#vulcanology

[eopederson]

Rovine di Pompei con il Vesuvio innevato in lontananza, Campania, 2009.

[geologicaltravels]

2024: Iceland ... the Hvalnes peninusla. Came across these incredible outcrops totally by accident while stopping to look at the black beach. There is a paper on this locality found here (Weidendorfer, Ulmer, Mattson 2014) that contends these exposures are the result of magma mixing of partially crystallised magma chambers.

[roseenby]

we are doing natural disasters in humanities at the moment and we have gotten into the volcano part of the unit and I may mildly like volcanology. (I say 42 wikipedia pages into a volcanology rabbit hole)

[up8photographer]

🌋 Kilauea is erupting again on Hawaii's Big Island. What to know about its lava displays

Kilauea's lava soared as high as a skyscraper during a 6-hour eruption. Here's what to know

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano has been shooting lava from its summit crater at semiregular intervals since late last year, delighting residents,

[eopederson2]

Mt. Rainier wildflower season, 1970.

[grayrazor]

Love that my smart TV, made to be a Netflix box, still processes the embedded closed captions from VHS tapes.

[merelygifted]

Record-breaking Tonga volcano disrupted satellite signals in space | Space

The January 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption continues to astound.

An underwater volcanic eruption last year was powerful enough to generate plasma bubbles that disrupted radio communications in outer space, a new study finds.

The new results could lead to ways to avoid satellite and GPS disruptions on Earth, and to learn more about volcanoes on alien worlds, scientists added.

In January 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai submarine volcano — a large, cone-shaped mountain located near the 169 islands of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific — erupted with a violent explosion. The outburst generated the highest-ever recorded volcanic plume, one reaching 35 miles (57 kilometers) tall, and triggered tsunamis as far away as the Caribbean. All in all, the eruption was the most powerful natural explosion in more than a century...

[thingsilearnedtoday]

Hello!

Today I learned that in 79 CE, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, it destroyed two cities. The city of Pompeii, and the city of Hurculaneum.

The catastrophies that happened at both of these cities were caused by pyroclastic density currents (also know as PDCs or Pyroclastic flows). These were large plumes of hot, dense ash and debris from the explosive eruption of Vesuvius. (AKA not Lahars)

In Pompeii, these PDCs were much cooler than the ones at Hurculaneum, and so the people were buried in ash and ultimately died of suffocation and not at the hands of temperature. The people buried left voids in the solidified ash filled with bones and sometimes clothing. Someone eventually got the bright idea to dump Plaster of Paris into these voids, and that's where we get the creepy and tragic statues of the people of Pompeii.

In Hurculaneum, the town was victim to whats called pyroclastic surges (a less dense, hotter version of a flow). They were extremely hot. The temperature was hot enough to kill anyone hit by it nearly instantly. It hit most of the town and the rest was covered by a lahar (volcanic mud/debris flow). We know this because the bones found in Pompeii were mostly intact and non-discolored. The bones in Hurculaneum, however were extremely discolored and there were no clothing remnants. Archaeologists later found that this kind of discoloration of bone only happens when they're exposed to extreme temperatures. (Teacher didn't cite the source for this one, cursory looks say this might be disproven in the past decade. He's usually pretty up-to-date though.)

Notice that there is no space between the surrounding "dirt" and the skeletons. The "dirt" here is volcanic product.

I highly recommend giving this article a read if you're interested in learning more about what happened in Hurculaneum. :)