Important points about volcanoes: location matters, explosiveness can be predicted to an extent, and fast-moving flows of volcanic materials (known as pyroclastic flows) are deadly.
The current eruption of Kilauea on Hawai'is big island can tell us a lot about what is going on beneath the volcano and may provide lessons for future eruptions.
It feels as if volcanoes in our region are going off at a high rate right now - but it’s reasonably normal activity for the “Ring of Fire” belt running around the Asia Pacific.
‘Volcano forensics’ involves a mixture of modern day monitoring and analysis of past eruptions. Geologists use volcanic rocks as a kind of time capsule to assess what happened previously.
Volcanologists study the formation and eruptions of volcanoes - surely one of the most interesting jobs around. However, it can also be very dangerous.
Thirty five years after the devastating eruption of Mount St Helens, a volcanologist looks back on how it unfolded – and how it forever changed our understanding of how volcanoes work.
A British volcanologist has won one of the most prestigious awards in science – the Vetlesen Prize, which is considered to be the earth sciences equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Stephen Sparks of the University…
Mount Ontake, Japan’s second-highest volcano, erupted killing at least 31 people on September 27. Since then, there has been feverish speculation about why tourists were on an active volcano and why the…
In September 2014, the Natural Environment Research Council will launch a major five-year programme to study the volcanoes of Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley. The project team contains core investigators…
You can learn a lot about volcanoes by studying explosions. The more we can learn about their explosive behaviour, the more chance we have of saving lives when they suddenly erupt. There are many volcanoes…
Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I’ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon’s final defeat in Belgium on June…