Latest Lava Stories

The Alaska Volcano Observatory raised a warning level for a remote Alaskan volcano on Tuesday, indicating a possible eruption. The center elevated the alert status for Cleveland Volcano after a new lava dome was spotted in the summit crater.  Officials said the dome was about 130 feet in diameter as of Monday. The volcano is a 5,675-foot peak on an uninhabited island, 940 miles southwest of Anchorage, Alaska. Authorities say sudden eruptions could occur at any time, and ash clouds...

An airborne radar developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has returned to Hawaii to continue its study of Kilauea volcano, Hawaii's current most active volcano. The Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, mounted in a pod under NASA's G-III research aircraft from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., returned to Hawaii's Big Island on Jan. 7. The one-week airborne campaign will help scientists better understand processes...

Satellite imagery is showing Alaska’s Cleveland Volcano spewing ash 15,000 feet into the air from uninhabited Chuginadak Island about 940 miles southwest of Anchorage, USA Today is reporting. “It’s not expected to cause a disruption to big international air carriers,” U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientist-in-charge John Power said, who went on to call the event a “small explosion”. Air carriers in the region are showing a bit more concern, “any time you put an ash cloud up...

A team of scientists from Oregon has collected microbes from ice within a lava tube in the Cascade Mountains and found that they thrive in cold, Mars-like conditions. The microbes tolerate temperatures near freezing and low levels of oxygen, and they can grow in the absence of organic food. Under these conditions their metabolism is driven by the oxidation of iron from olivine, a common volcanic mineral found in the rocks of the lava tube. These factors make the microbes capable of living...

Lava fingerprinting reveals differences between Hawaii's twin volcanoes Hawaii's main volcano chains--the Loa and Kea trends--have distinct sources of magma and unique plumbing systems connecting them to the Earth’s deep mantle, according to UBC research published this week in Nature Geoscience, in conjunction with researchers at the universities of Hawaii and Massachusetts. This study is the first to conclusively relate geochemical differences in surface lava rocks from both chains...

A new Canary Island is rising to the surface before our very eyes, and the first images of the infant volcano that is slowly coming up to the surface in the Spanish archipelago emerged on Friday. According to the Daily Mail, "Magma off the Canary Island of El Hierro has been spewing 20 meters high as the sea boils with a smell of sulfur… As it grows and gets closer to the surface, more and more debris such as stones start to shoot out of the volcano which, until now, has only shown its...

Africa’s most active volcano Nyamuragira, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, erupted last weekend throwing off clouds of ash and orange smoke, AFP reports. Located in the eastern areas of Virunga National Park, the volcano continues to erupt but was not considered a threat to locals or to the mountain gorillas living in the park, said Congo’s Center for Research and Natural Sciences. “A fountain of lava, smoke and ash came out of a fissure on the side” of a flat area...

On Oct. 9 an underwater volcano started to emerge in waters off El Hierro Island in the Canaries, Spain. Researchers of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO, Ministry of Science and Innovation) only needed 15 days to map its formation in high resolution. The volcanic cone has reached a height of 100 m and the lava tongue flows down its side, even though its activity has slowed down in the past few days. "This is probably the first time that such a young underwater volcano has been...

[ Watch the Video ] The first scientists to witness exploding rock and molten lava from a deep sea volcano, seen during a 2009 expedition, report that the eruption was near a tear in the Earth's crust that is mimicking the birth of a subduction zone. Scientists on the expedition collected boninite, a rare, chemically distinct lava that accompanies the formation of Earth's subduction zones. Nobody has ever collected fresh boninite and scientists never had the opportunity to monitor...

Volcanologists from the University of Leicester have uncovered one of the world's best-preserved accessible examples of a monstrous landslide that followed a huge volcanic eruption on the Canarian island of Tenerife. Seven hundred and thirty-three thousand years ago, the southeast slopes of Tenerife collapsed into the sea, during the volcanic eruption. The onshore remains of this landslide have just been discovered amid the canyons and ravines of Tenerife's desert landscape by...