The VC Bar

Welcome to the Volcano Café bar, a place for all things on or off topic and inane ramblings. There has been a need of late to find a place better suited to various theories, long comments and enthusiasm. This page will be less moderated than the main article pages and cleared out every month (this may change depending on use).

Have fun and don’t forget to tip the barman 😉

3,061 thoughts on “The VC Bar”

    • Terrfying for anyone to be on the cone slope when the lava lake drains.. cannot outrun this

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  7. Our local coffeeshop has brought in some coffee beans from the Lake Toba region. Delicious. Best coffee I’ve had in several years.

    Volcanoes seem to be necessary to produce good coffee. Big volcano, good coffee.

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  8. Where there ever any theories about the possibility of an super volcano/caldera in area of the whole Tyrrhenian sea?

    North crater wall somewhere around Grosseto, NE the sleeping volcanos around Terni, in the S Etna/Stromboli in the W Corsica? Inside the caldera Phlegraean fields and Marsili? Everything some how connected?

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    • IIRC, after the geologists were forbidden from deep-drilling near Naples, they resorted to a drill-ship just beyond Naples’ authority.

      Seems ‘Bay of Naples’ and ‘lido’ bay etc are volcanic, but vast ‘Gulf of Naples’ is not.

      Unless is very, very old mega-caldera, with ancient floor now deeply, deeply buried in sediment, looks like is innocently ‘sedimentary’ to considerable depth.

      Still, those big arcs and part-arcs do raise nape-hair. Especially when you consider Vesuvius / Somma & Ischia are but flank eruptions of the Phlegraean Fields complex…

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    • Watch it on Vimeo

      Here is another tourist video from Nyiragongo made in 1976… just before it drained.
      Unique home video.

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    • Apparently been tourism there for a very long time..
      I knows that Hawaii lava tourism started in the middle 1800 s, and Vesuvious had mass tourism already by the 1890 s.

      Nyiragongo is more remote, but appparently gotten tourists since 1960 s.
      Today over 2 million persons live in goma.

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  10. Nice little swarm beneath Mt. Hood today… right below the summit, not on the faults to the South. Probably still routine, though. Magma chamber putting in an expansion…

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  11. Nyiragongo sounds like an angry ocean with crashing waves togther with glass like breaking of lava rocks that shatters.
    Ultrabasic Nephelinitic lava lake bubbling around in Nyiragongo, huge gas bubbles bursts with cO2 magmatic and water steam. Nephelinite is really an amazingly rare ultrabasic rock composition. At current the sillica content for Nyiragongo is about 36 – 37% for the lava lake, with flank cones going a bit lower I think. Nyiragongo haves a very large cO2 emissions, like many alkaline magmas do. Perhaps the lowest viscosity of all sillicate magmas.

    Nephelinite thats sillicate magmas seems to have a relationship with carbonatite, at Lengai both Nephelinite and Carbonatites are erupting historicaly in holocene. The plutonic forms of these two magmas are often found togther in older rocks, I haves an outcrop of these two 200 km from my home. There plutonic Nephelinite dykes can been seen going into a Carbonatite complex.

    Nyiragongo is really ultra – active for being a superalkaline Nephelinite volcano. Amazing that it haves enough Nephelinite magma supply to host huge lava lakes. Nyiragongo is also probaly really warm for having this composition. Most Nephelinitic magmas erupts like cold strombolian eruptions.

    Nephelinite is generated by the most minute tiny ammounts of mantle melting. So most if not all other Nephelinite volcanoes are small monogentic cones and fissure flows. This is the sillicate magma thats produced in the very smallest ammounts on terestrial planets.

    The only other purely Nephelinitic polygenetic volcano is the small Stratovolcano named Visoke thats not far from Nyiragongo.

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    • The small size of the lava lake spattering and crustal plates may have to do with very low visocisty…
      But Nyiragongo perhaps lacks the lava lake foam layer. Convection in Nyiragongos conduit coud be faster too, forming a more broken up surface

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