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 😉
Video of someone walking to the top of fissure 8. Much hiking boots on pumice sound effects.
Some plants growing already.
Wow look at the lava flow at 08: 44
This stuff is extremely fluid as Kilaueas basalts tends to be. One of the lowest viscosities for any sillicate lava
So, corollary is that you’d find *no* lave tunnels / caves at eg Yellowstone, Toba, Ngorongoro etc calderas, unless upstream of a distinctive lava flow from later ‘flank’ eruption ? Very different ingredients, very different eruptive processes…
Sorry, not being pedantic, just doing an ‘either / or / xor’ sanity check on a possible story plot-point…
“Yeah, that big caldera would give us hot springs and lots of solar-facing slope with a couple of fresh springs, but forget about finding any lava caves. At least the wall is ‘breached’ so the lake has drainage, unlike the Big Ng…”
OT: FWIW, I vaguely remember reading that Easter Island has a bunch of lava tunnels and caves along the coast…
Would the recent ~5 SSE of Madeira suggest a ‘modest’ intrusion event, submarine dyke formation ??
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us60008brw/executive
The second most energetic event is a M 4.3, which is far below the main 5.5. This suggests a tectonic mainshock-aftershock distribution, as opposed to a volcano-tectonic swarm which usually produces a flurry of earthquakes where the most energetic events are close in magnitude to each other.
The IGN estimates a depth of 20-29 km for the earthquakes, and the location just outside the volcanic edifice makes it very similar to hawaiian flexural earthquakes so probably it is the same process (the lithosphere sagging due to the load of the volcanoes).
Just walk in the park… Hard Labor Creek State park…
https://www.wate.com/news/georgia-officials-preparing-part-of-state-park-for-coronavirus-patient-isolation/
https://www.google.se/amp/s/phys.org/news/2009-07-steppe-mammoths-roamed-southern-spain.amp
Albert looks like polar/ tundra fauna made its way into South Europe during the glacial maximums
Mammoths and Reindeer remains been found in
South Spain.
How did Sicily look like during the LGM?
How cold was the Mediterranean Sea during the LGM?
IIRC, several bunches of now-separate Med islands were merged, sundry straights significantly narrowed. But, though depth over Gibraltar Sill was much, much reduced, it would still be a sea-way. Between the end-Messinian mega-flood’s old scour trench, Atlantic tides and storms, the gap stayed open.
( Um, don’t know about Red or Black Seas. IIRC, both are grimly disputed… )
IIRC, Med currently needs equivalent of ~1 metre Atlantic water per year to balance river-fresh vs evaporation. Gib in-flow is significantly higher as there’s a briny bottom out-flow. Balance during glacial eras depends on so many factors across region I wouldn’t know where to start. Also, IIRC, several large-ish rivers cut across what is now Central Sahara…
Harking back to the Messinian Event, when vast, kilometres-deep river canyons eroded (*) and were subsequently back-filled with sediments, I’d suggest each glacial low-stand probably carved into the top 100~~150 metres of sediment. There may be much ‘terrace’ info to be found, but my Google-Fu hath fallen short…
One curious ‘gotcha’ may have been an up-tick in coastal Med volcanic eruptions, as coastal plains were ‘off-loaded’ by the low-stand…
*) Nile’s mile-deep at Cairo ? The ‘Notch’ beneath Aswan High Dam ??
Mediterranean salinity crisis happened before the glaciations
That was the end of Miocene
The first cenozoic european glaciations happened at start of Pleistocene
Lowering of the atmospheric CO2 is one reason for Pleistocene glaciations
“Mediterranean salinity crisis happened before the glaciations”
Yes, yes, and the Messinian flood(s) created vast scour channels which would later help to keep the Med open…
Likewise, the sediment in those Messinian river canyons was vulnerable to erosion during the glacial low-stands, hence my comment about terraces…
Mediterranean was much colder and more arid during the Glacials than today. Only 30 000 years ago
It may have never frozen but..
Northen Mediterranean probaly was as cold as Norway sea today.
Sourthen Mediterranean Probaly was as cool as English Strait, South North Sea is today.
The landscapes around, where temperate dry steepe
and steppe tundra in the more northen parts.
Nik
Glenveagh National Park In Northen Ireland, coud be a good analouge How example Spain and Greece looked like during the peak of the ice age in vegitation wise and temperature at least
Imagine an open, windy landscape thats treeless and fairly dry.
Summer + 18 C winter – 5 C
Ice Age South Spain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvQKCX3L-44
Wonderful video showing how extremely fluid Nyiragongos lava lake is.
Watch it in HD.
Nyiragongo is extremely fluid, notice the lava bubble gas bursts at 0:36 – 0:43
Extremely fluid and runny this lava is.
This is Nephelinite lava, an ultra-alkaline, ultrabasic magma composition.
The sillica is only 35%for Nyiragongo and its around 1200 C.
The most sillica poor- sillicate lava on this planet, and the worlds only erupting Nephelinite volcano.
Very small ammounts of partial melting in the mantle is required to form souch alkaline sio2 poor lavas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIUTjaefr2s&t=122s
Another good Nyiragongo video, filmed by the same person.
Very fluid weird alkaline sillica poor lavas.
Watch 4:23 – 4:34 waves of molten rock.
This is now the worlds largest lava lake, since bit larger Halemaumau drained.
But Nyiragongos lava lake seems to have stopped growing larger.
But its rising with the years, the lava lake have now reached platform 2 ( terrace 2 ) and soon will reach platform 1.
Every overflow raises the crater floor in Nyiragongo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htY8nVrT57o
Lava steam devils in Nyiragongo : )
Similar tornadoes/steam devils was seen over Holuhraun and Fissure 8 lava river in Leilani.
This video is a few years old, the lava lake is much higher today
Albert coud I walk across that in some special suit?
I also knows that these kinds of effusive lavas are probaly too very fluid for that
Some basalt lava flows in Etna are viscous enough to allow a walk over them, as they slowly flows without sinking down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bumUw0lNOz0&has_verified=1
I recommend that you don’t try.. It is possible to walk on viscous lava flows, but you need to be fast as shoes do melt. (And you need solid boots to start with.) Imaging walking on the lava river of Leilani. You can’t.
Nyiragongo and Halema’uma’u are fluid as heck .. very runny
These you sinks down in instantly a bit, despite the density
Impossible to walk over!
Albert another question: the extremely fluid lavas at Halemaumau and Nyiragongo woud make excellent ash trays right?
Souch runny lavas must mold itself into details very easly indeed.
Smooth molds?
Etnas lava molds and ash trays always comes out rough and poor in detail
Albert woud it be possible to blow glass with example Nyiragongo and Halemaumau? These lavas are extremely fluid and often spatters into huge glassy sheets.
