The Vredefort impact

The centre of South Africa is an amazing place. The long drive from Cape Town in-land is exciting for the first two hours, while the road climbs up through the mountains, past vineyards and valleys full of fynbos. Once on the high interior plateau of South Africa, the landscape becomes dry and monotonous – and…

Time for komatiite

People mellow with age. (At least, most of us do.) The emotions of youth become less all-important and less demanding of our attention. Young people feel that every perceived slight needs addressing. The heat goes to the head and mistakes are made. Older people consider more before responding. The Earth, too, went through a youthful…

Gold!

Rainbow’s end It is an amazing and powerful image. The wide lava fountain in the caldera like a wall flower in full bloom, with the cloud of volcano seeds above, the lava flowing from the bleeding flower, slowly re-filling one of the largest holes on Earth, and the distant rainbow linking the lava, the caldera,…

Istanbul and the Marmara Sea

There are San Andreas faults in many places. They happen where two rigid continental masses slide past each other at fairly rapid pace. The San Andreas fault separates (‘connect’ would be the wrong word) the American plate from the continental edge of the Pacific plate. It runs along the length of California, in-land up to…

The volcanic dusk of Venus. Part I.

The last time I wrote an article here, it was to talk about Afar Region volcanoes, and I promised more to come. This is still a project that I have in mind, but that will have to wait a little longer until I can get an extended period of free time. Today we will go…

Magma rising

In 1864, three people set out on the journey of a life time. Starting at Snaefellsjokull, Hans, Axel and Otto descended into the crater, found openings to the depth and started on a journey to the centre of the Earth. At least, so Jules Verne told us in his book Voyage au centre de la…

A new large open conduit lava lake at Nyamuragira

  Report by Jesper Sandberg Forewords 2025 has so far been an exciting year with volcanoes, definitely so with Kilauea which is in many ways Earth’s most impressive volcano. It continues its caldera filling episodes at the previous Halemaumau crater area. If Kilauea keeps going like this for years the whole caldera will be filled.…

A Railgun design to launch drones with

Mount Rainier development

Welcome to our April-1 story which has the untruth, the whole untruth and nothing but the untruth. Nothing in here is real. Although even that is not true. The mentioned rocket propulsion methods all exist or are under development. Even the rocket railgun launcher, which we carefully made up for this post, suffered from a…

Mount Spurr

Since April 2024, Mount Spurr has shown increasing signs of activity. These are now at a level where an eruption is plausible. Nothing is ever guaranteed with Alaskan volcanoes: they can always decide to go back into the freezer. Eruptions are decided on the Spurr of the moment. (Yes, I had to get that one…