cheaper.

          In the end though all BDBs are a dead end, but that is a completely different topic.

          • Buying standard stuff from suppliers is good. Cheaper by far and almost always very well tested and understood. NASA’s problem was always that every product was essentially a prototype.

  8. That earthquake swarm centred over Vatnafjoll – entirely tectonic?
    It’s a strange spot. Carl’s ‘Forgotten Volcano’ postulated the idea that 4.8km3 could have been intruded there during the 87 quake swarm. And it’s flanked by Hekla & Katla.

    • The swarm from the 5.1 which struck earlier seems to be still going… Can an entirely “tectonic” event cause volcanic activity?

      My concern about Hekla, regardless of what geologists say, is that it does have a history shouting “BOO!” when we least expect it. Erupting without warning.

      • Chicken or egg situation.
        Was the reykjanes swarm tectonic and then volcano-tectonic with the dyke pushing up, or was it caused initially by the dyke?
        This is at the eastern end of the South Iceland Seismic Zone, kind of where it meets the main fracture, south east corner of the ‘Hreppar Block’.

        Hekla’s a scary one. Deep magma chamber I believe.

      • Think the swarm is on / near the plate boundary as the SISZ heads for the Eastern Volcanic Zone. The SISZ is a transform fault zone.

  9. For me these pictures work like an optical illusion: the structures flip from being seen as raised structures to being seen as depressions. For example in the first image I can see the round structures only as raised . With this interpretation the flow channels are all raised structures. I am unable to see it the other way round.

    This is consistent with light hitting from the NNW direction.
    They would have to be interpreted as depressions if the light hits from the opposite direction.

    In the image with legend “Location where the lava stream was diverted…” I saw it first clearly as a valley then it flipped to raised and ever since I was unable to see it as a valley even with conscious effort. I have problems interpreting the direction of the light in this image. I cannot find a direction that explains the bright spots consistently.

    • Round structures? I think you mean the meteor impact craters, those are depressions. I guess it might be difficult to tell if something is higher than the rest or not if one does not recognize the structure first. The centre of impact craters are always down, same as channels, and valley networks.

      • I still see them as coming up even though I know they are craters – I think it is a bit like the revolving mask illusion

        maybe caused by the low light angle 🙂

  10. Had always wondered about this feature off the coast of Iceland:

    The Aegir Ridge is an extinct segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the far-northern Atlantic Ocean. It marks the initial break-up boundary between Greenland and Norway, along which seafloor spreading was initiated at the beginning of the Eocene epoch to form the northern Atlantic Ocean. Towards the end of the Eocene, the newly forming Kolbeinsey Ridge propagated northwards from Iceland, splitting the Jan Mayen Microcontinent away from the Greenland Plate. As the Kolbeinsey Ridge formed, so activity on the Aegir Ridge reduced, ceasing completely at the end of the Oligocene epoch when the Kolbeinsey Ridge reached the Jan Mayen Fracture Zone.[1]

    The relatively thin crust and short lifespan of the Aegir Ridge is anomalous given its proximity to the Iceland hotspot. Mantle hotspots deliver warm, actively-upwelling material to mid-ocean ridges, increasing mantle melting and crustal production. Likely, the stresses associated with plate tectonics and the mechanical structure of the lithosphere created a situation in which spreading at the Kolbeinsey Ridge was energetically favorable to spreading at the Aegir Ridge. As the Kolbeinsey Ridge began rifting, hotspot material would then draw out of the Aegir Ridge and flow preferentially towards the Kolbeinsey Ridge, leading to the ultimate extinction of the spreading center.

    • An absolute gem! Thank you for spotting it. I’ve bookmarked his videos now. Science with Icelandic humour – perfect mix.

      • Ever since finding the place I was always confused why there was a place at all called Vatnafjoll. It is hardly a mountain especially when there is a much more substantial mountain right next to it, and there is also most certainly not a lake there and looks like there never has been either. It makes much more sense that it was a drunk joke. 🙂

        I really want the map from http://jardfraedikort.is/ to update the area south of Hekla so I can see the layout of lava flows from Vatnafjoll in the great detail they deserve, even google earth is patchy on this area and GVP has nothing, even the radiocarbon dating has got error margins in the thousands of years 🙁

  11. Mars is 1/10 th of Earths mass
    But defentivly erupted recently.

    Whats the current temperatures of the Marsian core? The InSight heat flow experiment have failed spectacularly, the heat mole probe coud not dig into Mars sadely

    • Mars is smaller than Earth, But its way more massive than our moon, so Mars probaly still carry substational internal heat, even if the planet cooled more than Earth.

      I woud put the Marsian core at
      2600 C perhaps even 3000 C althrough I coud be wrong.

      Earth center maybe 6100 C because its greater mass

  12. The faf drumplot shows a damn large double quake shortly before 1:30 in the afternoon. Second quake slightly larger than the first and under a minute later.

    • Those are P- and S-wave arrivals from the M5.2 near Hekla. The P-waves arrive a bit faster, but the S-waves carry the most energy.

    • That was a quake near Keilir. First one over M3 in a while.

      Friday
      12.11.2021 05:05:40 63.915 -22.202 6.5 km 3.2 99.0 3.3 km SSW of Keilir

  13. I am still fascinated by the first picture and the round structures. For me the round structures look like flattened volcanoes (vents) sending out lava streams which run down and meet at the lowest point. Just like Fagradalsfjall did.
    If Mars had any water and kept some it would be at one or both poles.

    • A comparison could also be Yellowstone Caldera maybe. Or Taal. Round structures in a circle or half circle, “rivers” running down from them. Or a bit drier:
      https://www.volcanocafe.org/the-forgotten-volcanoes-of-chad-part-ii/

      Or this, first and third picture:
      https://www.volcanocafe.org/the-forgotten-volcanoes-of-libya/

      Or this (Richat’s Structure):
      https://www.volcanocafe.org/terra-nova-the-eye-of-africa/

      Well, there’s nothing like drilling.

    • Also La Palma shows it neatly: Several vents, several lava streams, connecting further down.

      I admit to having a bias: Reading about volcanoes and knowing that the whole planet is full of them, also on the ocean floor and that they are just of different age, makes you see volcanoes. I haven’t read as far as much about water.

    • Then also: Where is the river? Or Lake? Why would the tributaries leave traces, but not the biggest river?:

      • Donau mouth, having swallowed Iller, Lech, Isar, Inn (!!!), Altmühl, Naab and Regen and more rivers further downstream.

      • Altmühl ..