Ocean entries forms nice glass bubbles sheets called Limou – Pele
Nyiragongo and Kilauea are very smooth and runny
Woud it be a good glass blowing stuff? or is it too much inpurities and too little sillica ?
The extremely fluid smooth lava in Halemaumau: is that a good glass blowing material?
I imagines it to be that
But its probaly rather brittle because of the low sillica and lots of inpurities
Nice little group of quakes near Magna Utah Looks like aftershocks from the 5.7 (bottom of the list)
3.0
5km NNE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 14:07:53 (UTC)
8.8 km
3.5
2km NNE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 14:06:12 (UTC)
-2.5 km
3.4
5km NNE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 14:05:04 (UTC)
7.5 km
4.0
7km NNE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 14:01:46 (UTC)
6.7 km
3.2
2km ENE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:48:01 (UTC)
9.3 km
3.2
6km NE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:47:44 (UTC)
-0.5 km
3.6
5km NE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:36:38 (UTC)
10.6 km
3.6
7km NNE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:36:24 (UTC)
9.3 km
3.9
7km NE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:32:29 (UTC)
3.0 km
3.3
7km NNW of West Valley City, Utah
2020-03-18 13:31:18 (UTC)
8.9 km
3.3
5km NE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:29:55 (UTC)
-3.2 km
2.5
6km NE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:27:20 (UTC)
8.7 km
3.8
3km NNE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:23:20 (UTC)
-1.6 km
3.9
6km NE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:22:01 (UTC)
-3.2 km
3.4
7km NE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:18:28 (UTC)
6.7 km
3.5
5km ENE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:15:55 (UTC)
8.8 km
3.7
6km NE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:15:11 (UTC)
7.8 km
2.8
4km NNE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:14:06 (UTC)
8.4 km
5.7
6km NNE of Magna, Utah
2020-03-18 13:09:31 (UTC)
10.6 km
The tilt measure southwest of Kilauea is continuing to increase. And it is a large and fast change. I am wondering whether it is instrumental, as nothing else shows anything similar.
Albert
Look at HOK between Kona and Mauna Loa. I have no idea what this means, this is the one of the few times I have ever looked at it. I see that IKI has turned its trend. Maybe a deep intrusion? I guess there is a reason that they installed this tilt meter there.
Mac
The tilting at SDH is enormous and doesn’t match with what the GPS and the 2 properly working summit tiltmeters are showing so I would say that it is instrumental.
With HOK it is harder to tell since there is no other way to constrain deformation in that area but perhaps it is the same instrumental failure as in SDH because it looks similar, it shows a continuous rate of tilting that should not be there.
That one seems more plausible. It shows the inflation of Mauna Loa which is still continuing.
Yes but the tilting at HOK is unexpectedly strong. MOK and SLC are much closer to the summit where inflation is centered and show a more or less stable tilt with changes that do not exceed 2 microradians/month. Compared to the 6.5 microradians the 0 component of HOK has gone up in a month. Inflation at the summit is not enough to explain the rate of deformation down at HOK
It may be wrong. But the tilt is not inflation: it shows the difference in inflation between two points. Above the inflation magma chamber, inflation is uniform and tilt does not change. To the side, tilt changes much more. How far away you need to go for the tilt to be strongest depends on the depth of the magma chamber.
The rift across Mauna Loa can also cause tilt changes, and some of the tilt instruments measure this. And the caldera can sink or rise and this affects local instruments. HOK is further away and would only see the larger-scale inflation.
Because HOK follows the summit GPS movement fairly well, I am inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.
An interferogram can shed some light into this, where the fringes are the closest to each other would be the area of strongest tilting, or it would be if the interferogram just showed the upward movement. Since east is also toward the satellite it complicates things but it can still be useful.
HOK is outside the area of deformation created by summit inflation of Mauna Loa, so it actually shouldn’t be affected at all. SLC also seems to be outside the area of deformation but if the interferogram is displacing the inflation towards the east due to the looking angle then SLC might be slightly affected. The best positioned tiltmeter turns out to be and not suprisingly MOK.
And lastly, the rifts would only create deformation if a dike is intruded into them, unlike the ERZ of Kilauea the rifts of Mauna Loa do not have permanent conduits within them, they depend on the summit sending dikes, except for the uppermost part of the SWRZ which does have some magma storage.
Good points. The southwest rift zone did have inflation up to last year (if I recall correctly), after which it moved to an area close the summit. There were earthquakes in the rift zone, so some intrusion has been happening. But it is like Hekla: first activity is at the summit and the rift zone follows some hours later.
Rain?
Two rain gauges on 3/17 showed close to an inch of rain.
The tilt at JKA has also made a move. I have not looked at this instrument in months. Looks like it started around the 15th/16th maybe with this quake.
2020-03-16 07:16:37 3.2 -1
At the beginning of March both 290 and 20 were about zero, now +2 and -2 microrad. Maybe some localized fresh magma in the rift zone with the uptick in activity in the area.
Mac
If it is inflation then it should become noticeable in the GPS JOKA in some days time.
The tilt would indicate downrift inflation so it would also result in westward movement if it turns out to be magmatic and not some other signal like weather
Well, If we needed to open up some rifts to allow some flow these last few over the last couple of days may have made some cracks. Most likely these would be local short lived intrusions, if anything. Aftershocks.
2020-03-21 17:08:41 2.5 2.3
2020-03-21 16:55:01 3.2 0.2
2020-03-21 15:07:00 3.6 -0.5
2020-03-20 23:45:19 2.1 4.2
2020-03-20 21:51:36 2.2 2.4
2020-03-20 12:04:58 3.3 6.5
2020-03-19 16:48:10 2.6 6.2
2020-03-18 04:20:49 3.2 6.1
All off them kind of in line between the ocean and south of a line from Mauna ulu to Puuoo.
Those are in the south flank faults of Kilauea, it may just be the routine stress release.
JOKA is a little up and west, but we are talking a wee bit .02 meters. I will check back in a few days since this may move back toward the longer trend.
Woud it be possible to blow glass with example Nyiragongo and Halemaumau? These lavas are extremely fluid and often spatters into huge glassy sheets. Ocean entries forms nice glass bubbles sheets called Limou – Pele and Peles hairs
Nyiragongo and Kilauea are very smooth and runny
Woud it be a good glass blowing stuff? or is it too much inpurities and too little sillica ?
Woud Halema’uma’u s fluid lavas make good glass jars and kitchenware?
Hi Folks,
Do you have good details on Teide Volcano and Canary Hotspot, please?
Would like to know if partial melting too small for formation of normal Thoelitic basalt in Canary Islands.
Thanks.
Tholeiitic basalts are extremely rare in the Canary Islands, as far as I know they are absent in the central volcanoes but can show up rarely in the rejuvenated volcanism, like the Timanfaya eruption of Lanzarote. But rejuvenated volcanism is not directly caused by the hotspot, it happens through crustal flexure and decompression melt created by loading of adjacent volcanic edifices.
