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 …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
![Fire, Fog, Frost, Famine – French Revolution? The Lakagígar eruption in Iceland, 1783-1784 [Part 1]](https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/gmpv/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/05/Figure1_southwestern_fissure_edit.webp)
“On the 8th of June 1783, at Whitsun, there gushed forth from the mountains behind the summer pastures a fire which devastated land, cattle and humans with its effects, both nearby and far away”, wrote Reverend Jón Steingrímsson of Kirkjubæjarklaustur in his autobiography [2]. The “fire” which welled up from a volcanic fissure now known as Lakagígar …[Read More]
Professor Tamsin Mather, a volcanologist in Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences reflects on her many fieldwork experiences at Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, and what she has learned about how they effect the lives of the people who live around them. Over the years, fieldwork at Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, has revealed many secrets about how …[Read More]
What controls how violently a volcano erupts? Stratovolcanoes like Mount St Helens (USA), Gunung Merapi (Indonesia), or Volcán de Colima (Mexico) tend to erupt in two distinct ways: effusively and/or explosively. Effusive eruptions are eruptions where lava is extruded without any major explosions. Although effusive eruptions can be dangerous, at stratovolcanoes they tend to be …[Read More]
