It is a big day. VC has reached the ripe old age of 15 years!

VC started on 15 November 2011, 15 years ago today. The blog and its lively community have grown up through the many eruptions, all unforeseen, since when Carl started our adventure: Bardarbunga (did we have fun with that name: Bardar-bunga-bunga), Leilani, Taal, Anak Krakatau, La Palma, the once-in-a-millennium re-activation of the Reykjanes peninsula (which VC famously managed to postpone by a year because of covid), Hunga Tonga’s VEI-6 (or perhaps it was a 5.99), Mauna Loa, Kilauea’s many outbursts (accurately predicted by Chad), the eruption-out-of-the-blue of Afar’s Hayli Gubbi, and many, many others. Over this time VC matured from toddlerhood to volcanic school-child, volcanic puberty and now, finally, towards the beginnings of maturity. It has been a journey into the unexpected.

What is VC? It is more than a blog. It is a community, it is people who like volcanoes, who like to learn about volcanoes and who like to discuss volcanoes. We are a science-based blog, but one where everyone is welcome. No one knows everything, and everyone knows something others don’t. We learn and enjoy together. There are readers and commenters from all over the world. You, the readers, is why this blog has survived for so long.

How did it all start? VC has always been a team effort, but it was Carl who put that team together. The story was told for our 10-year anniversary by Carl. It is repeated (slightly shortened but still in his inimitable style) below:

“When in doubt, data shall provide the answer!”

 

In the beginning

How did Volcanocafé come about? As with all great things it involved a sheep and nagging elderly English ladies.

The embryo was seeded one stormy night in Iceland during the easy to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull eruption. As we were sitting chatting and gawking at the eruption on one of the webcams a sheep came flying past the camera and passed out over the cliffside.

This image stuck with us, and we became sort of the club of the flying sheep. At the same time many of us was dissatisfied with the early volcanic blogs, mainly with the commenting sections. And during the aftermath of the eruption the elderly English ladies decided that enough was enough and elected me as the person who should write all the articles.

At this point I got the idea that I could get away from this daunting responsibility by refusing to do it alone, so I said that I would do it only if Lurking tagged along, to my utter horror he accepted to do so.

I then tried to get away by stating that I knew nothing about setting up and maintaining a forum like this, but one of the ladies then unfolded her wings and came out as a fully-fledged forum-coding-demon.

After that I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to write an article. The rest is sort of history now.

I will though say that I completely by accident got my comeback against the dear old English ladies a few years later. As most know I am not a native English writer, and sometimes upon a blue moon I miss entirely the cultural connotations of an English word.

I just never expected that canines would be one of those words fraught with peril. In an offhand sentence I wrote, “To doggedly dog where no dog has doggedly dogged before”. My intention was to point out general stubbornness, but from the shocked, giggling, and red-faced elderly ladies I kind of understood that there was something more to it.

So, I mercilessly questioned them about what it was that I had written that shocked them so much, and slowly the truth of the English national weekend pastime of “Dogging” came out into the open. In the end I just had to ask them how on earth they knew what this was… innocently asked of course.

Oh, the sheep you ask? Well, it is rather memorable to watch a flying sheep, so we made it into the Patron Sheep of Volcanocafé. Having a Patron Sheep sort of made certain that we would never take ourselves to seriously, even though we obviously took the science part seriously.

However, we never expected to see the sheep again. So, it was with utter horror we watched as Bear Grylls found the sheep in an episode of his tv-series. He then ate the rotting carcass, made a sleeping bag out of it, and then profusely vomited sheep all over.

After that the flying sheep was elevated to Martyr Patron Sheep, and nobody watched Bear Grylls again (at least I hope so).

 

The four foundations

From the beginning there were four things that was important to set into place. The first was that we would not enforce any out of topic rule for the comment section, as long as it was about science, we let it slide.

The reason for this is that there can be years in between interesting eruptions, and we wanted people to hang on, read articles, and generally be friends. After all, we who founded the place wanted it to be our living-room where we could discuss all sorts of topics as we pleased.