Hi Philip Evans
Yes the partial melting is generaly too small under Canaries to form Thoelitic Basalt
Iceland and Hawaii, and Galapagos are the only oceanic hotspots that produce pure thoeltic melts.
Iceland and Hawaii produce the purest Thoelitic Basalt
Because they are the strongest oceanic hotspots
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12957-1
https://www.quantamagazine.org/sudden-ancient-global-warming-event-traced-to-magma-flood-20200319/
Looks like massive flood basalt volcanism CO2 outgassing caused the Paleocene- Eocene Thermal maximum. The hottest Earth been in 300 million years.
It happened 57 to 54 million years ago
Links to papers.
The scary stuff is that man made CO2 emissions are 10 times faster than PETM release
just checking in: we are in pretty much lockdown due to virus and the good news is: the DIL and grandkids are in lockdown with us because they were visiting when everything stopped. 🙂 DIL does all shopping and picking up meds and post office i’m fine, just busy… carry on….. Best!motsfo
only down side is: Seldom get to use internet; so if anyone says “HI” i’ll probably miss it. Stay well everyone, esp. Lurk. 😉 dealing with Florida can’t be easy.
Hi!
What the lockdowns are trying to avoid.
City of Bergamo, Italy (Pop:120,000). Historical and current monthly recorded deaths from city register. Charts compiled by Bergamo local newspaper. Data for this March obviously not complete. Data up to 26th March.
Note this is just the city not the entire Bergamo region.
I’ve just seen a graph which is almost identical to that one: it’s a U S -wide one plotting over time the new applications in the USA for unemployment benefit. Another aspect of the same crisis
Albert: is Nyiragongos lava cooler than most basalts?
This is a lava lake bubble burst in daylight from Nyiragongo, and its hardly glowing at all.
Nyiragongos magmas are formed by the very smallest ammounts of partial melting, and should be cooler than example Hawaii and Iceland where melting rates are much larger.
Nyiragongos magmas cooler than normal basalts?
Very dull colour here in daylight
http://mrietze.com/Kongo-eth11.htm
Nyiragongo hardly glowing at all in daylight
This is a Nephelinite – Melinilite magma
Very very alkaline and sillica poor ( 36% sillicon )
Good to keep distance to that coughing gator!! 😬😬
https://webcams.volcanodiscovery.com/nyiragongo
Strong heat signal over Nyiragongo again
The lava lake coud be overflowing again, or the
caldera wall vent is pouring lava flows over the crater floor. The lava lake overflow fillings is soon as high as 1996. Nyiragongos lake is rising constantly with the years
Which volcano is that??? Look at the volcano at the 3:00 mark in this Youtube video about Katla. below. It most certainly is NOT Katla! It’s way too steep and looks like it probably has a crater lake (?). I was initially thinking Ruapehu, but no. Maybe Popocatepetl, but that’s a bit much ice on top.
https://youtu.be/RClGksTzQnI?t=181
Cotopaxi volcano
Mike K
Nyiragongo is exciting as heck these days
The lava lake column grows higher and higher and filling up the caldera.
I loves that bubbling Nephelinite – Melilite
Nyiragongo haves a very rare lava… hardly any sillica at all. That volcano is low in sillica, very low only 35%,
so it makes These lavas very fluid.
Ultrabasic and Superalkaline so called ”Nephelinite” magma. Sillica is crazy low, hardly any sillica at all
Jesper is right, that looks like Cotopaxi…….no idea what it is doing here. I hate sloppy documentary making.
https://www.newsweek.com/florida-man-charged-burglary-held-5000-bond-stealing-1-pack-toilet-paper-1492081
Comet Atlas, which was hoped would be bright in May, seems to have broken up. That would imply that it may not get that bright. Keep posted. And it looks like Comet Borisov, the interstellar visitor currently in the solar system, has also split. It is a bad time to be a comet.
I hope this is ok to post. If not, feel free to chop with impunity.
I’ve mentioned my passion for playing and (home) recording at a few points in the past, so when the UK was put on lockdown, I thought it was a good time for people like myself to step up and give people a lift.
So I bullied, cajoled, and persuaded other members of a local folk club to pitch in and help me do this. That’s myself right at the start, my wife contributing her tap dancing and my daughter singing a few bars of the vocal and messing with one of our cats whilst I was trying to shoot the video.
It seems to have gone down rather well, and all recorded strictly under lockdown regulations.
Well, I don’t know about the VC Dragons and their rules, but that gave me a very nice, warm, happy feeling! Thank you for brightening up the day!
Cheer’s Clive… And Albert and anyone else who looked it up.
My work here is done 🙂 (…done…on to the next one ! 😀 )
Brilliant Neil..thanks for making and sharing.
It was every bit as much fun to make as it looks… and given that I outsourced the mixing to someone better than me and told him to select line by line which vocalist to feature, it was a good (and gentle) lesson in humility for my daughter, who is on the verge of big things in her burgeoning music career, yet a singer from a local pub band got most of the lines.
Purely based on the fact that his more cutting voice was better suited to the song. Her fans include some huge names in the British music scene, but sometimes even the best don’t paint with the right colours on their palette .
And I played my first ever lead solo !
Great fun. Now for something completely different.
Thumbs up!
Great!
Great!!! Thanks!
Kind of nifty data visualization of earthquakes underneath various faults in California. Scripps Oceanography lecture from 2008.
Catching Mercury – today is the first (and last) flyby of Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_BepiColombo_trajectory.webm
Volcanic activity seems to be stalled…A big weather event for us in the southern states this weekend, a pandemic, and some nasty locusts in Africa. All it takes to finish the catastrophe list is a big earthquake and large eruption and 2020 will be the worst natural disaster year.
Tallis
Looks like later Sunday into early Monday morning will be the concern for mid-west GA. Will be keeping a close eye on this one.
Mac
For where I am it’s Sunday morning, around 2500 J/Kg at 6:00 am for East Texas, the models are beginning to paint a more nasty picture where I am. Hopefully your area gets a nice linear mode.
What is happening?
Potential Severe weather from Texas thru the southeast starting today thru Monday morning. They have started warning us in mid-west GA. 3 days ahead of the storms and according to one of the local meteorologists, this is a rare call. There are some things that can make it worse, or lessen the severity of the storms.
Mac
From a blog post on Wunderground dot com. https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/south-braces-for-easter-outbreak-of-severe-weather.
Conditions are aligning for a volatile weekend of severe weather from Texas across the Southeast, including the potential for strong tornadoes on Sunday. In its Day 3 outlook for Sunday issued early Friday, the NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center placed the area from northern Louisiana across most of Mississippi into western Alabama under a moderate risk for severe weather.
