Scientists say they have identified the exact mechanism responsible for the exceptional tsunami that spread quickly across the world after the colossal eruption of the Tonga volcano earlier this year.
New models that show how the continents were assembled are providing fresh insights into the history of the Earth and will help provide a better understanding of natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes.
In the fall of 2017, geology professor Patricia Gregg and her team had just set up a new volcanic forecasting modeling program on the Blue Waters and iForge supercomputers.
A lava lake in a crater of Kīlauea spent ten years sloshing and churning before the volcano gave a bigger belch.
Magmatic volatile contents, such as water, are abundant in volcanic arc melts and influence magma evolution, dynamics of volcanic eruptions and the formation of ore deposits.
This increased amount of water has broad implications for understanding how Earth’s lower crust forms, how magma erupts through the crust, and how economically important mineral ore deposits form, according to a new paper led by authors from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), “High water content of arc magmas recorded in cumulates from subduction zone lower crust,” published in Nature Geoscience.
Billions of years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions broke loose on the moon, blanketing hundreds of thousands of square miles of the orb’s surface in hot lava.
The massive Jan. 15 eruption of the undersea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in the South Pacific Ocean was a once-in-a-century event that allowed an international group of 76 scientists using multiple forms of technology to crowdsource their data in ways never before possible.
New research by an international team from 17 countries including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist Keehoon Kim demonstrates that based on atmospheric pressure waves recorded by global barometers, the Hunga explosion was comparable in size to that of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption.
The 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes shocked inhabitants of the western island of Kyushu, causing hundreds of casualties and serious damage to vital infrastructure.
Volcanoes can be found even off the coast of Antarctica. At the deep-sea volcano Orca, which has been inactive for a long time, a sequence of more than 85,000 earthquakes was registered in 2020, a swarm quake that reached proportions not previously observed for this region.
A group of Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian geologists provide critical new evidence for the timing of volcanic activity in the Karoo province, the largest of the Jurassic magma systems. The remnants of the province are widespread in southern Africa and Antarctica.
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It is easy to see that the processes in the Earth's interior influence what happens on the surface. For example, volcanoes unearth magmatic rocks and emit gases into the atmosphere, and thus influence the biogeochemical cycles on our planet.
The Popocatépetl volcano, located southeast of Mexico City, stands as the second highest peak in Mexico and is considered to be one of the potentially most dangerous volcanoes in the world, given its record of highly explosive eruptions over the last 23,000 years.
A fresh analysis of the possible cooling effect of the sulfur dioxide injected into the atmosphere by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano in January 2022 has concluded that the impact will be much smaller than initially thought—but the researchers responsible add some major caveats to this conclusion.
Lava domes form at the top of many volcanoes when viscous lava erupts.
Researchers in Japan, Sweden, and the US have unearthed evidence that low volcanic temperatures led to the fourth mass extinction, enabling dinosaurs to flourish during the Jurassic period.
A few specialist microbes survive conditions analogous to those of Mars’ early history, reports a new publication in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science—and this may be thanks to a broad range of adaptations.
While the aftermath of an undersea volcanic eruption and the following tsunami garner much attention as the waves crash around inhabited islands, an expert at West Virginia University says the combination of those hard to predict eruptions and climate change will eventually erase island nations and their cultures in the Pacific and western Indian oceans.
The transport of carbon dioxide stored in the Earth’s lithospheric mantle beneath the Hyblean Plateau in southern Italy at a depth of approximately 50 to 150 kilometres is responsible for the exceptionally large CO2 emission of Mount Etna.
University of Miami experts provide insights on the powerful eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano, an event geologists are calling the biggest recorded anywhere in the world in more than three decades.
Far above the populated towns on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, off the coast of western Africa, Esteban Gazel and Kyle Dayton carried equipment from their car and hiked toward the erupting Cumbre Vieja volcano’s active vents.
A Cornell University geochemist has helped discover solid evidence that connects the geochemical fingerprint of the Galápagos plume with mantle materials underneath Panama and Costa Rica – documenting the course of a mantle plume that flows sideways through upper portions of the Earth.
Volcanic gases are helping researchers track large-scale movements in Earth’s deep interior. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists, together with a group of international collaborators, have discovered anomalous geochemical compositions beneath Panama.
Volcanic eruptions contributed to the collapse of dynasties in China in the last 2,000 years by temporarily cooling the climate and affecting agriculture, according to a Rutgers co-authored study.