It worked as a charm. As soon as a volcano came around of importance everyone set aside the conversations and started to discuss the topic at hand.

Then we needed a rule to moderate with. We came up with a rule that both explained itself and had enough wriggle room to be useful in pretty much any circumstance, “Be Nice!”. On the few occasions that we have had to use it, we voted before banning repeat offenders.

In a world of trolls and argumentative people it is remarkable that we are still below 10 people that have been banned. This is not due to a lack of arguments, but in general people remember to argue themselves blue in an ever so polite way. We do have the best readers in so many ways (thank you).

The third thing was science above else. What we wrote should be factual and based on science and follow the data at hand. The reason back then was that we were stunned at some of the early volcano blogs playing loose with science and facts when talking about volcanoes. We wanted to be the opposing force of that.

Later came the clickbait youtubers bleating out ever weirder prophecies about ginormous volcanic eruptions. Science and facts in this day and age turned out to become ever more important, and we do our best to do our part.

So, it is with quite a bit of joy that we find that we are referenced as people try to point out those who produce hogwash. Every time I see someone referencing us as a means of stopping nonsense my heart leaps with joy.

And here we come to the most important thing. Nobody can do it alone. From the moment of inception I knew that I could not do it alone. We needed to be more writers than one. First of all, we all have working lives, families and so on.

Secondly, one voice will not be able to create a discussion and a foundation for scientific debate. Opposing views are important. It also forces us to do better, at least it forces me to be better.

Over the years we have had many guest writers, recurring guest writers, specialists writing about their volcanoes, and in the end a small group of staff-writers that uphold the bulk of the writing.

There are also the unsung heroes who perform our daily technical maintenance, Gaz Dale, Tommy Wallace and Ingrid van der Voort. Without them the place would fall to pieces in a heartbeat, you guys are the best.

 

The New Decade Volcano Program

Out of the trio of Albert, Henrik, and I, came our claim for fame during a session of having beers together. We somehow got it into our heads that the Decade Volcano Program needed an update since it had been running for a decade.

We also felt that the volcanoes did not truly fulfil the original requirements for the decade volcano program. On top of that we wanted to update those requirements a bit.

Out of this came a monster-set of articles. To our surprise the series got wings and flew out over the world, and in many ways, it influenced how decadal volcano programs are used today.

 

Now over to my personal favourite article of all time. One of those ideas that had turned into “truth” was that the moon and the tide causes earthquakes, eruptions, and dandruff. Almost everybody used to believe it back then.

I argued against this but did not have any hard facts to back my opinion with. Lurking decided to just go and ask the data itself a few hard questions. Without any bias he started to pound the entire dataset that he had on earthquakes to see what would drop out.

It turned into a tour-de-force of scientific “Question-data-answer”. Even the USGS nowadays link ever so often to The Moon and the Moonie-article. It has also been used by Nature as a tool for vetting an article prior to publication.

 

Our fallen comrades

I would here like to mention two people who formed Volcanocafé. The first one was one of the English Ladies. Well, except that Sissel Skramstad was Norwegian and lived in Holland. She was one of the two that set the place up from a technical standpoint and helped to run the place.

Sadly after a few years we suddenly lost her, and I lost a dear friend who I had chatted with late nights when neither of us could sleep. Without Sissel there would have been no Volcanocafé to begin with.

Then we come to irascible artillery major and world-class anglophile Henrik Lovén. If there was ever anyone who could give me a run for the money on having had a career with many twists and turns it was Henrik.

Besides a long and illustrious military career, he also did a stint as the CEO of a major league bandy club, proprietor of a gem store, and an assortment of other ventures. In the end he fought a very long and painful fight with cancer. He knew from onset that he would not stand a chance and was given 3 months to live. But he went at it like the soldier he literally was and fought back with gusto and got 3 years before the end.

He was through his life a man of grand ideas, so it should come as no surprise that he was the champion of our grandest project, the NDVP. From day one Henrik wanted to pen the final piece himself. In many ways it was his own Eulogy that he penned, it was truly glorious and true to form it was larger than life.

