I love large caldera volcanoes. The first reason is that they are always very beautiful, especially if they have lakes in them. The second reason is that most of them are of a class of volcanoes that leave their pointier cousins far behind. Size matters after all. At one end of the beauty spectrum, you…
Geological time is interesting, because even the geological now is decades long, if not centuries. The current geological episode at Reykjanes didn’t start with Fagrafjall (it is no longer a valley, so let us drop the “dal” out of Fagradalsfjall shall we). Nor did it start with the large and very noisy intrusion over at…
Think of one thing that has interested you for as long as you can remember, or at least for so long the level of factual knowledge you have of it is almost ridiculously vast. That one thing that always brightens up your day when you hear or read something about it, no matter how busy…
I am writing this the day before the already failed COP26 meeting in Glasgow. Failed in the respect that neither the leaders of China, nor Russia, will partake. Failed also in the respect that the leaders of Japan, Australia and Brazil are travelling there hellbent on stopping or slowing down any progress. Failed in the…
Late in 2020, an M6.4 earthquake struck the town of Petrinja in Croatia. It caused extensive damage in the town and in nearby villages, and 7 people died. Even so, the impact was more limited than it might have been because houses here tend to be well build. It came as a surprise: powerful earthquakes…
There is a bit of California here. The fault equals the length of the San Andreas, its shape, its movement, and its earthquakes. Even the ends are alike: where the San Andreas has formed the Salton Sea, its counterpart has embraced the Marmara Sea. Both are places where the crust is being pulled part, and…
If you are now wondering why you never heard of this, this was a prediction, not an event. The volcano decided otherwise 38 per cent of all eruptions in Iceland come from Grimsvötn. It is an amazing number: this hidden volcano, invisible and unreachable to all but the most hardy explorer, is among the most…
The Icelandic Met Office has released an Official Bulletin about the possibility for an upcoming eruption at Þorbjörn on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland. Þorbjörn belongs to a class of volcanoes that I normally like to call Unknownabunga, one of all of those volcanic features in Iceland that pretty much nobody knows anything about, until…
In my previous article I wrote that Taal most likely would not continue to erupt for a long period of time, based on the previous history of the volcano. Obviously Taal decided to go for something not recorded in the historic annals. It is therefore time to take a deeper look at what is going…
After a couple of rather hectic volcanic weeks in the world of volcanoes I thought I would write a little something about two of these events. Namely Stromboli and Grimsvötn, the reason I am cherry picking those two is that they have a common theme, water. Stromboli Unless you have been to Stromboli you…