I originally submitted this article on November 9, 2012, Due to PHILVOCS raising the alert level for Taal from “No Activity” to Level 1 on 8 Oct 2019, as pointed out by reader Andrew McNeil, we felt that a quick rerun was in order. Before we touch that, let me add that the data in…
A while ago Jesper Sandberg asked a question about if Grimsvötn could sprout forth a lava lake. I somewhat sloppily answered that I did not think that it was possible. Jesper then asked why not, and I got somewhat flustered since I did not have a ready answer. I promised to come back with a…
A Clive special from 2015, re-published because it is worth re-reading. Ever since I saw my first pictures of Ball’s Pyramid, I wanted to know more about this isolated and amazing structure. The pyramid is named after Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, who discovered it in 1788. On the same voyage, Ball also discovered Lord Howe…
Africa in general is a place that is easy to fall in love with, in particular Tanzania is easy to become deeply enamoured with. Sometimes I think that there is a deep DNA-memory remnant in all of us that is telling us that this is our ancestral home. When most people think about Tanzania, they…
At 19.03 local time the automatic SIL-system in Iceland picked up a strong tremor signal. When this type of tremor signal is visible in Iceland it is normally associated with either a large jökulhlaup (rapid glacial melt outflow) that can become larger than the output of the Amazon River, or it is associated with an…
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day Lord Byron, Darkness, 1816 The world has changed. It is not something we normally notice – change is slow and memory surprisingly selective. Nothing has altered but everything’s changed, as the song says, paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre. We have little idea of how our parents…
Lately there has been a bit of discussion about Flight Level Ash Advisories and how people interpret them visavi actual columnal height. Some have been disappointed when it has turned out that the advisories have been up to 3 times as high as the confirmed numbers released by the various agencies at a later stage.…
A guest post from Salting I visited Iceland many times in the past to meet friends and take a day off on my way between Europa and US. In summer 2011 I made an extra-long stop and visited a glacier to better understand the forces that shaped the coastline around my Swedish home island. Trekking…
That the question even exist is a bit of an oddity in modern volcanology, after all we have known amply how to take ejecta-depth measurements to create Isopac-maps since 1956, more about that below. The reason that this question has prevailed is that there are anomalies in the numbers proven for the eruption, compared to…
The VC list of 25 super eruptions – continued In our quest for major eruptions, we are continuing our journey around the world, moving north from Indonesia. Kyushu, Japan Japan’s southernmost main island is volcanically highly active. Past explosions have left large calderas, separated into two groups. In the centre of Kyushu is Aso, and…