Eruption on EARTH Magazine

Benchmarks: August 15, 1984 & August 21, 1986: African killer lakes erupt

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 15:23:07 -0400

In August 1986, a carbon dioxide eruption from Lake Nyos in Cameroon killed more than 1,700 people. This photo was taken in early September 1986 by U.S. Geological Survey scientists studying the disaster. Credit: USGS.

Only three lakes in the world are known to explosively release dissolved gases from their bottom waters. All three are in Africa; two have erupted with deadly consequences.

2012: The end of the world or just another year of living in harm's way?

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 11:58:39 -0400

The 1.2-kilometer-diameter Meteor Crater in Arizona was formed by a roughly 50-meter-diameter impactor about 50,000 years ago. ©Michael Collier, ESW Image Bank

A pair of curving erupting prominences on the sun on June 28, 2000. Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool dense plasma suspended in the sun's hot, thin corona. At times, they can erupt, escaping the sun's atmosphere. SOHO (ESA & NASA)

Geysers and thermal waters in Yellowstone reveal the area's seething magma chamber beneath. Brenna Tobler

©Callan Bentley

We live on a knife-edge, separated from an ocean of super-heated rock by a wafer-thin and perpetually rupturing crust, swinging our way through a cosmic minefield of lethal debris around a nuclear furnace prone to tantrums. For doomsayers, the end of the Mayan long-count calendar, set against such a backdrop, is a gift. Though Mayan culture never spoke of a cataclysm, Dec. 21, 2012 — the purported last day of a 5,125-year cycle in the Mesoamerican calendar — has been added to an endless list of days when the world has been predicted to end.

Five outstanding questions in earth science

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:13:31 -0400

A magma chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park has produced super-eruptions in the past and may do so again someday. Copyright Mary Caperton Morton

Sauropods' massive sizes are well established, but less is known about their biology. Copyright Matt Martyniuk, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Even 15 years after the release of “Good Will Hunting,” there remains something appealing about watching the title character, a mathematically inclined janitor at MIT, scribble the solution to an unsolved mathematics problem on a hallway blackboard. In reality, there are a number of unsolved problems in mathematics, seven of which were designated in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute as “Millennium Prize Problems,” each with a purse of $1,000,000. To date, only one has been solved.

AAG: Eruption of El Salvador's Ilopango explains A.D. 536 cooling

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 13:22:01 -0500

A massive eruption of Ilopango volcano in El Salvador, today a crater lake, may have triggered the global climate cooling of A.D. 536. The only historical eruption at Ilopango took place in 1879-1880, during which a lava dome formed creating the Islas Quemadas in the central part of the lake. NASA Earth Observatory

El Salvador’s Lake Ilopango, near the capital city of San Salvador, is known for boating, diving and the rugged, scenic beauty of its 100 meter-tall cliffs --- the lip of the caldera that holds the lake. However, 1,500 years ago, it may have been the site of one of the most horrific natural disasters in the world. It may also be the long-sought cause of the extreme climate cooling and crop failures of A.D. 535-536, reported Robert A. Dull of the University of Texas at Austin at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in New York this week.

Voices: Dead or alive ... or neither? Why a dormant volcano is not a dead one

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 03:51:09 -0500

Quite a lot of volcanic activity has been reaching the news lately — Sinabung in northern Sumatra, a possible eruption in the Congo and another Sumatran volcano called Seulawah Agam that may be “waking up” after 170 years of quiet. One thing that’s been mentioned in many of the news reports about these events is that the eruptions were “unexpected” or “surprising” because people had always assumed the volcanoes in question were dormant. But what does dormant really mean? And what does active or extinct mean?

Alaska's Mt. Redoubt erupts at last