        Sounds like something from Middle Earth : )

        • We learn it in school. Donau’s origin is German, Black Forest. It then disappears for a while – in Middle Earth 😉 – and then:
          Iller, Lech, Isar, Inn fließen zu der Donau hin,
          Altmühl, Naab und Regen, fließen ihr entgegen.
          Meaning: The first four come in from the Alps (south), the right hand tributaries, the other three come from the North, the left hand.
          After that there is lots of water from the Austrian mountains and also water from Hungary and the other countries.
          Some are smaller, some larger. The largest one is Inn coming from the region of St. Moritz, Switzerland, then going east through lower Engadin, then north to Austria, then east to Innsbruck, finally north to Passau, Germany where it flows into Danau (Danube), together with a smaller river. That causes floods, when it rains for two to three weeks in May when the snow comes down.

    • Those are most likely impact crater from meteors. They are very old, from the Late Heavy Bombardment or so, so the shape is worn down.

      • Not guaranteed when there is no drilling. Richat’s Structure was also thought to be an impact crater, and Chicxulub was proven after drilling into it. Then there is Nördlinger Ries (Albert has a piece in VC about it): Round structure, no river.

    • NASA is geat with pictures and very stingy with text, at least for the public.

      • NASA gives what the public wants. VC is unusual these days by still focussing on information and discussion

          • They are not, I think. Most people can understand complexity when needed. But they are being fed a diet of fast-food, sugary and instantly digestible opinions which are designed to trigger emotions and to bypass the brain. People often tend to be more considerate when speaking then when listening, when the brain manages to get a word in.

            Brainy McBrainFace?

          • Good point besides reading. Listening is very important.

        • As long as we don’t get space ships named Rocky McRocketface I am happy…

          I much prefer ‘Folding Metamorphic Space to IX’ as a name for my future starship.

        • Yes the ”general lack of education”
          In many comments on Nasa pages on Facebook and Youtube is terrible

          World is full of flat earthers, extreme creationists, and other non sience views

          But Im not insulting anyone..

          But yes Volcanocafe is good that it exist

        • This is why love VC. From someone who was unlearnèd on this subject, but not trusting mainstream narratives. I have learned a lot about how our system works. Thank you all, especially Carl.

      • Education is important, esp. in childhood. When people have no time for a while to learn more as adults because of work or raising children it’s ok as they can always turn the switch on again.
        But the general problem is laziness, comfort. Comfort and laziness are well served by colourful pictures, short films and shopping like there is no tomorrow.
        Reading is work, next to impssoble when you’re tired. But when laziness prevents people from reading they fall asleep in life. And that’s many, and they still have an (often uneducated) opinion.

        • But btw, I think VC is doing an excellent job in combining outstanding texts with good pictures and graphs.
          If I had had a school teacher like Carl or Albert in physics I would have excelled I guess. I had a sleeping pill. Half of the class were regularly missing, spending time in a nearby bar playing cards. He ignored it. Probably knew how bad he was. Gave us the second worst grade, so we could go on to the next level. That was rather nice of his.

          • My physics teacher was boring old Scotsman who seem to do his best at making physics boring and uninteresting; same with my geography teacher. However there was one geography teacher, I had when was in year 7, that sparked my interest in volcanoes.

            Nowadays what kids are taught is just puppy poo.

            I think Carl needs to do a video series on volcanoes, each being 30mins in length, GCSE standard for public understanding, with some nice graphics.

          • It’s money, Peter. The better folks are in universities and industry. To get better teachers in natural sciences they would have to be paid better and also better than the other teachers. Besides they would also need a longer education as there is more stuff to learn and more difficult then arts and letters.
            In my country this would cause a shit storm. We are going down though in natural sciences.
            In a short while we might not be able any more to compete with Japan, China and Korea.

        • Its more complex than this. Its related to the ‘spiteful behaviour’, where many people were shown to want to deprive someone they never met yet giving them no benefit whatsoever. So people who are ignorant in a subject tend to support those who are as ignorant as they are, against the person who clearly has the knowledge. Hence people believing ‘the man in the pub’ because he is seen as no cleverer than them.
          Aren’t humans odd?

          • When were any of you last in a school? Easy to judge from the outside. ‘The better folks…’ Are these people with better qualifications or who can teach? ‘Puppy poo’, do you want kids who can recite facts or also apply the knowledge? The UK exam system for secondary sciences has only got harder to pass since the 90’s as has the IB, Universities expect so much more from applicants than 40 years ago.

          • Edmdas,
            you forget old people have kids, and know what the education levels were in the 60’s as well as the 80’s and I have had cause to look at the syllabus in the 2010’s. In the Uk the rising grades and greater numbers getting the grades has been accompanied by vastly easier exams (at all levels) and even in prestigious universities there is grade inflation.
            Is it surprising that academically, the top 10% is still the top 10% and are significantly more academically able then the average?
            What is quite wrong is that smart kids from disadvantaged homes cannot be given more help to learn if they have a mind to. To be honest, just a working tablet and an internet connection puts you in touch with some very excellent teachers no matter how poor they are at school.
            IMHO all exams should be marked on deciles, come what may. Forever.
            PS I was state school educated and many of my friends came from VERY disadvantaged homes.

          • Our students are just as smart as those we had 20 years ago. There are changes: they are more focussed on getting the highest grades and more worried about their future. There is more dispersion in background: some have seen all our first year math already, some have seen very little of that. It depends on where they went to school, and funding makes a difference. There is quite a large range in funding per pupil across the UK, although perhaps not as large as in the US. Academia is big business now and that has both positive and negative aspects. Support for students has vastly improved (and that has been a big help during covid), but there is also a lot of pressure to accept more and more students. I would go back to the system with some academic institutions and some more vocational ones, so students have more real choice. 30 years ago universities were in bad shape with buildings in disrepair. Now the buildings are new and shine with big advertisement banners. One extreme to the other. But the students are still the same, and it always nice to see someone from a poor school catch up and blossom. But it is becoming more common (though still rare) that the school was just too poor for that.

          • Albert, unless you have moved institution (or the calibre of institution) then by definition the kids you have will be as good as they were 20 years ago. They will be the XX decile.
            As to schools being ‘too poor’ that’s simply untrue. In the 1960’s we had maths in a freezing cold nissan hut with a turtle stove, yet got excellent results. We made our own physics experimental equipment (you will be amazed what you can do with a meter rule, string and a few weights, beakers etc). Biology could do wonders with stuff taken from a park or asking the local butcher.
            You really do not need megabucks, although people think you do to buy expensive gear that shows nothing any better than what you can make.

          • I would have loved to see those experiments. But from what I see, funding does make a difference, probably not for the best students but for the typical ones. And I also noticed that students come with more self doubt than before. They hear everywhere that their exams are dumbed down and their A levels inflated. The message sticks. And it isn’t true. They are just as bright as the students from your school days.

