VolcanicDegassing

There’s (volcanic) dust in the archives

David Pyle August 14, 2014

Volcanic ash samples collected on Barbados, deposited after eruptions of St Vincent in 1812 (small vial) and 1902. British Geological Survey Archives.

There’s not much that beats the thrill of discovery.. particularly when it turns up in your own backyard. This summer, I have been on the hunt for records and reports of the 1902 eruptions of St Vincent, a lush volcanic island in the Eastern Caribbean. There are indeed many reports from this eruption, carefully documented in official records from the time. But, more surprisingly, there are ...[Read More]

Summer Reading – H is for Hawk

David Pyle August 11, 2014

Much of my time is consumed with reading, but it is almost always for a purpose: essays, assignments, proposals, drafts of papers, re-drafts of papers, papers for classes, for review.. This almost always means reading fast, with a goal: to measure, assess, hone, distil, critique and rewrite. Often, it means hacking through tangled and cumbersome layers of scientific prose, to reveal the central ...[Read More]

Friday Field Photo – St Vincent, 1902

David Pyle May 30, 2014

Today’s field photo is by Tempest Anderson, of the ‘Roseau Dry River flowing with Boiling Mud’, a picture taken in the aftermath of the May 1902 eruptions of the Soufrière of St Vincent. The full published caption explains the origins of this boiling mud – a phenomenon we now call a lahar: ‘This is a small stream in the Wallibu Basin. When the water undermines the ba ...[Read More]

How NOT to write to an editor

David Pyle May 27, 2014

Over on the Nature Methods blogs site, there are some interesting posts with advice for authors on how to prepare cover letters, rebuttal letters, appeal letters and the like. Here’s an example of ‘how NOT to write to an editor‘, based on a recent experience of mine. I shall let the author remain anonymous, but my hunch is that this is not an isolated example of this sort of beha ...[Read More]

An 18th Century London Volcano

David Pyle May 19, 2014

A 3D printer model of the Soufriere of St Vincent, an active volcano in the southern Caribbean.

We are now just three weeks away from the launch of an ambitious public engagement project – ‘London Volcano‘. This will see us build a large scale-model of volcano on the front lawn of London’s Natural History Museum. This activity is all part of Universities UK Week 2014, and our aim is to highlight the work we are doing on ‘Strengthening Resilience in Volcanic Area ...[Read More]

Thermal imaging of volcanic eruption plumes

David Pyle May 16, 2014

Thermal imaging using infra-red cameras is now a widely used tool in the monitoring and analysis of volcanic explosions, and this pair of time-series snapshots of two short-lived ‘Vulcanian‘ explosions at Volcán de Colima, Mexico, shows one example of why. In each panel, times (in seconds) are times since the start of the explosion sequence; and the temperature scales (vertical colour ...[Read More]

The destruction of St Pierre, Martinique: 8 May, 1902

David Pyle May 8, 2014

May 8th marks the anniversary of one of the worst volcanic disasters on record: the destruction of St Pierre, Martinique, in 1902, at the climax of the eruption of Mont Pelée. Below are a snapshot of images from one of the contemporary accounts of the disaster, ‘The volcano’s deadly work‘, written by Charles Morris in 1902. This eruption followed just one day after a similarly de ...[Read More]

‘An amazing and portentous summer..’

David Pyle March 24, 2014

Book review: Island on Fire, Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe In Island on Fire, Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe take the reader on a dramatic tour of volcanic eruptions, death and destruction. At its heart is the story of the great 1783-1784 Laki fissure eruption, one of the most significant historical eruptions of Iceland, which belched 120 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, a ...[Read More]

Growth of the Kameni Islands Volcano, Santorini, Greece

David Pyle March 18, 2014

The Kameni islands, Greece

A new paper, published in the journal GeoResJ, reveals the intricate details of the volcanic Kameni islands that lie in the flooded caldera of Santorini, Greece. The Kameni islands started growing shortly after the explosive eruption that formed much of the present day caldera. For the past 3500 years or so these islands have grown in pulses, with each new eruption adding more material to the edif ...[Read More]

Small volcanic eruptions and the global warming ‘pause’

David Pyle February 25, 2014

A new paper in Nature Geoscience by Santer and colleagues revisits the volcanic scenarios used in modern climate model simulations. The authors consider the effects of including a ‘more realistic’ model for the influence of small volcanic eruptions on the climate system over the past two decades. Of course, more realistic means more difficult.. and one of the long-standing and unresolv ...[Read More]