Don’t be lulled by the term “moderate”: this is actually the highest risk category that SPC uses this far in advance of an event, which signals the gravity of the situation. “Strong, long-tracked tornadoes and potentially widespread damaging wind are possible,” SPC warned.
The potential outbreak will emerge from the juxtaposition of a winterlike upper-level storm system with a flow of summerlike low-level air. The Gulf Coast region has been simmering under relentless heat the last few weeks, leading to the warmest March on record for a number of U.S. locations (as well as many parts of Mexico on the other side of the Gulf). The developing storm system this weekend will pull another rich feed of warm, moist air into the Southeast. Because of the powerful winds and high water-vapor content expected with this moisture channel, it may end up qualifying as a strong atmospheric river—the type of narrow corridor that can fuel very heavy rainfall.
Watching 2 tornado signatures on radar in Missippi, one following the other. Also a big rotation just west of Birmingham Al.
It was pretty nasty in the southeast did you get hit hard? I luckily missed in the intense storms.
We are good. There are a lot of families in the south that did not do so well. We had at most a severe Thunderstorm warning.
Mac
still well here…. Hope Everyone else is well too….. Best and a Blessed Easter to us All, motsfo (who will be coloring eggs tomorrow… i’m so busy…and the computer is busy until late at night when i’m just too tired to type… Love to All…
Happy easter to you! And enjoy the eggs – we haven’t seen eggs in the shops in our village for several weeks. We blame all the parents trying to entertain the young children who should be at school, and turn to baking. But that is a guess.
How High in the atmosphere must I go, for the skies to turn black?
I know from flying at 33 000 feet its already dark purple blue.
But when do the skies turn competely black?
Is it 20 kilometers up?
Did something change in the settings? I’ve always followed via mobile, but since last night something must’ve changed I guess, because now I can only read the ‘main’ replies, but not the replies on those ‘main’ replies. Most of those secondary/further disappear in the side of the screen. I can send screenshot via mail if you like. Hope this will be repaired soon.
You are having issues via mobile?
I did a few back end updates a few hours ago, maybe something has gone screwy!
Can you give me a bit more info?
I find the comments can sometimes go a bit wonky after an upgrade as the site isn’t really optimised very well for mobile browsing.
The width of a line is max 12-14 letters on your reply. And that’s only a reply. This reply will be about 1 word per line (on the ‘far’ right side of my screen). Should you send an answer I think it’s going to dissapear or only your name will still be visible. It seems the background (the black with white dots) takes up a lot more space. Wich means the ‘white’ editable area is smaller (less wide).
Never had problems in the past with reading on mobile; normally it’s optimised enough to just read without much inconvenience. Thanks for looking into it. If my reply isn’t clear enough (I’m not native English as you have noticed) I can provide sceeenshots.
I see the same problem and I know exactly the same thing has happened before with back end updates. The margins with stars are usually not visible on the mobile, but now they are large. Plus the indentation of comments is way too large, leaving just a very narrow space for text.
yes, its one of these issues that pops up from time to time, we use a separate plugin to provide our mobile formatting and when the back end has an update, it can take a time before the plugin catches up with the new formatting.
We have been considering an update to the blog for a while and making it more mobile friendly.
The forest fires around Chernobyl that have been burning for over a week now are approaching the reactors. The abandoned town that has become a tourist centre is already in the fire zone although I have not heard whether damage was done.
Latest reports are they’ve sorta got it under control, kept it ~ 1 km away from the Sarcophagus complex. Easier to tackle as fire-front approached the lake & cooling ponds. Still, there’s a lot of top-soil / leaf-litter radio-isotopes gone up with the smoke…
At least a lot of the short-term stuff has had a couple of half-lives. A similar event in 1987~~1990 would have been much worse…
Some advice for the COVID-19 emergency from Patrick McKeown, a breathing expert. It is about the importance of nasal breathing which isn’t being given as much attention as it should:
Is it just me or did the format of volcanocafe just change? (and not for the better)
Replies are suddenly super narrow. My nostalgic self likes how it brings back memories of the holuhraun days.
this is due to a recent update of the backend.
we use a separate plugin to provide mobile formatting, and it can sometimes take a wee while for the plugin to catch up.
we are planning an update of the site in the near future to add native mobile formatting, but this is a rather large undertaking and will take a while to be coded and implemented.
In the meantime (and its not an ideal solution, but its what we have for now) in Chrome on Android, there is an option to switch away from the mobile formatted version.
In the top right, hit the 3 dots, and down near the bottom, click desktop site.
this switches away from the mobile formatting to match what is seen through the webpage on pc.
Exploding paper mill in Maine. Looks remarkably like a volcanic cloud.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/15/insane-video-captures-massive-paper-mill-explosion-in-maine/
The top of the plume almost looked a bit surtzeyan at the beginning.
Maybe because it was wet material?
Heavy iron isotopes leaking from Earth’s core
https://phys.org/news/2020-04-heavy-iron-isotopes-leaking-earth.html
from
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-020-0560-y
Iron isotope fractionation at the core–mantle boundary by thermodiffusion
Charles E. Lesher, Juliane Dannberg, Gry H. Barfod, Neil R. Bennett, Justin J. G. Glessner, Daniel J. Lacks & James M. Brenan
Nature Geoscience (2020)
fair-use quotes:
“The new study suggests heavier iron isotopes migrate toward lower temperatures—and into the mantle—while lighter iron isotopes circulate back down into the core. (Isotopes of the same element have different numbers of neutrons, giving them slightly different masses.) This effect could cause core material infiltrating the lowermost mantle to be enriched in heavy iron isotopes.”
“Computer simulations performed by the research team show this core material can even reach the surface, mixed with and transported by hot, upwelling mantle plumes. Some lavas erupted at oceanic hot spots such as Samoa and Hawaii are enriched in heavy iron isotopes, which Lesher and the team propose could be a signature of a leaky core.”
/
Nature link is pay-walled, but Google Scholar found a free PDF version…
Um, could such isotope enrichment finally settle the ‘itsa deep / shallow plume’ for each hot-spot ??
Also, report reckons the heavier isotopes go up into mantle, while the lighter go down into core. This seems counter-intuitive, such I’m obviously missing some key process…
I can’t find but it seems to me that there is an article by Carl (or another?) on a hypothesis of iron eruption from the core to explain the Kiruna mine in Sweden.
I think that’s what Henrik refers to at the end of the article.
https://www.volcanocafe.org/super-eruptions-and-hyper-eruptions/
I am not sure if anything was every written regarding this, as Henrik said that it was a “discussion over a couple of beers or four”.