          • I agree Albert that they are just as bright. And I am sure you can get the best out of them.
            Problem is in school when they are adolescents and very distracted by computers and phones and when they get lazy. My son nearly became a victim of that. We had him pack his bags and send him to a Public School in England where he found s.th. he hadn’t known before: Motivating teachers.
            Our schools here are now worse than British Grammar Schools.

          • Albert,
            Kids are as bright and as dumb as they have always been, even though there is indeed a small drift of IQ.
            The fact that graduates of my era earned 130%+ of the average income was because we were the top 10% educationally. There was probably another 10% of similar smartness who got a poor education and probably few GCSE’s (or none), many will have done very well (Alan Sugar is far from alone) and actually many of my uni peers ended up in not terribly well paid jobs (many teaching/technical related).
            As to doing GCSE physics (“O” level for me of course) outside the ‘modern’ bits where some electronics may be needed (actually quite easily buyable and cheap) what areas are not doable very simple? Mechanics? Simple wave theory? Light? Surface tension? Thermal? All easy with a little ingenuity.

  14. 4.3 mbLg SW VILLA DE MAZO.ILP
    2021/11/12 08:28:54IV
    38

    • Thank you for the links. From NG:
      “If so, the spirals would suggest that volcanoes —not ice floes, as other experts believe—shaped an unusual area near the red planet’s equator.

      Athabasca Valles is a region of flow channels and valleys covered with terrain plates, structures that show clear evidence of something fracturing and drifting across the planet’s surface millions of years ago.

      Scientists have been divided, however, as to whether the plates were made by the hardening of a massive lava flow or by icy “rafts”—much like Arctic pack ice—from an ancient inland sea.”

      Same division as everywhere:
      Volcanoes vs. ice flows
      Plumes vs. tectonics
      Deccan traps vs. Chicxulub

      Debate is good and keeps things lively.

      • Both Plumes and Tectonics exist on Earth

        These lava spirals have also been seen on ponded Pahoehoe lava flows in Hawaii

    • Also the second one is interesting: “There is also a possibility that current volcanic activity, if proven, could help explain the presence of methane in Mars’ atmosphere. Various telescopes, orbiters and the Curiosity rover have all detected the gas in small quantities, which on Earth is produced mostly by microbes as well as some from geologic activity. Scientists still don’t know the source of the Martian methane, but even if it is only from geological activity, that could still have implications for biology, since it would require liquid water-related chemical reactions (serpetinization) below ground.”

      • Yes maybe

        Mars is between the Moon and the Earth in size
        So its cooling rates should be in between too. There is almost certainly some kind of volcanical life left in Mars.

        There maybe even fumaroles releasing water vapours in some small unkown place on Mars.

        But No sulfur been detected in the Marsian Atmosphere
        Volcanism maybe highly episodic

        • Cerberus Fossae must have emitted all of its gas long ago. The volcanoes must be silent dead now.

          • But still preparing the next flood basalt eruption…

    • “A Place to Look for Life?

      The debate pitting lava against ice is more than purely geological. If Athabasca Valles does show clear evidence of water ice, the region could become an important target for future Mars astrobiology missions.”

      Problem with Mars is that everything always has to revolve around water which has hindered volcanology. Athabasca has very obvious lava made features, they are just very big compared to Earth’s, but they have the same shape. You can even see spatter ramparts in some places that are aligned with Cerberus Fossae. And the stuff that flowed down Athabasca was pahoehoe and aa lava they can be distinguished apart clearly unlike elsewhere in Mars.

      • There might be a slight obsession resulting from the idea of finding another habitable place to go on to and destroy it with our rubbish that is now collected even in the deepest oceans.
        Might be better to put some money into cleaning this garbage dump first including places like Southern Congo.

  15. If Baldrick was deleted/erased tomorrow it would exactly fall within estimations based on the average eruption length for La Palma.
    This night you could still see some incandescent lava moving (active looking lava flow).

  16. I just managed to get around to reading your article, Héctor. Well done and I am so pleased you’ve given a knock on the head to all the “river channel” enthusiasts that dominate the Mars debates. I’ve been very frustrated with the “river erosion” label being slapped onto rifts, outflows and various other structures on Mars, when some of them are so clearly not water erosion.
    Hopefully, as the science Mars advances, the water enthusiasts will be nailed down in place!

  17. Hector Whats your opinion on the Temperatures on the Marsian core?

    InSight have confirmed its liquid and its quite large too, bigger than Earths entire moon. But its not hot enough to produce a magnetic field.

    The core is large and yet very low in density, so its tought its lots of sulfur in Mars Core ”Iron Sulfide Core” that lowers the melting point
    I woud not be supprised If Mars center is quite hot, But not as hot as earths center.

  18. Two weeks ago I came down with covid. I am finally getting over it, and am slowly getting back to work, at least with half days. The cough is much less now and the fever is almost gone. The two worst things were blinding headaches and complete lethargy. Oxygen level dropped but did not reach danger zone. I need to keep testing for another two weeks since it can flare up again and if it does it can be worse.

    I probably became infected on public transport. The alternative is in lecture theatres but students are very good at wearing masks there – over 90% do. Mask wearing is mandatory in trains but compliance there is low especially among younger people. I blame the government for that as they came out with mixed messages. The UK prime minister does not wear a mask even in hospital. In a train you are in a closed environment for 30 minutes, so viral loads can get high.

    How bad is the disease? Before it turned out to be covid we were all wondering what it was what I had. at first it seemed a cold, then a bad cold, then a flu but not really. I tested positive four days after the first signs, and the disease peaked three days later. At that time we were getting medical advice as nothing was working and there were signs of oxygen deprivation. Slept a lot but couldn’t sleep at night, couldn’t eat. Appetite return was the first sign of recovery. But lack of energy remains a problem even now. The headaches have finally disappeared. Apparently headaches are a typical sign of the delta variant. This is a slow burner with a slow recovery. I kept my sense of smell. But it seemed to attack all parts of the body – even old scars started to hurt again.

    I am double vaccinated. That gives 60-70% protection against catching it in normal circumstances. I guess a crowded train is not a normal circumstance. Other family members also caught it and that obviously came from me. That seems typical, once it is in a house everyone is likely to get it. Did the vaccine help? I am convinced I would have been in hospital otherwise, with a ten times higher chance of death than the standard 0.5% for covid. Now it is waiting to see what the longer term effects are.

