18 May 1971. This date may not mean anything to you at the moment, but it represents a very special day for the evolution of Mount Etna, leaving a deep mark in the recent eruptive activity of the volcano. Exactly 50 years ago, Mount Etna saw the birth of what, only a short time later, was to become the most active crater of the last decades: “The South-East Crater”, the fourth child of ...[Read More]
11 years on from the infamous eruption and ash cloud that shut down the European airspace, there are parallels between current travel restrictions and another Icelandic eruption that’s currently in the news. 11 years ago the now infamous eruption of Eyjafjallajökull occurred. I remember that one, the ash cloud, right? Yes, that’s the one. The one that was all over the news, with stunning images of ...[Read More]
Tarun Goswami, an archaeologist from India, asks: How is a tuff formed? and more specifically… Why do some deposits have more ash than others? We are paraphrasing – the questions are specifically about the tuffs formed in the Toba supereruption. So… you asked, we answer! First of all, modern definitions generally describe a tuff as a volcaniclastic rock composed of solid volcanic ...[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 important (e.g. through industrial activity and burni ...[Read More]