I shall ask Carl and find out if anything was ever written and if not WHY NOT?? and I will report back 🙂
https://www.volcanocafe.org/super-eruptions-and-hyper-eruptions/
There was a discussion in the comments on the post. I was never convinced by the mechanism: iron is much denser than silicates and it lacks the buoyancy to come up through the mantle. It could only happen as small inclusions in much bigger plumes. But I am open to the evidence
Several months ago, Champion International (a paper mill up in Cantonement Florida) had an explosion in one of it’s recovery boilers. Black Liquor was spread all over the place.
Black Liquor is a product of the kraft process and contains chemicals and pulp. The recovery boiler is intended to recover those chemicals and produce power for the plant, reducing it’s load on the local electric grid.
From what I understand… the mixing mechanism for the vat containing that mix was being turned back on and ignited residual methane build up in the tank.
Is this a toxic material spread, then?
I hope if there is some higher power in this world, God, Karma, Destiny, or something else the mind couldn’t even Imagine, I hope it destroys modern society and all of humanity. I would love to suffer that destruction as well…Hopefully Reykjanes delivers some good fires!
Wow lol! hahahaha
You are hellbent on destruction
If there was a button
” press for Siberian Traps 2.0”
Woud you press it?
The tools of destruction must not go to your hands 😂
Well I am not the most stable person in the world, I wouldn’t press a siberian traps button but I would press a K/P button with extra Deccan eruptions.
Some reading
https://www.wired.com/story/move-over-san-andreas-theres-an-ominous-new-fault-in-town/
A bit overstated. Faults can take over from each other and the bend indeed causes a problem for the San Andreas, making it possible for the stress to find another break point. But there are many faults than can play a role, and when a crustal block rotates, it can cause bends elsewhere. I also wonder about the aftermath. At some point, a bit of California will have torn off, and like its predecessors, will begin the journey to Alaska. That is when things begin to be interesting.
Well if they interviewed someone with traditional views on the area, no one would read it!
We visited Death Valley 2 years ago with my sister’s family (brother in law is a seismologist) and it was very interesting We stayed in Beatty NV. (bring everything you need since this town has next to nothing) and made day trips into the park. One of the trips was a dirt road (we had rented 2 4 wheel drive trucks) through a slot canyon that takes you by Leadfield Ghost town. This was an amazing drive with folding, faults, amazing colors, and old mines. If you go, check the weather, the water has polished the walls smooth up to 20+ feet high in some areas. We drove out west to 395 and then down along the area of the Ridgecrest Fault on the way back to Riverside CA. We will do it again!
Mac
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JtPxBu-Jkjo
Voice of a Barn Owl
Cute and fluffy
But having a voice from hell itself
They are legendary for their calls
Thats why they are called ” Demon Owls”
Haha….would you say that is worse than a neighbor with two little yappy miniature pincers ??
Barn owls are satans minions 🙂
Small cute gargolyes screaming
Miniatyre Pinschers are far worse because they bark constantly
We had a barn owl attack nesting magpies. The tree was just outside our bedroom window, just five feet away. You would not believe the noise at 2:00am! Sounded like hyenas being murdered.
We hear barn owls around quite regularly.
It is normally the magpies attacking other nesting birds here.
The comet from outside the solar system currently visiting us has an extreme amount of CO frozen on its surface. That indicates that it formed in a much colder environment than our comets did. Its original host may have been a red dwarf, similar to Proxima Centauri
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52353671
Shallow quake at Mauna Loa, 2.5 at -3.6km. The Kilauea tilt looks like it took a big drop but it is actually due to the chart being rescaled to a .1 microrad reading.
Mac
There have been 2 unusual seismic events today, at 14:09-14:12 and 15:39-15:47 UTC. They are much stronger at the summit of Kilauea that elsewhere in the island so must come from relatively shallow below the summit and are long period earthquakes.
It is the first time I see an LP at Kilauea even though I have been looking at most weird-looking events for several months now, though maybe i just didn’t notice them particularly if they were weak.
Not sure what it means, but if they repeat I will look into it.
I have been watching the inflation around Kilauea. Joka is still moving west and now starting to move up, maybe showing inflation east and under that GPS. MKAI is moving South and up and just north of it NUPM (both just east of Mauna ulu) is moving a little north and up, I am guessing that there is some movement possible under there.
I looked at those two sigs and I like the 15;39 -47 for possible lp event.
I think that we are missing a lot of small events. I remember one of the papers showed an event at Wood and it was tiny, nothing like the large events we were seeing at Pahala. I just looked at the usgs latest quakes and searched from Jan 1 till now and the HVO has only reported two events as other.
I do recall that most of the gain in volume of a shield volcano is by cracking due to pressure and then filling the cracks with Magma.
Joka is interesting, judging from the tiltmeter there have been 2 pulses of deformation, both I think most likely due to inflation downrift. The first was in March and after a week-long pause a second pulse started around April 3rd that is still ongoing.
The center of inflation of the 2 pulses seems slightly different, after the pause inflation seems to have shifted slightly southward, maybe closer to Joka.
It shows that magma has started bypassing Pu’u’o’o again.
Also, the first pulse moved the Joka GPS only west while the second seems to be moving Joka west, north and up, though it may be to early to say for sure.
Is there any indication of SO2 increase?
SO2 looks stable.
Might be worth keeping an eye on, in case these events signalled degassing. It may be a while before SO2 makes its way to the surface
Just started reading this.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2172-5
“Extreme rainfall triggered the 2018 rift eruption at Kīlauea Volcano”
Not sure that I am buying this?
It is a model. To test it they need to make a prediction, some implication of their model that can be tested. I don’t see that in the paper.
The M6.9 quake was too deep to have been affected by rain. The magma had been collecting at pu’u’o’o, not Kilauea. If rain was involved, it was in the east rift zone, not at the summit.
more
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6425/367.abstract
This paper is good. Came out today?
From the Paper
“The 2018 rift eruption and summit
collapse of Kīlauea Volcano”
‘The loss of magmatic head due to the earthquake, coupled with the evacuation of magma
from the summit in 2018, suggests that it may
take several years before enough magma can
accumulate beneath the summit to erupt. After
the 1924 summit collapse, which may also have
been associated with flank instability (33), only a
few small eruptions confined to Halema‘uma‘u
crater occurred in the ensuing 10 years, and there
was a total absence of eruptions anywhere on the
volcano for another 18 years. If future activity at
Kīlauea follows a similar pattern, the next several
years will see little, if any, sizeable eruptive activity. However, it is also possible that reduced summit magma pressure may promote higher rates
of magma supply from depth owing to a pressure
imbalance between the deep and shallow parts
of Kīlauea’s magma plumbing system [e.g., (34)],
which could result in renewed eruptive activity
sooner than expected. The next several years offer
an exceptional and exciting opportunity to study
the evolution of magmatism following a major
perturbation to Kīlauea’s plumbing system.”
I would assume this is demonstrated by the Pahala events?