    Could I catch it again? There are now more cases in the UK of people in hospital who were vaccinated. Previously almost all those were people who had refused vaccines. Immunity wanes, or the virus changes. There are some indications that immunity after having the disease is wider than what you get from vaccines: the immune system can recognize more variants. The suggestion was that this is because the immune cells in the body themselves also mutate, and if you are lucky a mutation works against a virus mutation. Luck of the draw. Vaccines give more specific immunity which is less versatile, but of course vaccines can easily be updated once a new variant appears. The virus is still evolving and there is no telling what will happen next. I should be ok for a year but perhaps not for longer.

    In the UK, it seems a vaccination rate of 90% is sufficient to suppress the virus, but it has to include all age and social groups. Case rates are now highest in the poorer parts of the country. That correlates well with vaccination rates. The poor are more suspicious of the government (with some reason) and have lower vaccine uptake. The UK slowed down the vaccination rate over the summer, and that gave time for the anti-science groups to sow distrust. Once trust is lost, it is not easily regained. People do change their minds once they get the disease; we have seen that among our friends. No one who knows what this disease can do would choose to have it.

    I just received a message to come and get my flu vaccine. Yes please.

    • Good heavens, Albert. And you’ve been active on VC, too. I hope you recover fully soon, and thank you for telling us about its impact.

    • Where I am the border to the rest of the country is going to open in a month (people on here in Australia might figure out where I am now… ). I am fully vaccinated and so is nearly everyone else here (just over 80% I believe and still going) but reading your account shows maybe things will still not be so smooth, and that perhaps getting a ‘cold’ now will be a little more serious than it was before, probably not forever but for some years at least.

      It is good that you didnt get a serious case 🙂

      • It seems to be okay for half a year, sometimes more, Chad. And it seems to help against hospitalization.
        It does not help against carelessness like not wearing masks in public transport where lots of people are on small room.

        You are okay for the summer. Starting from March you should be careful. It’s an automn and winter problem.

    • I would wait two or three weeks with the flu vaccine until you are completely fit and feel healthy. You should have a decent immunity right now. It’s better to be healthy for vaccinations, and this goes for all of them.

      I am sorry that you had such a serious spell, nobody realized here I think. I wish you all the best for getting back to your old strength.
      Same problem here. I know somebody else, fully vaccinated, no hospital necessary either. So, if the vaccination keeps us out of hospitals it is already a success.

      Auguri!
      That’s what the Italians say and you know where it comes from. Also: May God bless you! And your family as well.

    • Get well soon, Albert.
      Unfortunately medicine is not an exact science.
      In medicine, statistics are subject to selection bias, and testing accuracy or vaccine/tratement reliability is rarely above 80%.When a test has an “accuracy” (in terms of “sensitivity”) of 80%, I’m happy with theses fingers..
      Due to virus mutations and the heterogeneity of human beeing, herd immunity may be an elusive goal.
      In many countries, communication was unrealistic; so that sometimes people were disappointed by the discrepancy between the prediction and the reality of the facts.
      So get vaccinated if you want. If you have any comorbidities, this is highly recommended. Until now, very, very rarely, side effects have appeared. It is also clear that one can catch this disease when one has been vaccinated, but maybe illness will be less serious
      I am one of those who thinks that it is a mistake to have abolished barrier gestures when visiting confined places (whatever the green pass).

    • Immune cells don’t mutate, but there is a good chance a viral infection (as opposed to a vaccine) will produce a broader spectrum of memory T-cells, not strictly relying on the spike protein as the target antigen.

    • I am currently working in this area. There are a few supplements (these are not fixes or cures by any means) I would strongly recommend to help mitigate some of the effects of Covid. Omega 3 (DHA/EPA) – fish oil or krill oil ideal, for at least the next 3 months. N acetyl cysteine – I can send you references and clinical data to support the why’s and wherefores if you would like them. If you have any kind of cardiovascular issues and a propensity for blood clots, please do get in touch with your GP to see about anticoagulation therapy for the next few months.

    • I did say it months, over a year ago, that vaccination is good, but best to later be infected by the wild virus. Its not just variants, the problem is the vaccines just have copied of the spike proteins. These are very mutable and in rna viruses mutate readily. The further the mutation is from the vaccine you had the longer it takes for an immune response to be usefully mounted.
      The killer T-cell mechanism is wider. Basically (simplistically) a cell infected with a virus ‘exhibits’ bits of chopped-up virus on its surface. This kicks in the T-cell response in that T-cells that happen to have matches go into overdrive and divide up and each kills infected cells before they are ripe. They are then stored as memory-T cells for another time, BUT the chopped up virus includes the inner bits, which are much less mutateable (and still have a functioning virus) bits so give protection against a very wide range of mutants.
      I have been on the tube (when rammed with people) and even accidentally during half term a couple of weeks ago, where the tube was crammed with maybe 100 primary school aged kids and parents. I must surely have been exposed? I hope so.
      Its why vaccine refusers do us a favour by keeping the viruses circulating at low level.

        • Never did. That’s why I tried hard to catch a light dose from feb 2020.
          No real idea if I ever succeeded, however note that the dose effects the severity.
          How ill you become is a function of what ever immunity you hold related to the dose and the ‘severity’ of the disease.
          All (I admit) a tad unquantifiable, you just gotta do the best you can.
          Interestingly your family were probably in close contact to you before you realised, hence (as you spotted) they caught it from you. Hopefully younger and less inherently susceptible.

    • Hope you feel better soon Albert.

      One or two cases appearing at a constant rate at my work. Some people get it as a bad cold, some have ended up in hospital. Some people have infected others, some people have been the only ones to get it in the household. Some people have had colds that are not COVID that are worse than some people with COVID. Is this what living with the virus will become? Looks like how badly you get it is completely dependent on the person and their immune system.

      Hint from an infectious disease doctor that I heard today. Take an aspirin a day for 30 days and it’s supposed to help.

    • Bloody hell, I am sorry to hear that! I hope you will quickly make it to full recovery! What an ordeal.

      Your students, however, are not amazing. There is no reason there shouldn’t be 100% masks in a lecture hall. Of what I have heard, this also usually seems to be the case in most places (well not sure about the UK apparently). So maybe they need some stern talking to…

      Same is true of trains, of course – no reason not to mask up – but I would expect less compliance than in an academic setting. I have seen the occasional “faking that I am eating so that I do not need to wear a mask”-clowns there…

      Best wishes to you!

      • In all honestly, the effects of masks is rather small. Useful, but small.
        The problem is that people think its huge, its not.

      • Masks in crowded places have a significant effect. They keep the virus load down. Not a safeguard against infection, but a lower virus dose seems to allow for a milder disease and that is already a great help. As for our students, some students will forget to bring their mask, and many are international students with different training in masking. 90% is pretty good. I do require that any student in the front row is masked and if not, they move to the back. The probably thought I was paranoid, but statistically, the lecturer is most at risk of severe disease. But I expect the issue was on the train, and with younger people who take it far less seriously. Three people in my environment have died of covid, two work colleagues and one family. Other people may not have had that experience.

