The exploration of space has been a two-way battle. Not between the Russians and Americans, but between humans and robots. The race to the Moon was a victory for the humans. But it is notable that the humans have been in retreat since. We no longer go beyond low-Earth orbit: we could not go back…
Guest post for VolcanoCafé by René Goad First of all I would like to thank Carl Rehnberg for inviting me to write a guest post and I will be talking a bit about the Galapagos Islands. For a good few years I’ve been wanting to visit the Galapagos Islands with the Sierra Negra Volcano…
Its career as a planet last for less than half its year. Pluto was discovered late, in 1930, as our final planet, completing the Sun’s brood of nine. (In hindsight it had been seen, but not recognized, as early as 1909.) But it was always an odd one, the runt of the litter, banished to…
I have lately read a lot of comments about Iceland being boring and calm. In reality nothing could be more wrong, Iceland is brimming with activity. So, let us take a quick look at some interesting volcanoes before we go to the namesake of this article. Volcanic activity in general If we start in the…
The more you read about volcanism in North America, the more confused you become by the immense complexity of eruptive phenomenae and sequences. As will be clear from my previous article about Mount Tehama (Lassen), it is not always a question about a single central volcano such as Vesuvius or Etna, but about a multitude…
This is the third article in our series of re-posts. It is well worth noticing that it was first published well ahead of the volcanic crisis at Volcan Chilles on the border between Equador and Colombia which taught us that even if a volcano is thought to not have erupted for some 174,000 years, it…
This article began as a regular piece on Lassen Peak but quickly expanded as I discovered how incredibly complex the geology and history of the Lassen Volcanic Complex was. Unlike nearby Shasta, Lassen Peak is but a dacite lava dome, one of the largest lava domes on Earth but only one of the dozens of…
Starting today, we begin to reproduce some of the more popular posts originally published on the old site. But don’t worry! We will continue to produce new posts as and when something of interest crops up! Volcanic activity in North America is surprisingly infrequent. In spite of there being no less than 255 volcanoes or…
The August 24th eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD is the most famous and well-known volcanic eruption of all time. By now, volcanologists have pieced together the sequence of events to form a coherent and comprehensive picture and the only official dilemma is the actual date with meteorological evidence arguing a date towards the middle…
Although the 2,265 volcano-tectonic earthquakes at Planchon-Peteroa as reported yesterday by Georges Vitton (Le Chaudron de Vulcain) is perhaps the more interesting news, our readers are probably more interested in the large earthquake swarms in Tjörnes Fracture Zone. What is happening? Is it an eruption, is an eruption imminent or can an eruption be expected…