Volcanic eruptions are not easy to anticipate. Now, a new paper proposes a way to provide early clues by evaluating magma movement far beneath volcanoes. The Bárdarbunga volcanic system in Iceland began to erupt from a fissure on Aug. 29, 2014. By the time it quit six months later, it had created an almost 33-square-mile lava […]
IDITAROD, ALASKA — While gliding along a trail that had just felt the imprint of 2,000 dog feet, Bob Gillis skied over to a rock that jutted from the snow. A few miles northwest of the ghost town that gives the world’s most famous sleddog race its name, Gillis and I were in the […]
Nine years after it erupted, Kasatochi Island is just beginning to resemble its neighbors. Kasatochi is a speck in the middle of the Aleutian chain between Dutch Harbor and Adak, about 75 miles east of the latter. The volcanic island had no modern history of erupting until August 2008. In a few days that summer, […]
Planets with volcanic activity are considered better candidates for life than worlds without such heated internal goings-on. Now, graduate students at the University of Washington have found a way to detect volcanic activity in the atmospheres of exoplanets, or those outside our solar system, when they transit, or pass in front of their host stars. […]