Extreme Geohazards – what are they?
In December 2004, we all learned one Japanese word; tsunami  (津波, lit. "harbor wave"). Japan has seen a number of tsunamis through out times, situated right there on the Ring of Fire, and when the Sumatran earthquake hit the ocean floor in the Indian ocean in 2004 creating the monster waves killing some 300 000 people, tsunami became a household Japanese word, included in many languages.

Given that there has been some recent interest in Uturuncu in the media, when

As my last few blogs have been a bit heavy on the science, I thought I'd write something a bit lighter.  So here are some pretty pictures of the fieldwork for master's project, when I went to Pantelleria to measure the CO₂ degassing that was occurring there.


Favare Grande, a fumarole on Pantelleria.

Iceland is always referred to as an oceanic island on an oceanic ridge protruded above the Atlantic sea level. Under the aegis of Plate Tectonic Concepts(PTC), this island is considered as the real time evidence of lithospheric spreading. In the wake of new geophysical data, apprehensions are more about the spreading concepts of lithosphere and related geodynamics.  This paper looks into a few important facts, which negate the PTC on Iceland.

In the first part of this look at magma chambers, I talked about some of the processes that dominate what goes on beneath an active volcano.  The twin actions of fractionation and assimilation were what preoccupied the early researchers, however more recently we've realised things are a little more complicated than that.  In this part I want to take a closer look at some of those intricacies.

Planet Earth: Extreme Beauty – Extreme Danger

The moon has no global magnetic field yet  Apollo astronauts found magnetized rocks on the lunar surface.

A new hypothesis proposes a mechanism that could have generated a magnetic field on the moon early in its history. The 'geodynamo' that generates Earth's magnetic field is powered by heat from the inner core, which drives complex fluid motions in the molten iron of the outer core.  The moon is too small to support that type of dynamo but the researchers write in Nature that an ancient lunar dynamo could have arisen from stirring of the moon's liquid core driven by the motion of the solid mantle above it.

This post is the first of a new series I plan to write, on the techniques used to study and monitor volcanoes.  The reason science is the best method we have of investigating the world around us is not so much what we know, but how we know it.  I thought I'd start with a technique that always amazes me; we can measure centimetres of ground deformation over an area of many square kilometres, from an altitude of 800 km.  Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, InSAR for short.