        • You are probably right. In the future I will wear the FFP2 mask in the month of November by free will. I’m not keen on that automn influenza – I hate it whatever it is. The FFP2 mask protects the person who wears it. It shouldn’t have ventilation though.

        • The figures I have seen, the best being the US navy, is about a 50% reduction if everyone wears masks. I would expect, but have seen no evidence, that there would be a bigger reduction in severity.
          The real danger is the environment you are in, a crowded bus or tube or pub is definitely very high risk, particularly given the 1%-2% infection rate in the UK. I have noticed in London a simultaneous increase in general congestion of people and a reduction in distancing and masks commensurate with a “return to normality”.
          Its interesting that the UK seems to be progressing quite well along the lines of infecting the whole country (inevitable for the world anyway) at a moderately brisk rate whilst minimising severe effects. Its too early to say if admissions will continue to fall long term, but its looking hopeful.
          This time of year we would expect nearly 2000 deaths/day from all causes.

    • Albert, it sounds like you’ve been through quite an ordeal. Thank you for writing about it. Glad you’re feeling better; get 100% well soon.

    • Get well soon, Albert!

      Thanks for telling us this; it’s something people need to know. Vaccination isn’t ironclad by any means, but it sure does help, both in reducing the odds of infection and in reducing the odds of serious consequences if infected. I also encourage people to get a booster shot.

      There’s been much disinformation here as well. One gem I’ve seen is the claim that the vaccines are faulty because if a vaccine worked, it’s work permanently and you wouldn’t need booster shots. I guess they’ve never heard of flu shots (which in reality are likewise not 100% effective, plus immunity wanes over time, even against the same strains the shot contained).

      There’s also much disinformation citing the issue of more vaccinated getting Covid than unvaccinated, and this is cited as “proof” the vaccine doesn’t work, or makes the disease more likely. This is absolutely a symptom of something, and what it’s a symptom of is the claimants knowing nothing about statistics. If you’ve got a 90% vaccination rate, and the vaccine is 80% effective, that remaining 20% happens to be larger in number than the 10% of the population unvaccinated.

      As for trust, the health authorities in many places have worked very, very hard to undermine it via mixed messaging and hamfisted idiocy. For example, areas that prohibited people from going places alone during house arrest (lockdowns). There were plenty of cases where they sent police chasing after people, such as a guy surfing alone off southern California. He was in absolutely no danger of contacting the virus, no giving it to anyone, until the police showed up. That sort of absurdity caused some law enforcement agencies to declare that they would not enforce lockdown rules, and massively undermined public support for the health agencies (and regrettably, all were tarred by the same brush). There’s also the issue of hypocrites not following the rules they impose (there are a plethora of such here in the USA).

      And, masks. If there’s a perfect example of who they’ve bungled it, that’s it. One of my favorite outright lies by the authorities here (they’ve since admitted it was a lie) was to discourage cloth mask wearing, because (they later said) those masks were needed by health professionals early on. Err, cloth masks aren’t PPE, never were, nor were they used as such, so that reasoning was absurd. What was outrageous was the admission that they gave out false recommendations – if there’s a better way to destroy trust, I don’t know it. There’s also the issue that they keep specifically pushing cloth masks, which are by far the most ineffective type.

      Albert, if I may ask, when your became symptomatic, did you have any issues at all with your eyes? (irritation, soreness,etc?) The reason I ask is that the eyes are a vulnerable point for infection from aerosol and airborne transmission, a little detail that largely goes ignored. In crowded confined environments like public transport, this effect would be magnified.

      • The liquid that bathes the eyes are packed full of actives that destroy viruses (and much else).
        After all we have been fighting them for many hundreds of millions of years.
        Also the eyes are not a target for covids, lungs are.

      • I am sorry to say but all your statements are incorrect. Do you really think the UK is dumb enough to compute a conditional probability in the form
        P(infected | vaccinated ) = Num(vaccinated & infected) / Num(population as a whole)
        as you seem to believe?
        This really is a symptom but not of what you think it is.

    • Have you ever read even a single paper on the topic of immunity and vaccination?
      But you do read all papers in your field of study and carefully scrutinize the arguments.
      Well, if a paper on volcanology has shoddy science it likely won’t kill you. If a vaccine is based on bad science combined with the profit motive it is another matter entirely.

      • Best wishes for your recovery and: repeated flu vaccination reduces resistance to infection (can provide links if desired).

        • Might be true. Immune system shot into laziness. Medicine in general esp. in Germany: Sell, sell, sell.

      • Yes, I do read papers on vaccination. I know the numbers and the data. And I know flu: our neighbour died of it. Don’t spread doubt where none exist

        • I’ll not add anything to it. I find it boring anyway as I said. My neighbour died of flu as well. Like most older people at the end of their lives.

        • albert, denali ,uncle tom cobbly and all, I think the threading is totally confused so unless you say who you are replying to, nobody has any idea. In the olden days of usenet this could be automagically added at the start.

      • I have read plenty of papers. Do you want me to find one for you?

    • All best wishes, Albert. A friend of mine here in Florida contracted it. An acupuncture physician with a degree in Oriental Medicine. He’d been sitting on the fence about the vax when he fell ill. He was 4 days in hospital on oxygen but not really hammered. His family, wife and two children, had mild infections. Fully recovered now and back doing his thing for several weeks now. You cited public transport. 18+ months ago when we were all on lockdown here, it was obvious that population densities would be a mitigating factor. I did a rough calculation and determined that the maximum number of properly socially distanced individuals which might safely occupy a NYC subway car was 16.

    • I gave it some thought how to say this. Attempt: I never had a flu vaccination. Instead I had a not so pretty spell of flu in November ’19. When my son came home from the US in Feb ’20 he probably was “positive”, had a light symptoms like everybody else who he had been with and three months later high antibodies. I had nothing whatsoever. I would give this some literature, papers in the sense of debate though.
      What I strongly like to recommend is a vaccination against Pneumococcus pneumoniae (Bacterium). And what I would like to recommend for reading as well is papers about hospitalism. And about the lack of autopsies. But only if you feel like it, Frankly, volcanism is more interesting.

  19. Sorry to hear Albert- I did notice you weren’t active on the replys. Myself double vax ,but aware it’s no 100% guaranteed won’t catch it! Hope you get better each day.

    • Keep safe Albert. I think we are all in for the long ride with COVID, but with cheaper vaccine development methods I think we will remove this one from our species. We did it with Smallpox and hopefully Polio soon.