I have wondered about that. The Pahala swarming is almost certainly related to a large batch of magma rising from the hotspot: Over time the activity has moved slowly northward and upward, starting with the deep tremors offshore towards the end of 2018 (about 41 km deep), then the start of strong ground-cracking in August 2019 under the coastline (from memory many of those events were about 37 km deep) and over the next several months the swarm has shifted northeast and slightly up. Magma may have started to silently enter the horizontal magma storage that exists at 30 km depth since earthquake rates have started to go down in the Pahala area since February.
The question is whether this is just the hotspot’s doing, an episodic release of magma like the one that happened previously in 2002-2007 and the timing is just coincidental? Or was it the 2018 eruption which “pulled” the batch though the pressure imbalance? It could also be a combination of both if the batch was more or less ready by 2018 and the eruption prompted its release.
There is another possibility. The Puna eruption was strange in the sense that magma underneath Pu’o’O’o suddenly decided to break out sideways rather than up. The stress on the rift had become less than the pressure from above. That may have come from an overfull magma reservoir, but there was also a weakness in the rift. The M6.9 quake shows that the region was already approaching breaking point. The region is moving sideways/down by gravity, and is kept in place by friction at the interface between the ocean floor and the lava pile. It was all starting to fail. How about if the same is happening in Pahala? The magma is finding its way up because stress has become less – things are not held in place as well. Could the next significant earthquake be under Pahala?
Not a prediction – just a thought for discussion.
The south flank is moving sideways/up by some cocktail of gravity, volcanic overpressure in the east rift/deep rift and pressure from intruded dikes. If you check stations in the area of the south coast that deforms the fastest, APNT and KAEP, they are currently being uplifted not subsiding. This is the inferred structure of the south flank of Kilauea:
The largest earthquakes happen in the decollement fault which dips slightly inwards towards the center of the island. It also extends under the entire southwestern half of the island including the area of Pahala, this part is named the Hilea Seismic Zone. Strain is added to the Hilea Zone when dikes intrude along the southwest rift zone of Mauna Loa, otherwise it doesn’t seem to move or deform. There haven’t been any dike intrusions here since 1950 so since then not much new strain should have been added to this art of the fault which is why I think a large earthquake is unlykely. However a really large rupture of the south flank of Kilauea may be able to propagate into Hilea same way in 1868 the 7.9 earthquake which had its epicenter near Pahala
I was saying before I hit enter: The 1868 earthquake is usually modelled to have ruptured both south flanks of Kilauea and Mauna Loa even though it was caused by a dike intruded along the southwest rift of Mauna Loa and down to the South Point of the island just a few days earlier.
Though I guess it would easier for a rupture to propagate from Mauna Loa’s flank to Kilauea’s than the other way around given that Mauna Loa is behind and can “push” Kilauea
These are some reconstructed ruptures from large earthquakes in the decollement:
Latest Excess Death monitoring in Europe.
And just after I posted that they updated the site for the first time in 10 years adding more colours to capture the scaling (and make Iceland disappear).
Here is the new version updated for Week 15 which is the latest week now with relatively complete data.
Test
Mauna Loa wants some attention…
Since the 2020-04-12 22:09:43 3.1 -1 quake the SLC 90.0 tilt has changed relative to the SLC 0.0. Then with the recent 2020-04-21 14:18:30 2.3 -3 we see SLC 90 is accelerating away from the SLC 0.0 measurement.
We see on some of the local GPS sites changes also, these include SLPC, PAT2, PHAN, with smaller changes mostly in the north south direction with; KHKU, PIIK, and MLSP with these stations stopping or lowering their southward trend of years. I am only posting several of these graphs to save data.
Since this is only a week or two of movement, we will have to keep an eye out.
Looks like a LP tremor under Pahala. I see a couple of deep quakes off shore and some indications on various instruments, only showing WOOD.
2020-04-24 05:21:48 2.3 37.2
2020-04-24 05:10:41 1.8 39
Actually deep Pahala tremor is high or mid frequency, short period, they are not typical volcanic tremors, instead the correct term would be spasmodic tremor.
I have seen the summit of Kilauea do spasmodic tremors too but they look diferent in the seismographs, the ones from Pahala always or almost always show up with the same characteristic shape, though today’s event was weak and therefore the shape is not very obvious but it is still there: First a sudden onset followed by a decline in amplitude and then one very broad peak in amplitude sometimes with a series of shorter peaks within.
This page is great to see some of those beautiful Pahala tremors that happened during the 1st half of 2019:
https://www.monitorseis.net/hawaii-spasmodic-tremor.html
Dust
Thanks for the link, learn something new every day!
HVO has addressed the rain problem:
https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/hvo_volcano_watch.html
The rapid inflation in the 2 months leading to the eruption is the most likely culprit, it was quite obvious that a dike intrusion was imminent, and HVO did predict it would happen. Pu’u’o’o had countless times during the eruption intruded dikes uprift and downrift but always a short distance of not more than a few Kms, to me the main question that I would like to see answered in the future is why this time the dike grew so far downrift.
I have to agree with them. Rain seems unlikely as a significant contributor. As to why the magma went east rather than up, the answer is close to Pu’u’O’o. Flank eruptions were common on Pu’o’O’o and it started out as one, but the pressure was high enough and the stress low enough) to open up the rift. After that, Pu’u’O’o had no chance.
Albert
Look at Grimsvøtn! soon she will blow
Cumulative seismic activity ( magma chamber pressure )
is soon at 2011 s levels
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/vatnajokulsvoktun/grf_uppsafn.html
But it needs to go alot stepper before things erupt.
Or the magma chamber grown so hot and big, that it dont give off alot quakes
But the month is still green, after three yellow months (although it could still go yellow). 5 April 2021. Unless Carl is right.
I imagines the Grimsvötn magma to be similar to the Holuhraun magma
Very hot and fluid and very gas rich in sulfur
Grimsvötn produces pure thoelitic basalt= large melting rates in the mantle.
Grimsvötn haves a very high sulfur content, suggesting a powerful magma source.
The geothermal energy is intense there in that caldera.
Grimsvötns uppermost magma chamber is belived to contain as much as 40km3
of relatively pure basaltic melt. ( Kilaueas main chamber deep under halemaumau may contain a similar ammount. )
These two are frequently erupting, and probaly is very liquid inside.
Most volcanoes are not very molten/open liquid on the inside.
Its the open conduit volcanoes, that are really molten.
Exactly how Grimsvötn and major Vatnajökull volcanoes
looks on the inside is impossible to know.
The Galapagos trapdoor calderas is maybe an analouge?
Imagines Grimsvötns chamber to be something between Sierra Negras massive sill
and the open balloon like magma chamber under Nyiragongo.
Greip is probaly a chaos a sills and dykes, and intrusions of all diffirent ages and temperatures, not formed a magma chamber yet to collpase into a caldera.
How many centimeters have Grimsvötn inflated now since 2011?
