GMPV
Geochemistry, Mineralogy, Petrology & Volcanology

Degassing

La Soufrière de Guadeloupe: Past Eruptions and Ongoing Activity

September 13, 2024
La Soufrière de Guadeloupe: Past Eruptions and Ongoing Activity
La Soufrière on a clear day. The fumes coming out of the volcano are from Cratère Sud Centrale (the focus of the most degassing on the volcanic dome). We can also see numerous scars decorating its flanks (source: the website Parc national de Guadeloupe).

La Soufrière de Guadeloupe is an andesitic stratovolcano located in the southern part of Basse-Terre, within the Guadeloupe archipelago (Eastern Caribbean). It towers over the towns of Sainte-Claude and Basse-Terre. Nearly 50 years ago, this region faced severe consequences from a phreatomagmatic eruption, forcing the evacuation of 80,000 people. Since then, the volcano has been regularly monitore ...[Read More]

Volcanism, anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, and mass extinctions

July 7, 2024
Volcanism, anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, and mass extinctions
Credit: Ivan Koulakov (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Only a very small fraction of the energy produced by nuclear fusion in the Sun (3.82 x 1023 kW) reaches the top of the Earth’s atmosphere (1.7 x 1014 kW), and then only about 50% of it reaches the Earth surface, where it is absorbed by the oceans and land. This energy is radiated back as longwave infrared radiation, which is partially absorbed and after reradiated downward to the surface by the gr ...[Read More]

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog about lava lakes: here’s what happened

March 8, 2023
The lava lake of Halemaʻumaʻu at Kilauea, Hawaii
The lava lake of Halemaʻumaʻu at Kilauea, Hawaiʻi (by Ivan Petrovich Vtorov - own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

If you’ve not been living under a rock you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the AI text generator wowing the internet and striking fear into the heart of exam co-ordinators worldwide. I’ve been meaning to write a blog about lava lakes for a while now, ever since rewatching Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s excellent documentary Into the Inferno. But with deadlines looming and lab work and admin c ...[Read More]

Can limestone digestion by volcanoes contribute to higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels?

October 28, 2019
Can limestone digestion by volcanoes contribute to higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels?
Degassing at Merapi volcano, Indonesia. Source: GFZ.

By Frances Deegan and Ralf Halama Carbon – the element on everyone’s lips. Carbon is unquestionably one of the most important elements on Earth – terrestrial life is carbon-based and so are many of our energy sources. From the perspective of a human time-scale, biological and anthropogenic (caused by human activity) carbon fluxes are very important (e.g. through industrial activity and burni ...[Read More]