      • I hope not. Covids are common throughout the animal kingdom and routinely jump species. We need a constant reinfection at low level to keep the immune system ready to reply to new strains. Covids are not a uniquely human virus.
        PS Do not be surprised if the next lethal virus is a pox virus as deadly as smallpox.
        Ultimately an primed immune system is best for mankind, and that means vaccines AND constant low-level reinfection.
        Remember cowgirls handling cowpoxed cows never got smallpox…..
        Medicine is good, but medicine with a 200M year old experience is pretty handy too.

      • This one won’t go. Coronoviruses are different. They become relatively harmless after a few years. More like influenza.
        Smallpox is very different, Polio too.
        Smallpox, always serious, with a death rate of 30%, was eradicated with inoculation, developped first by Edward Jenner. It took time though.
        This vaccination is more like a vaccination for flu, and it’s a very different story (high mutation rate).
        It’s important to know this. Zero Covid is nonsense.
        Zero Ebola might be an option.

        • I doubt coronaviruses become ‘relatively harmless’, more the population becomes effectively immune (through childhood infection). There are four endemic covids in the common cold syndrome, at least one of which provides good/excellent immunity to C19 (we knew that early 2020. Smallpox is a killer, but infection provides lifetime immunity. I imagine dose was also important to outcome. Jenner didn’t invent infection with smallpox to provide immunity (infection with pustules was used in quack medicine), he was the first to demonstrate the use of cowpox as a means of protection (somewhat unethically by modern viewpoints).
          Ebola has solid animal vectors, so unlikely to be eradicated.
          Its quite important to our children that they get good doses of current human viruses when young and resistant, many are quite deadly when caught as adults, all the pox viruses, mumps, polio, etc etc. Remember these diseases effectively wiped out the native americans in two continents.

          • So, you need the right comparison. The “Spanish” Flu is the wrong parameter for two reasons:
            1. Different virus.
            2. Different circumstances (war).
            The new CoV will cause common colds in the future, the question is only when. Carl who is very intelligent got it right at the beginning. He might have underestimated the time factor though.
            This one had a first appearance (closest relative at least) in 2012 with six miners in Yunnan. Three of them died which makes a letality of 50% back then. You can google that. They had been cleaning some mining channels from bat poo. It might be the reason why they didn’t find a host animal.

  20. La palma, Lava flows maps yesterday.
    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FD6zlOvXEAgghUH?format=jpg&name=4096×4096

    The more strong earthquake today has a 4.3.
    4.3 mbLg SW VILLA DE MAZO.ILP 2021/11/12 08:28:54 III-IV 38 +info
    Waiting if a new 5.0 and a swamp coming on the next ours.

    The lava has enter in the sea and engulfed al Los Guirres beach, conecting with the olf fajana. I think that can be move to conect with the south arms of the old fajana and continue expanding.
    https://twitter.com/involcan/status/1459099846451863553

    I start to think with the volcano eruption can reach to Christmas and New Year, similar to the La restinga eruption.

    • What is your view, the seismicity seems to have declined but there seems to be a continuing solid set >4.0 and the lava seems to just keep flowing even if the gas is reduced.

    • I don’t believe that Baldrick will keep going until Christmas but right now the SO2 is supposed to be too high either to have the eruption extinguish right now.

      • (Which means it will be longer than the average volcano on La Palma, which is 55 d according to some statements early into the eruption.)

  21. I think that Carl did a great job taking over and invested a lot of work. Needs to be mentioned maybe.

  22. I wonder, Mars has got an atmosphere but it is very thin. Would eruptions be expected to have huge fountains?

    It is quite incredible to be able to see the true appearence of flood basalts as they are brand new.
    It is also interesting that flood basalt volcanoes are actually not all like Iceland, but can also be like Hawaii or Galapagos too, just bigger. Shows a tectonic rift is not a requirement, only a large magma chamber.

    • Athabasca Valles is really my stuff
      The low atmospheric pressure woud have given violent gas nucleation like on IO Big violent fountains

      Althrough Athabasca Valles may have just been massive massive massive dome fountain mess for 100 s of km along the Fissures

      Not even IO haves these violent flood basalts.. Athabasca Valles probaly moved so fast that you coud not outrunn it If you was there, it woud be a sight of hell : D I wants one on Earth in Siberia far away from cities

      • Henrik.. is a great writer and I miss him of course, we all do. A fantastic mineral expert too 🙂

        But his strong opinions on Mars as totaly stone dead .. is wrong. InSight proven Henrik wrong with mars core

        Mars had both effusive lava and explosive eruptions and Big lava fountains

        • Not only did Henrik tought that was Mars was inactive, he tought it was competely stone solid cold.

          An object the size of Mars will still carry plenty of internal heat today. InSight have also seen lots of radioactive minerals in the ground.

          Its not dead yet…

          But I haves lots of respect for Henrik. He knew so much about minerals! totaly dwarfing my knowledge about mineral processes.
          He went often under the name Pyrite on Volcanocafe

          • But this is about how it would erupt. It is tall enough that from the summit you’d expect a wide ejecta plume, effectively covering the mountain in a pyroclastic blanket. Fissure eruptions would be lower down at higher atmospheric pressure and more likely to be effusive. But Olympus Mons has little evidence for fissures, unlike Arsia Mons. They may be buried under the ejecta blankets

          • Explosivity does seem to get stronger high up the Tharsis Montes. There are many sizable cones up there. The diameter of a crater is related to lava fountain height. Size of the craters there suggest fountains of 500-1000 meters. Elsewhere in the planet activity is almost fully effusive.

      • It is only a question I ask because the flow features in Hawaii that were used as comparison, the Great Crack etc, there was no tall fountaining. Seems visually the Mars flows were literally just flowing out of the ground, just the same as at Nyiragongo earlier in the year, or at Fagradalshraun in September.

        • It looks like the lava mostly flowed out of the ground effusively without fountains. Mars has pseudocraters, but those are secondary, formed when lava flows encountered ice, carbon dioxide ice most likely. I haven’t seen any large cones, tuff rings, explosion craters, stratovolcanoes or anything related to explosive volcanism, only small spatter cones sometimes. For such low gravity and extremely voluminous and intense eruptions there is a surprising absence of explosive activity. Mars magmas must be very gas poor, I’d say.

          Something striking about Mars too is that I haven’t seen a single lava flow of high viscosity. It’s all basaltic fluidity, there are no silicic magmas in Mars.

          • That said perhaps there is an explosive activity of a whole different type to Earth and thus cannot be recognized easily.

