Afar Holocene volcanoes I: Volcanoes in an ancient lake.

After Albert’s explanation of Afar’s volcanic and tectonic past, I will look into this region’s Holocene volcanism, and try to create the first comprehensive volcanic history of this very unstudied volcanic area. I like Afar because the volcanoes are “naked”, what I mean is that due to a desertic environment, the lava is slow to…

The making of Afar

Africa is broken. It is being dissected by the famous East African Rift which extends over a length of 5000 km along the eastern side of Africa and seems poised to destroy Africa as we know it. Some say a new ocean will form here. In that case a new name will be needed. Suggestions…

The Afar Triangle

In 1912, Alfred Wegener published his proposal that continents had moved. He presented various lines of evidence, of which the best remembered is the fact that the opposite shores of the Atlantic ocean fit together as pieces of a puzzle. There was much more, including the fact that earthquakes were focussed on the Pacific ring…

The Sundhnukur Fires. Summary, precedents, and future.

We are still learning. There is much we humans don’t know about volcanoes or about how they behave. The past few years have been enlightening. It all started in January 2020, the Svartsengi region started rising, and an elliptical area of inflation appeared that encompassed Mount Thorbjörn, the Svartsengi Power Plant, and the 800 years…

The Rumble in the Jungle

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…