No jubilee would be complete without upholding the memory of our fallen comrades.

In memory of Sissel Skramstad | VolcanoCafe

Henrik Lovén 1958-2019 | VolcanoCafe

 

The future
Here’s for many more years of Doggedly dogging like no dog has doggedly dogged in the sulphur mines of science.

CARL REHNBERG

That was written 5 years ago, for our 10-year anniversary. Carl mentioned that he did not recall his first article. But we do. To help Carl with his memory, here it is:

Hello everyone!

Starting a new blog is an audacious and scary project. First of all begs the question, what is it all going to be about? This question was the easiest to answer since my interests are volcanoes, tectonics, and geology in the broadest aspect possible. The blogs that are already about in this field are mainly technical and written by expert volcanologists, or geophysicists that write about tectonics and earthquakes.

Why then start a new blog if there are already outstanding blogs in their respective fields? Well, I think there is more to the story than the technical stuff. The effects of volcanoes and earthquakes are larger than that; they after all affect real human beings, often in tragic ways. So I think that a bit of sociological aspect should be added to the technical issues. They also affect biological systems, so expect some nice posts about biology in and around volcanoes. On top of that we have geology; after all we are talking about the odd world of rocks folks. Also, if we are lucky there will be a bit about risk management and how the scientists work to save lives. And without making any promises, I am hoping that we can snare a volcanologist to give a couple of guest blogs, more on this as that unfolds.

My personal motto is “Nobody is an Island alone”. I am a friend of group efforts, they are most often not as stringent as the “man alone” blogs, but in multitude lays strength and diversity. So if you feel that you have a perspective to add to the combined story. Please feel free to put in a suggestion about what you can add to the blog, either as a guest-blogger, or as a permanent blogger. Just remember that different bloggers will have different ways of writing. There are also those that quietly help out with other things in here. I will leave it up to them to do their own presentations. I will though mention the quiet help of Ursula who set up this place for us.

A short note about me and my interest in volcanoes, it all started when I was about 7 and I found a book on volcanoes. I started reading and found an article about Novarupta Eruption in Katmai back in 1912. In a way it shows that young boys are easily impressed by big numbers, after all Novarupta was the largest eruption during the twentieth century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novarupta

A short note about me would perhaps be in place. I am using Carl le Strange as a nom de guerre. I have a background as a music major (composition), and then realized that I prefer to listen to other peoples music, so I went back to my love of understanding things. After a major in theoretical physics I started working in the military industry at the same time as I did my Ph.D. I think that was more common back then, than it is today. When I was done with my studies (complete with a side trip into another major in literature) I got into the Energy sector, where I stayed for quite some time in various capacities.

I would here like to say thank you to those that have been quietly badgering me to start blogging about science in general, and volcanoes in specific. There was though one email that really made me decide myself. It was from a mother of 3 children who wrote about how her children and their friends had gotten interested in science due to a science blog. So here goes, may the fun begin!

CARL

And what fun we’ve had, and hopefully we have also spread some interest in science. The world has become a darker place since 15 years ago, but volcanoes can still provide a light in that dark.

Let’s end this anniversary with some comments from two members of the team, expressed at another anniversary, a very long time ago:

Sissel:

Thank you all for everything you shared this year! What an amazing flock we are. Wish you the whole alphabet:
Awesome, bleating, crazy, delightful, educative, funny, gorgeous, happy, interesting, jumping, kindhearted, lovely, melodious, nice, orderly, peaceful & quiet, recreational, sheepy, twinkling, unforgettable, vivid, wooly, xtraordinary, yodeling and zestful  HOLIDAYS!

Geolurking

you guys have forced me to keep reading and studying the topic in order to answer some of your questions and inquiries. To have someone as equally curious is a boon to someone who likes to talk about a topic.

Your links to other data sources and images keep the forum alive and interesting to all who pass through here. So give yourself a round of applause, you deserve it!

We’ll toast to that. Cheers, from all of us!

15 November 2026