Latest Lava Stories

Smithsonian Scientists from the Smithsonian and the University of Rhode Island have found unsuspected linkages between the oxidation state of iron in volcanic rocks and variations in the chemistry of the deep Earth. Not only do the trends run counter to predictions from recent decades of study, they belie a role for carbon circulating in the deep Earth. The team's research was published May 2 in Science Express. Elizabeth Cottrell, lead author and research geologist at the Smithsonian's...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Neither explosive nor effusive—there’s a new type of volcanic eruption that was recently described in the latest edition of Nature Geoscience. According to the U.K. and New Zealand scientists who authored the description, volcanic pumice produced by the Macauley volcano in the southwest Pacific is the result of a previously unarticulated type of eruption. “By documenting the shape and density of bubbles in pumices generated by...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online How often have you wished you could safely see a lava flow, like the one that destroyed Pompeii?  Did you ever wish you could see it in Syracuse, New York? Professors, students, visiting volcanologists and passing spectators are now seeing lava flows in a campus parking lot at Syracuse University and have been since January 2010. The Syracuse University Lava Project has created a unique blending of science, art, and education to...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Although volcanic scientists are able to approximate the age of lava flows, determining the exact timing of each of a volcano’s eruptions has proved difficult in the past. A joint research team from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, University of Girona, the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) and other organizations has looked to establish a chronology of eruptions in the volcanic region of La...

A team of scientists that last year created waves by correctly forecasting the 2011 eruption of Axial Seamount years in advance now says that the undersea volcano located some 250 miles off the Oregon coast gave off clear signals just hours before its impending eruption. The researchers’ documentation of inflation of the undersea volcano from gradual magma intrusion over a period of years led to the long-term eruption forecast. But new analyses using data from underwater hydrophones also...

Guatemalan authorities raised an alert after the country’s most active volcano, Fuego, began spewing lava and columns of ash into the air at around 2:45 a.m. (0745 GMT) on May 19. Fuego, which overlooks the tourist hotspot of Antigua, shot ash 16,400 feet into the air and spewed lava 1,300 feet high and up to 3,280 feet long, according to a statement by Guatemala’s National Seismology, Vulcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology Institute. The disaster agency’s David de Leon said an...

Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com New photos taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show unique lava flows on Mars that resemble patterns seen on Earth. The lava flows reveal coiling spiral patterns that resemble snail or nautilus shells, according to research published in the scientific journal Science on Friday. On Earth, lava coils can be found on the Big Island of Hawaii, mainly on the surface of ropey pahoehoe lava...

Several volcanoes in our northernmost state of Alaska are showing increased signs of activity, and scientists are keeping a wary eye on them both, reports Yareth Rosen for Reuters. Kanaga Volcano, located near the port city of Adak, experienced a tremor Saturday morning followed by more seismic activity for about an hour, said the Alaska Volcano Observatory. This activity follows more of the same at Mount Cleveland, which threatens to make life troubling for Alaskans. Last erupting in...

In a rough-and-tumble wonderland of plunging canyons and towering buttes, some of the still-raw bluffs are lined with soaring, six-sided stone columns so orderly and trim, they could almost pass as relics of a colossal temple. The secret of how these columns, packed in edge to edge, formed en masse from a sea of molten rock is encrypted in details as tiny as the cracks running across their faces. To add to this mystery's allure, decoding it might do more than reveal the life story of some...

Scripps scientists propose mass melting as new force behind volcanic activity in Columbia River region Like a stream of air shooting out of an airplane's broken window to relieve cabin pressure, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego say lava formations in eastern Oregon are the result of an outpouring of magma forced out of a breach in a massive slab of Earth. Their new mechanism explaining how such a large volume of magma was generated is published in the Feb....