Etna is impressive as heck too
It boasts a 80 million cubic meters yearly magma supply
Thats almost 0,1km3 every year.
Not strange at all that Etna is hyperactive.
She been erupting constantly since september 2019.
Etna is perhaps the worlds most productive subduction zone volcano,
among the volcanoes thats NOT over a hotspot.
Etna is very rich in water vapour ( red lava fountains in white fluffy clouds )
Its also very sulfur rich.
Etna is so vigorous, thats something else must be at work rather than just subduction.
Etna is in a complicated tectonic setting, and probaly is decompression melting.
The subducting litosphericplate there have broken, and its so called
“astenospheric slab window” allowing decompression melting to take place.
Maybe some regional rifting too.
Etna erupts at normal mantle temps for that arera
The lava is basaltic but rather viscous and around 1100 C
Probaly decompression melting feeding Etna.
Careful of superlatives. Over usage diminishes the impact of using them.
Caveat: I’m half drunk and may be talking out of my arse.
In vino veritas
In retrospect… let me add that I like your commentary. This is just a note that some of the dynamics of your commentary lean towards the similar cant that moronic Yelperstone fanbois deliver. It is good that you have such drive over things volcanic… but temper it to realize that the Deccan Traps is “just a thing” in our realm of discussion.
Think of this as a friendly note and nothing more. DO NOT infer anything other than what I directly stated… so please, don’t read between the lines.
Kim Jong Un is dead!
The dear leader just became the Ethernal Leader
Hmmm – a bit early. Hong Kong’s Express reports they have a solid lead that says so…
And of course speculation has it he died of Covid 19.
Interesting to watch what is going on.
You heard it here first from Jesper!!
He died of heart failure after surgery.
Its what NK officals says
The dear Leader gone to the spirits. Rest in peace as
The Ethernal Leader
Kim Yo-jong is probaly going to takeover as ”The Proud Leander”
All eyes on North Korea
Um, as yet, nothing tangible. No-one will confirm or deny. No unusual activity, no ‘high alerts’, no ‘security lock-downs’, no ‘patriotic music’, nothing at all…
Given there’s no ‘designated’ successor, seems none of the ‘Usual Suspects’ wants to make the first move. Or even, by commission or omission, appear to possibly be considering such. For fear of an ‘Ides of March’ take-down by potential rivals or victims ?
IMHO, when the Norks play ‘Game of Thrones’, they make bloody Byzantine palace coups look civilised…
And, he’s back. Happily televised opening a fertiliser plant.
Either a doppelganger, or he just took ‘time out’ for a bad cold which was, um, suspected of being Covid encroachment. As appears to be smoking briskly, unlikely to have had severe symptoms, lest even his lungs complain…
And, yes, his re-appearance some-what discredits those ‘sources’ which declared his demise…
Cool superposition graph (with slider) of Kilauea before and after the 2018 collapse:
https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/juxtapose/latest/embed/index.html?uid=29bba7d2-96e3-11e8-b263-0edaf8f81e27
Albert: does the Super Earths have cratons or are they simply too active for that?
A rocky planet with 10 Earth masses and twice our gravity, will be intensely geologicaly active indeed.
More radioactive heating, and a much bigger volume to retain heat from formation.
Cratons are just thick crust and these are rather easy to make. It is all the rest that will likely be absent: no plate tectonics, perhaps no oceanic basins and no rifting.
But lots of geological activity on these worlds right?
10 Earth masses is ALOT of radiogenic heating with earthlike composition
Im correct here?
Albert a Super Earth with 10 Earth masses and earthlike compositon
The large mass should create lots of internal heat
Lots of volcanism right?
How hot woud the core be?
None of this is certain. All rocky planets are volcanic, but Earth is the only one with subduction volcanoes. Mars does plume (one plume only) and flood basalt. Venus does flood basalt and eruptions nothing like ours: there is a post on that somewhere. What would happen on a different planet seems to depend completely on how it formed.
Super Earths generaly haves hotter interiors right?
If they formed the same violent way?
But all rocky planets forms like that
10 Earth masses with an earthlike composition
Lots of internal heating right?
Larger volume to retain heat and more radioactive elements per surface arera
None of this is certain. You are making a lot of assumptions. For instance, if the radioactive elements are mainly in the crust, as some have proposed, than the size of the planet makes little or no difference. Cooling rates scale as the inverse radius, but also depend on how well the mantle convects and how well the crust insulates.
Albert
Two red hot steel or rock balls
A small one
A huge one
The large steel ball cools the most slowly
The smaller cools the quickest less surface arera
” Smaller planets cool faster than larger planets because smaller planets have a larger surface area to volume ratio”
But now come back a billion years later and they have similar temperatures. The earth has lost its formation heat long ago. Coolng rate depends on where the heat is generated, how heat is transfered up (conduction or convection, or even as a liquid) and how well the crust insulates (on earth most heat comes out via the thin ocean floor). Too many variables.
With respect, Jesper, the rigid red-hot balls model is a gross over-simplification. Earth’s Moon-forming mega-impact re-wrote the play-book, plus we have convection.
There’s stuff fractionating and crystallising into the solid inner core, releasing both gravitational and latent heat. There’s primordial isotopes in core and mantle merrily decaying with aeon-long half-lives. IIRC, some of the decay products lack chemical affinity for their source matrix, slowly migrate.
There’s tidal stirring, by the Moon and Sun. I’ll hand-wave lesser contributions by Venus and Jupiter as ‘mostly orbital’.
Then there’s our plate tectonics, which provide efficient deep-heat conveyors.Poor little Mars is dead, and Mercury moribund. Venus seems active, if ‘dormant’. “The large craters in the venusian plains indicate an average surface age that is only between 300 and 600 million years.” So, Venus *may* suffer catastrophic ‘overturns’, near-global flood-basalts when enough heat mounts beneath its vast cratons…
Such event is definitely a ‘Be Not There’ !!
Without tidal heating … its the large planets that stay active
Example: why is the Moon dead and silent
And the much larger Earth alive and erupting? 😉
ALL astronomy and geology sources says that size and internal heating… is fundementaly basicaly a law
Albert figure out… why is tiny Vesta .. so silent.. and dead
And why are Earth and Venus, the largest rocky balls alive…
Both Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus and Earth, have been insanely hot and molten at their births.. basicaly hellworlds during early hadean era.
Earth and Venus grew the most massive, their large volumes makes it possible for them to retain alot of internal heat and have plenty of radioactive elements.
” Larger planets cools slower than smaller planets because larger planets have a smaller surface area to volume ratio”
Earth and venus being most massive, has a great enough ratio of mass to surface area for its internal heating to drive volcanism today.
Mars became only 1/ 10 th of Earths and Venus mass
Its smaller body contain less radiactive elements and cooled faster.