          • The Medusae Fossae Formation, extending 5000 km south of Tharis, is thought be be pyroclastics which reach up to a kilometer in depth in places. It comes from volcanism in the highlands. Tharsis itself seems mainly effusive. Olympus Mons may be a mixture: the slope steepens near the summit which may indicate a change in eruption style, perhaps during the time that Mars lost its atmosphere.

          • Maybe its dacite. It isn’t shaped like a lava flow though, must be very eroded if dacite. There are no silicic flows with a young appearance that you can recognize them from the way they look.

          • Medusae formation is weird. Hard to know what it is exactly. I’ve thought it looks like giant dunes. If so those are the largest dunes in the Solar System, kilometre high dunes.

            How do the wind currents go in Mars. Perhaps the topography favours sedimentation of dust in certain areas that are more protected from the winds. With 20 km high mountains the topography surely has a big role to play.

      • IO haves No atmosphere at all 🙂

        Yet it haves open lava lakes and lava flows free over the surface 🙂

        But lava is not water either

      • It’s a pretty piece of science fiction. Mars considerably smaller than Earth. If that Olympus Mons had an eruption it would be like the Siberian Traps.

  23. The source of the Athabasca Hell looks very very recent: perhaps just a few million years old
    Perhaps younger, this feature is very Young.
    InSight .. have seen many earthquakes there 🙂

    • Not that young, it isnt standing out in the ladscape, and there are little craters all over it, a few million years is probably the most plausible. I guess only direct sampling will tell us, but that might not be somethign we have to wait for a lot longer 🙂

      • Meaning it is the same rusty colour as the rest of Mars, if it was only a few thousand years old it would look black.

      • Fissure cut trough older lava flows and cratered terrain its interior is acually dark in other vertical Photos of it, even When the sun shines down on it

        So its Young

    • The fissure coud have opened after the crater formation, and the dusty lava flows, are NOT related to this fissure since it cut through the old lava flows

      Young Feature

    • Athabasca Valles in beautiful, with amazing lava patterns. For example aa flows whose crust has been extended and broken with pahoehoe upwelling in between.

      White is aa lava, black is pahoehoe (in an infrared image):

      Similar thing happening in Venus, Ningyo Fluctus, radar:

      And in Sierra Negra volcano (Earth):

      • No doubt souch flows caused mayhem during the CAMP, and some CAMP flows where likley much much larger than Athabasca Valles flows, the gas mayhem must have been terrifying for CAMP

        Even Holuhraun and Leilani was very bad in gas, and they are tiny compared to LIP flows

        • Just a little heads up, it is ‘such’ not ‘souch’. There is no O, otherwise it reads as ‘sooch’.

    • Not immediately, but probably the chances are it will do something sooner than later. Hekla has a deep chamber that is inflating, but only when the conduit is opened can it erupt. It might actually be a bit like what happens at Reykjanes, tectonic conditions preventing eruption. Hekla has the supply to erupt pretty much all the time, like Etna, it doesnt though so theres something else going on.

      Vatnafjoll has only had small eruptions in the past few millennia, so if there is an eruption there it will be maybe a lot like Fagradalshraun.

  24. Speaking of lava flood eruptions, HVO reported today that the lava lake is now over 800 meters elevation. This matters because the 800 meter contour is about at the location of the middle ERZ, which saw magma intrude down the conduit before the last two eruptions. If the summit is now higher gravity will fight against further activity there in future, and increase the chance of eruption on the rift.

    Or it will drain down the SWRZ like in 1823. That is the better option, if it drains down the ERZ from chain of craters area it could be very damaging, and this has happened before in 1840. In an extreme case if the magma is not degassed it could be a curtain of fire, maybe a couple days only but sending lava flooding north of the ERZ. I have mapped the ground cracks for all the ERZ fissure swarms.

  25. Friday
    12.11.2021 15:35:17 64.621 -17.390 1.1 km 3.6 99.0 6.9 km ESE of Bárðarbunga

    Friday
    12.11.2021 15:26:00 64.624 -17.456 4.0 km 2.8 99.0 3.9 km ESE of Bárðarbunga
    Friday
    12.11.2021 15:16:41 64.622 -17.430 4.2 km 3.8 99.0 5.1 km ESE of Bárðarbunga

  26. Regarding the 5.1 quake in Iceland – think the tectonic fault on Vatnafjöll might have given way because of increased tension from the direction of Hekla, which is preparing for the next eruption. Stress released for now – time to fill the gap. Wonder how long that takes and what will give way next? Another quake around Hekla or the lid itself?

    • This quake was probably not at all related to Hekla. There was a M5.9 quake in 1987 just 5 km from this one. The source mechanism of that quake was no different from other quakes is the SISZ and there’s no reason to believe that the current one is any different.

  27. La palma, drone flyby with thermal camera at 12/11/2021 13:50h Local. The Guirres beach and the Kiosk has complitely obliterated. The fajana continue expand to the sea and fill the last conections with the two fajanas.

    • la palma “remains” of the Los Guirres beach. Status of 17:00 Local.

      • The video narrator has the most beautiful soft voice, and I can’t speak a word of Spanish beyond “Dos vinos tintos, por favor”. I could listen to her for hours. Better start learning “Puedo besarte, hermosa?”

        So a second lava stream reached the sea the other day, but the output must have slowed considerably, it’s taken a long time. IIRC there were three streams and one still hasn’t got there.

        Sorry to hear about your ailments Albert – get well soon! You must be lecturing in London to be commuting by train.

  28. The latest figures for Taal, no volcanic earthquakes or tremors in the last 24hrs. Is that probable given recent stats?

  29. La palma, provisional shallow 4.5 earthquake.
    4.5 mbLg ATLÁNTICO-CANARIAS 2021/11/13 06:56:02 5 +info

  30. FAF is not doing anything interesting but the blue is up.
    As usual, bad weather is the case, this time the wind comes in at about 22 m/s at FAF.

  31. Active pahoehoe lava flows on Jupiters Moon IO .. In 2024 we will get More Photos of IO from Juno. These are from Galileo Probe

  32. Farmeroz:
    There’s still next to nothing in this piece that I can criticize, on the contrary. You can rely on that guy (I don’t know with plumes though 😉 :
    “Covid-19 version of the coronavirus is a lot more alike the common cold version than MERS and SARS. They are all branches on the same family tree of viruses, but Covid-19 and the common cold are siblings, and the other two are very distant cousins. At least in how they behave, and how they interact with humans.”
    https://www.volcanocafe.org/you-and-corona/

    That’s written by a person who must have seen dire disease and loss. The main problems of Africa are still Malaria and AIDS, every now and then what’s dealt with in very high security places (BSL 4): Hemorrhagic fevers.