The landscape of the southwestern U.S. is heavily scarred by past eruptions of monogenetic volcanoes, and a new study marks a step toward understanding future risks for the region.
Esteban Gazel and doctoral student Kyle Dayton will join a small, elite team of international researchers on Oct. 21 at the newly erupted Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands – off the coast of western Africa.
Lava samples have revealed a new truth about the geological make-up of the Earth’s crust and could have implications for volcanic eruption early warning systems, a University of Queensland-led study has found.
Curtin scientists are part of an international research team that studied an ancient supervolcano in Indonesia and found such volcanoes remain active and hazardous for thousands of years after a super-eruption, prompting the need for a rethink of how these potentially catastrophic events are predicted.
A new analysis of 2.5-billion-year-old rocks from Australia finds that volcanic eruptions may have stimulated population surges of marine microorganisms, creating the first puffs of oxygen into the atmosphere. This would change existing stories of Earth’s early atmosphere, which assumed that most changes in the early atmosphere were controlled by geologic or chemical processes.
Ocean deoxygenation during the Mesozoic Era was much more rapid than previous thought, with CO2 induced environmental warming creating ocean ‘dead zones’ over timescales of only tens of thousands of years.
Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered that extensive chains of volcanoes have been responsible for both emitting and then removing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) over geological time.
Expert Q&A: Do breakthrough cases mean we will soon need COVID boosters? The extremely contagious Delta variant continues to spread, prompting mask mandates, proof of vaccination, and other measures. Media invited to ask the experts about these and related topics.
Currently, much of the thinking around risks posed by volcanoes follows a simple equation: the bigger the likely eruption, the worse it will be for society and human welfare.
Traces of the gas phosphine point to volcanic activity on Venus, according to new research from Cornell University.
A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia about 74,000 years ago likely caused severe climate disruption in many areas of the globe, but early human populations were sheltered from the worst effects, according to a Rutgers-led study.
The history of pyroclastic surges is written in the landscapes they ravage. Volcanic dunes and other deposits hold debris from ancient eruptions, as do craters marking sites of ancient blasts. This study focuses on Ubehebe and El Elegante.
Data collected by University of Rhode Island Professor Stéphan Grilli and his colleagues will appear in Nature Communications, which is considered one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journals.
An international team of scientists has analyzed chemicals in an ice core from West Antarctica to compile the most accurate chronology of volcanic eruptions during the last 11,000 years produced thus far.
Volcanic eruptions deep in our oceans are capable of extremely powerful releases of energy, at a rate high enough to power the whole of the United States, according to research published today.
What would a volcano – and its lava flows – look like on a planetary body made primarily of metal? A pilot study offers insights into ferrovolcanism that could help scientists interpret landscape features on other worlds.
The Volcano Alert Level (VAL) system, standardized by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 2006, is meant to save lives and keep citizens living in the shadow of an active volcano informed of their current level of risk. A new study published in Risk Analysis suggests that, when an alert remains elevated at any level above “normal” due to a period of volcanic unrest, it can cause a decline in the region’s housing prices and other economic indicators. Because of this, the authors argue that federal policymakers may need to account for the effects of prolonged volcanic unrest — not just destructive eruptions — in the provision of disaster relief funding.
In a new study, a team of paleoclimate researchers used a proxy product that employs natural climate archives to better understand the global and seasonal hydroclimate impacts of all known large tropical eruptions over the last millennium.
The study gives the first detailed description of a volcanic eruption from Sierra Negra found on Isla Isabela - the largest of the Galápagos Islands and home to nearly 2,000 people.
Earthquakes in the Black Rock Desert are rare and capturing the seismic recordings from these earthquakes provides a glimpse into the volcanic system of the Black Rock Desert that, while not showing any signs of erupting, is still active.
Volcanologists from the University of Georgia and two Swiss universities found a link between carbon dioxide and the volume of gas trapped in magma, which could help predict the intensity and magnitude of a volcanic eruption.
In 1991, a a volcanic peak on the Philippine Island of Luzon had the second-most powerful volcanic eruption of the 20th century. Eight hundred people lost their lives, and lush ecosystems were destroyed. In recent years, scientists surveyed the surviving mammal populations, and rediscovered a species of mouse that had long been feared to be extinct.
There isn't much in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula in northeastern Russia just across the Bering Sea from Alaska, besides an impressive population of brown bears and the most explosive volcano in the world. Kamchatka's Shiveluch volcano has had more than 40 violent eruptions over the last 10,000 years.
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