Mars smaller ball cooled, but its cooling is between Earth and the Moon.
Mars is in its last gasps and will erupt again somewhere in the future.
The Moon and Mercury became the smallest
Earths moon is almost 100 times less massive than Earth
And cooled very much faster. The moons whole mantle is now solid and very rigid.. convection is impossible in a world as small as the moon.
Moon loose its heat by conduction today.
Its last internal heat trapped in that tiny core
Volcanicaly the moon is dead today
Planetary size and radiogenic heating also goes in hand…
Earth is the largest terestrial planet.. and have the most radioactive heating and volume to retain that heat, among our rocky bodies.
Yes radioactive heating is major part of internal heating today
Earths moon is way too small for radioactive decay…
to make it alive today
A Super earth with 10X earth masses and earthly compostion and history
Will be very very hot indeed, lots of heat trapped in that large volume.
A larger earth would be more geologically active. If earth was larger we would have more internal heating.More heat from compression as the planet formed, and more radioactive elements trapped deeper.
And a larger planet retains its internal heat more.
Stronger mantle convection and more and smaller plates.
A larger Earth would likely be very geologically active with numerous ocean ridges and hyperactive spreading centers and subduction zones
Many plates, rifts, ranges and volcanoes; possibly so hot inside that its plates are more elastic than Earth’s.
Super Earth exoplanets maybe displays hyperactive tectonics and a faster mineral cycle.
The continents are small and no or very small cratons because the high level of geologically activity
The result is an island world with no stable landmasses
Mars may have been more volcanically active than the Earth in the past. It is not identical to earth though. It has a smaller core and more water. Sure, cooling depends on radius of the planet (not the mass: that is a misconception. A 10 earth mass planet with the same composition as earth would be twice as large and lose heat half as quick). On Earth, the internal heat production 4 billion years ago was 4 times larger than now. So time is more important than size.
At the moment radioactivity generates about 30TW in the earth. The majority of this is in the mantle, and less than 1TW is in the core. The stronger heat generated in the past still contributes about an additional 10TW to our heat flow. Thermal contraction (cooling) contributes 4TW or so and latent heat (solidification of the core) contributes less than 1TW: not significant but important to the core. The tidal force contributes 2.5TW so can also be ignored in our energy budget.
But the internal temperature is determined by how easily this power flows out. On Earth that is fairly easy as the mantle convects and the oceanic crust is very thin. On Venus it is much harder as the crust is one solid block 100 km thick, so its internal temperature is higher. This why Venus is much more volcanically active than Earth, over time. Mars is actually also well insulated and its mantle is still hot enough to generate melt.
Bottom line: every planet is different, and every planet evolves.
Yes thats true…
And finaly Albert agree the size of planetary bodies are very important
I woud enjoy to visit a Super Earth.
Life friendly Super earths?
Super earths around K orange dwarf stars coud be superhabitable?
A bit thicker atmopshere than earth to mild and warm temperatures and even out the pole and equator diffrence. ( 2 bars )
Cool temperate poles and everywhere else mostly warm temperate and mild tropical, rainy and humid and deserts are rare.
The humidity and rainfall depends on how large the oceans are too.
But likley very large oceans and small continetal active belts
A bit denser atmopshere allows it to be in outer habitable zone, with a mild worldwide climate.
Tectonics are faster than earths, with more CO2 outgassing and more volcanic eruptions, that keeps the CO2 pent up and biosphere happly thriving. Ice Ages are rare…
They will be like Cretaceous earth almost constantly
As I said, the size is NOT the major effect. Something was missed in translation here..
Om my imaginary Super Earth
You can almost fly with wingsuit ( the air pressure is dense )
Your blood thins out to cope with the excess oxygen.
The dense air means the polar landmasses are ice free at sealevel.
And strange dark polar forests of pseudo-spurces and pines looms below icey clad polar volcanoes.
The dense atmosphere thin rapidly with height and strangley bends the sunlight at the poles making strange “false” winter dawns
The gravity is suprisingly earthlike
Earth haves 10 times more mass the Mars…yet only less than twice the gravity. My Super earth with 8X earth masses haves only 1,4 X earth gravity. Gravity rises only as the cube root of mass.
Most of the global climate is mild and tropical / subtropical. thanks to the dense air pressure.
The sun is small and looks golden at dawn
Dayskies are nice pale turquise.. compared to earths deep blue.
I meant on a Super earth with dense air and and a K sun
The sun will look a bit golden at noon
Dayskies are pleasingly pale…. and sunsets are very red
How exoplanet
dayskies and evening skies coud be coloured
According to diffrent atmospheric pressures and
diffrent main sequence star luminosity intensities.
LEFT= star class
ABOVE= atmospheric air pressure
RIGHT= time of day
Planets with denser atmospheres than Earth
Develops pale creamy faint greenish Noon skies
And amazingly red fiery burning sunsets.
Authur of the image comments:
”1 bar Earth-like atmosphere densities would tend to be light to dark blue at the zenith, due to the scattering of low-wavelength blue light. If the planet’s sun was very hot, the sky would look a deeper blue, while cooler stars would give the sky a lighter blue to almost white look. When the sun gets to 3000k and below, the sky starts to take on an orange/brown tinge.
Like on earth, the horizon is the lightest in color and the zenith the deepest.
10 bar Denser exoplanet atmospheres would appear brighter (more washed out) and the primary color in the spectrum more “pure” (I’m unsure what the term “pure” means exactly when it comes to optical perception…would it look whiter?). Likewise, thinner atmospheres would be less bright than earth’s and the colors more “pure.”
With increasing pressure the sky color at the zenith becomes increasingly yellow. In my image this means that an earth-like sky at 10x earth pressure would appear blueish/green near the zenith.
At lower temperatures I’m assuming the sun would appear tinged by the color listed under “star temperature.” Otherwise you’ll probably only see the star’s color when it’s near the horizon.
I’m assuming when you get down into K and M class suns, the surroundings on the planet would take on a progressively redder tinge due to the decreasing prevalence of blue wavelength light.
I suspect the gradient of color from horizon to zenith will be steeper/gentler in some atmospheres. I’ve guessed that the gradient would be more apparent on a high G world (on the right). ”
Dense air haves lots of advantages for habitability
It milds, and evens out pole – equator temperature diffrences.
It makes worlds with long winters bearable as that dense air traps and spreads the stars heat.
“Thin” aired planets like Mars and earth
can have large harsh polar caps and large deserts.
On thick aired planets..its much more even in climate, green and humid.
With denser air pressure… having high CO2 becomes less important as a greenhouse factor. 3 to 4 atmopsheres of humid sea air is excellent warming on its own right. But complex life cannot live without CO2.
Super earths at least some will be very geologicaly active and volcanoes belch CO2 all the time: So outer edge of habitable zone is probaly where you should place it… to avoid climate overheating