Let’s image the simplest, most boring volcano possible. It consists of a magma balloon fed by a straw. The ground is perfectly flat above the balloon. Magma comes up the straw at a constant ...

Many volcanoes have captured the attention of fanatics such as us, we often pick favorites depending on our internal biases. After all volcanoes provide varieties of intrigue to curious minds, from ...

A fun question: which are the southernmost, most equatorial and northernmost volcanoes in the world? We need to add two provisos here, otherwise this question is impossible to answer: the volcano ...

It came as a shock – quite literally. It shouldn’t have, because a recent paper had predicted that the area was preparing for a large earthquake. On 29 July, at 23:25 UTC, the 5 th largest earthquake ...

On 15 July, a video of an explosive eruption of Erta Ale (Afar Region, Ethiopia) volcano was briefly discussed in the comment section. It was a small ash plume emerging from the summit of the ...

It seemed like yesterday, the day I first discovered volcanic winter while conducting research on the infamous 1993 “storm of the century,” and some passing weather enthusiast had brought up Pinatubo ...

The centre of South Africa is an amazing place. The long drive from Cape Town in-land is exciting for the first two hours, while the road climbs up through the mountains, past vineyards and valleys ...

The double-booked land is also known as the Afar Triangle, a low-lying region wedged into the Ethiopian Plateau. The region is not for the intrepid. The name is synonymous with remoteness. It is also ...

To me, it’s an eruption because it’s throwing rocks and it’s on a volcano. It could be phreatic or magmatic. It’s phreatic if it’s driven by heated groundwater, or magmatic gasses from an intrusion, ...

A trivia question: can you name the largest country without an active volcano? Here ‘active’ includes ‘dormant’: it is about volcanoes that have access to live magma and could in principle erupt, even ...

After writing my Ionian articles (there will be more Io later, since after all it has the solar system’s most magnificent active volcanoes) I felt it is time to return to Earth again, to a much ...

October 12, 1918 was just another Saturday. On the fields of France, the Hundred Days Offensive was turning a war which would now soon end, but leave 17 million dead; the devastation would set the ...