    • Covid and this piece changed my life – although I know some other people made of this sort of wood: Fearlessness. The absence of fear makes a clear mind.
      This piece plus pieces by some other rare jewels made me ignore what was transmitted by fearmongerers from Bergamo, and today, it can clearly be seen what was going on there: They shoved all the people from care homes into the hospitals, even with slight symptoms. The virus loved the hospital, lots of weak hosts. I decided to consider this as a huge mistake. The same happened in places in the UK and NYC and probably in other countries as well, and Cuomo had to pay the bill for it. I hope that lesson is used for learning. Aside from that I never wore a surgical mask, but always a FFP2 when I went out, and only inside. And I kept some distance.

      But thanks, Carl, this was one of your best pieces ever, at least for me. It taught me to look straight at the problem and might have fostered my natural immunity as I consider fear as unhelpful for the psyche and therefore also soma. Nevertheless I went to get the vaccination with the same attitude: The vaccination won’t give me any side effects. And that’s what happened, just a good 12 hours sleep.

      The worst is Covid and fear, the combination.

    • When they were into this for about a week in China I ordered the FFP 2. In China. China was the only nation on the whole Earth then that produced them. I wore it well before the government said we have to. I was stared at at the supermarket. When you do s.th. different in this world you are stared at. And this was the other problem: We had nothing, the nurses were practically naked. I felt pity for them and for my collegues. When they needed it most they had nothing. The EU had thrown everything away some time before because it had run out of date. Ridiculous. Even a mask over its date would have been better than no mask. So, Bergamo was a consequence of political mistakes.

        • People are always complaining about s.th. We need our own production companies as transport can take time when s.th. happens. Mine took four weeks and that was only a small order. When we produce some of our own stuff people will start complaining about prices.
          Globalization is good but stops working with pandemia or VEI 6-7.

      • Denali,
        at the same time (Jan 2020) I ordered an oxygen concentrator, still here, never used but could be used to run an oxy-propane torch if needed. FFFp2 masks are quite common, I have a box (sadly vented) that I used when visiting farm grain stores, also good when cutting bricks/concrete.
        For things like face masks there really isn’t an ‘out of date’, it basically the time the manufacturer collects enough data to prove they are OK. Like many food items (eg dried/tins) they are perfectly usable and effective and safe after that time (as some sampling and testing would show).

  33. Kilauea lava lake has surged. The tiltmeter jumped up like it did before the recent DI cycle, but then instead of dropping down immediately it has stayed put, and lava has been overflowing the lake ever since. There are also now a lot of breakouts on the edges of the lake, as well as at the time of writing a sizable lava river on the north side of the lake into one of the bays that emptied earlier in the week.

    Not really a massive change but the effusion rate has definitely increased, as though whatever trend of decline the eruption had before suddenly reversed. Maybe this is the start of the vent becoming episodic, which is likely to eventually result in an open conduit.

    🙂

      • Not sure there is really a big change in supply, it might be a change from 2 m3/s to 4 m3/s, it doubled in that case but not to a crazy value. I think maybe it actually has gone a bit above 4 m3/s, but in any case it is still within a ‘normal’ range.

        • Actually no, it has definitely increased more than that. There are two flows advancing across the surface rapidly. The entry point to the lake is also showing incandescence far out into the lake surface, tens of meters, it is flowing very fast. Seems a pulse of magma has arrived.

    • Althrough No volcano is too small for me Chad 🙂

      You can imagine the volcano of my dreams : D I wants Kilauea to turn into an absolute abomination, althrough it already is compared to pretty much all other volcanoes on Earth for now

      But its Ionian volcanoes that for now can Only fit my appetite among active volcanoes

    • Making a perched rootless lava lake
      Perhaps We will get a little shield on top of the lava lake crust 🙂

    • I wants Kilauea to turn into a mix of Loki Patera, Pele Patera, Pillan Patera, Ra Patera.. That woud be of great joy for me 🙂 bad bad bad bad JS

      But its wonderful as it already is as a volcano

    • Still going strong. The conduit seems to be stable, at least for now, and opening into the lake at some depth. The different tilt meters seem to be behaving quite independently. IKI showed a spike yesterday but nothing today. I am wondering whether there is some local adjustment of the solid crust.

      • The vent itself is something like 35-40 meters deep under the lake, technically the visible cone is rootless, only where the gas is released on the surface. The gassy lava is very buoyant being probably less than half the density of the degassed lake lava, so it rises and is able to erupt out the hole, but not all of it. If the crust shifts the cone will die and the only sign of effusion will be edge seeps and rising lake surface.

        In general the tiltmeter on the front page is most reliable, and also the one measurements generally derive from. It seems to pick up signals of eruptions in Halemaumau better. IKI probably is affected by a different magma chamber under Kilauea Iki, which would have its own signals.

    • Looks like the tremor has increased somewhat although it is barely noticeable. It could be the recent inflation of the Kilauea that is shown by tilt making its way up to the vent.

    • I also like the Small Town Enviroment of the Big Island

      A clear blue ocean, sky, volcano, garden, beach…beauty everywhere….
      And No winter

  34. New lava falling to the sean in La palma this time north of the first entry point

  35. So, this piece (You and Corona) was outright bold. Somebody is sitting in the middle of Africa, pondering about possibilities to get home and writing this bold piece. I admired that.

    But what do we exspect from a man who, with his wife and family, is living next to some plate salad with possibly two triple junctions and a neat suduction zone and has a second home on a caldera lake? Or from a guy who wanders into Southern Congo, for that matter. He could also live in safe Northern Sweden with his family, no doubt about it.
    (Sweden seems to have more bold people – Bavarians were afraid of them in 1648. One of them is Anders Tegnell).

    And who is bold enough to open a volcanic site with some different aims like adding some historical and general knowledge to technical stuff, ten years minus two days ago?

    So if you like this praise of your piece take it as a birthday present to VC from a doctor who admired it.
    What happened to Albert can happen – he was unfortunate in this, and I wish him a complete and swift restitutio ad integrum.

  36. Has start to appears light sismisity on Tenerife
    .8 mbLg S LOS REALEJOS.ITF 2021/11/13 18:11:41 7 +info
    1.7 mbLg SE FASNIA.ITF 2021/11/13 05:52:51 46 +info
    1.4 mbLg NE GUÍA DE ISORA.ITF 2021/11/13 01:24:02 15 +info
    1.8 mbLg ATLÁNTICO-CANARIAS 2021/11/11 02:56:13 20 +info
    1.1 mbLg N VILAFLOR DE CHASNA.ITF 2021/11/11 00:22:30 12 +info

    Expected only has been tectonic….

Comments are closed.