Update: An eruption has started already. Visible in the webcams. The initial outbreak is beautiful and is a must watch: There is a very odd magma intrusion happening at Kilauea right now. How do we know it’s an intrusion? There is very rapid deformation in the tiltmeter at the summit of Kilauea, far beyond what…
As has been noted here, little is known about people living near volcanoes which had a VEI-7 eruption. But we do know something about Tambora. The slope of Tambora, on the Sangar peninsula of the island of Sumbawa, was home to the Kingdom of Tambora. The kingdom had been mainly located some distance from the…
Some days ago, a video called my attention on Facebook, a video of a beautiful explosion of Popocatepetl volcano in Mexico. I ended up in a YouTube channel called Volcano Time-Lapse. This youtuber had dubbed the explosion as the perfect explosion, and for a good reason. At night-time, with not a cloud in the sky,…
Introduction Jupiter’s Moon Io is the most volcanic place in the solar system. The most powerful active volcanoes known to exist cannot be found here on Earth, but on Io, a small moon of Jupiter, and it is therefore an enormous fascination for me. Io is a volcanic powerhouse, so volcanic it is very much…
Volcanoes can erupt invisibly. A sudden, swift explosion in an isolated location may be unobserved and still have worldwide impacts. The source of the large eruption of 1809 remains unknown. We still don’t know the culprits of the volcanic climate catastrophe of 536 and 540. The link between the year without summer of 1816 and…
Last article we saw a newborn felsic system, Laguna del Maule, whose so far brief history has begun rather impressively, with possibly two VEI-6 eruptions, a number of smaller plinian eruptions, and some sizable lava flows. In the article before that one, we saw Domuyo, a monster volcanic system that is very lazy. It could…
In the previous article I was talking about the volcanoes in Argentina, in the Andes, near the latitude of Buenos Aires, only a little more to the south: Payún Matrú, Tromen, and Domuyo. Now we cross the border into Chile, into the Maule Province of Chile. Here, almost exactly along the topographical divide between the…
There is a group of volcanoes that I’ve always wanted to talk about. It is a surprisingly little known, little studied location. However, about a decade ago, thanks to advances in technology, one of the volcanoes jumped from being practically uncharted to becoming moderately famous, when using satellites scientists were able to detect inflation around…
Land is precious. The saying goes ‘Buy land – they don’t make it anymore’. We need the land to live on, to grow our crops, to socialise, work, educate, and all other things that makes human life worth living. Even our touch phones won’t work under water. With a growing population, the pressure on the…
Is this the strangest egg in the world? The shell contains no egg white, yoke or embryo, nor even chocolate. No bird will ever hatch from it. Instead it is filled with a stony mineral. Which creature laid it, and what was expected to emerge from it? The only thing that comes to mind is…