We tend to think of the moon as the archetypal "dead" world. Not only is there no life, almost all its volcanic activity died out billions of years ago. Even the youngest lunar lava is old enough to have become scarred by ...
Space Exploration
May 14, 2019
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A year after a volcano on Hawaii's Big Island rained lava and gases in one of its largest and most destructive eruptions in recorded history, people who lost their homes and farms in the disaster are still struggling to return ...
Environment
May 03, 2019
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In the early spring, volcanologists monitoring the ground around Kilauea, the most active volcano on the island of Hawai'i, noticed a significant increase in seismicity, a sign of an impending eruption. Meanwhile, in Palisades, ...
Earth Sciences
Mar 14, 2019
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5
Imagine astronauts on Mars, tasked with picking rock samples that will be used by scientists to search for signs of life. But they can only transport a limited number back to Earth. What should they look for? Are some types ...
Space Exploration
Mar 11, 2019
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18
Scientists measuring the thickness of Kilauea volcano's newest lava flows have said molten rock added as much as 180 feet (55 meters) of lava to parts of the Big Island last year. New land created in the ocean reaches as ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 24, 2019
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12
UC Berkeley scientists have obtained more precise dates for the Deccan Traps volcanic lava flows, linking peak activity more closely to the asteroid or comet impact 66 million years ago and the coincident mass extinction. ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 21, 2019
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A volcano in central Indonesia has erupted, ejecting columns of thick ash as high as 7,500 meters (24,606 feet) into the sky.
Environment
Dec 16, 2018
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7
A very large team of researchers from multiple institutions in the U.S. has concluded that the Kilauea volcanic eruption that occurred over this past summer represented an unprecedented volcanic event. In their paper published ...
What happens when lava and water meet? Explosive experiments with manmade lava are helping to answer this important question.
Earth Sciences
Dec 10, 2018
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265
The San Francisco Volcanic Field is a 4,700 square kilometers (1,800 square miles) area in the southern boundary of the Colorado Plateau. The field contains more than 600 scoria cones active in the past six million years. ...
Environment
Nov 20, 2018
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8
Lava is molten rock expelled by a volcano during eruption. When first expelled from a volcanic vent, it is a liquid at temperatures from 700 °C to 1,200 °C (1,300 °F to 2,200 °F). Although lava is quite viscous, with about 100,000 times the viscosity of water, it can flow great distances before cooling and solidifying, because of both its thixotropic and shear thinning properties.
A lava flow is a moving outpouring of lava, which is created during a non-explosive effusive eruption. When it has stopped moving, lava solidifies to form igneous rock. The term lava flow is commonly shortened to lava. Explosive eruptions produce a mixture of volcanic ash and other fragments called tephra, rather than lava flows. The word "lava" comes from Italian, and is probably derived from the Latin word labes which means a fall or slide. The first use in connection with extruded magma (molten rock below the Earth's surface) was apparently in a short account written by Francesco Serao on the eruption of Vesuvius between May 14 and June 4, 1737. Serao described "a flow of fiery lava" as an analogy to the flow of water and mud down the flanks of the volcano following heavy rain.
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