Hunga Tonga and The Supercriticality Event

As the numbers for the Hunga Tonga eruption continues to come in it is becoming ever clearer that something truly momentous happened, something not seen or heard in 139 years. With a columnar height of 55 kilometres, an explosive pressure wave travelling several laps around the planet, forming a medium sized deadly tsunami, gouging out…

The curious case about seemingly endless energy

How’s that for a humdinger of a clickbait headline? As clickbaity as it might seem, it is still true, but I freely admit that it comes with a couple of hippopotamus sized caveats. Firstly, I should probably state that this article is about geology, geophysics and tectonic plates, and not as such about volcanoes, I…

Water, Grimsvötn and Stromboli

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…

The Art of Fracking a Volcano II

In this part of the series I will take a look at the risks of harvesting geothermal energy. Let me begin with stating that so far there has been no large accident caused by harvesting geothermal energy. On the other hand, there is no such thing as totally safe ways to harvest energy. We all…