An underwater volcano erupted in January near the Pacific nation of Tonga and sent massive pressure waves racing through Earth’s atmosphere, where they lapped the planet several times. The last volcano to generate such large ripples in the atmosphere was Krakatau in 1883, during one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions in recorded history, […]
Some 252 million years ago the world was going through a tumultuous period of rapid global warming. To understand what caused it, scientists have looked to one particular event in which a volcanic eruption in what is now Siberia spewed huge volumes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. However, there is evidence the climate […]
It’s official: after some careful data analysis, the Tonga volcano eruption of 2022 has been confirmed as the largest explosive eruption of the 21st century, and on par with the biggest eruptions ever recorded. Having ejected material around 10 cubic kilometers (more than 2 cubic miles) in volume, generating an atmospheric shock wave that […]
No matter where you’re standing on Earth, you can only ever see one face of the Moon. Its other cheek is perennially turned away from our planet, and this far side is much more pockmarked with craters than the one facing us. The Moon’s near side is covered in lunar maria, vast plains of […]
Yellowstone volcano’s magma chamber mapped in documentary Yellowstone supervolcano has been the source of intense research by scientists for many decades. It has blown its top three times in history in what have been described as “supereruptions”: eruptions that are approximately 1,000 times more powerful than the Mount St Helens eruption of 1980 which is […]
Yellowstone supervolcano: Expert on ‘danger’ of Caldera in 2015 Yellowstone National Park sits above an enormous volcanic hotspot responsible for large-scale volcanism in the states of Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming. A hotspot is an area of the Earth’s crust where hot plumes rise from the mantle below and cause volcanic activity at the […]
By any measure you want to use, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption in January 2022 was a massive eruption. It produced a swirling plume of gas, dust and ash that reached 58 kilometers (36 miles) into the sky, atmospheric waves that traveled around the globe several times, and tsunamis in the Caribbean on the […]
Scientists studying ice cores packing in some 60,000 years of history have found signs of thousands of volcanic eruptions across that time, stretching back to the last Ice Age – with 25 of the eruptions larger than anything Earth has seen in the last 2,500 years. Researchers excavated the cores near both poles: in […]
When a volcano in Tonga erupted on January 15, it gave satellites their first glimpse at a plume of volcanic ash shooting into the mesosphere, the third layer of Earth’s atmosphere. According to NASA, the Tonga event was the largest volcanic eruption since satellites began monitoring our planet. As the Pacific volcano shot a burst of ash […]
Mount Etna erupted in spectacular fashion late on Thursday for the first time this year. Europe’s highest and most active volcano lightened up the night sky with explosions and bright red molten lava. The powerful eruption sparked a volcanic storm above the volcano and sent bolts of lightning across the sky. The latest eruption centred […]
