volcanology

Ancient rocks from Western Australia suggest water was reaching deep inside Earth more than three billion years ago, long before modern plate tectonics may have fully developed. Researchers propose that water-rich pieces of crust periodically sank into the mantle through a process they call “dripduction.” The buried water then helped produce magma and volcanic eruptions.

TL;DR No. Sierra Leone has no active volcanoes, no dormant ones, and no record of any ever erupting on its soil. The country sits on a chunk of continental crust... The post Are There Volcanoes in Sierra Leone? Here’s the Real Answer appeared first on 33Science .

Nature Geoscience, Published online: 11 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41561-026-02099-7 Rapid caldera collapse during submarine eruptions could increase tsunami magnitude, suggests an analysis of the geomorphological evolution of the caldera formed in the climactic eruption of Hunga volcano (Tonga) in 2022.

NASA’s satellites captured the aftermath of the eruption, which lasted for more than a day

Nature, Published online: 10 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02809-6 Seismic data pinpoint the collapse of an underwater volcano, and reveal how the eruption triggered a destructive tsunami.

A powerful eruption from the Indonesian volcano lofted ash into the atmosphere, disrupting thousands of flights and degrading air quality.

It’s hard to overstate just how big the 1883 eruptions were, and the catastrophic and often strange impacts that followed. For starters, the Moon went blue.

Location: Anak Krakatau, Indonesia Situation: Anak Krakatau, literally "child of Krakatau" has had some large explosive eruptions over the past week including ash plumes that reached ~50,000 feet (15 kilometers). More importantly, the ash was ...

With austral winter nearing its end, clouds cleared for a satellite view of volcanic activity in the remote South Atlantic.

For nearly five centuries, the Krasheninnikov volcano in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula had not erupted. Nor...

The sequence of six paroxysmal eruptions that occurred between July and August 2024 at Mt. Etna’s Voragine crater has been investigated in order to constrain the plumbing system dynamics. Whole-rock and glass major-element analyses have been integrated with a detailed petrological study of erupted products, focusing on olivine major-element compositions to track magma storage and transfer dynamic…

Pit craters are observed throughout the solar system, but are rarely seen forming. Here we document pit crater formation and characteristics following the 2011–2012 Cordón Caulle rhyolitic eruption using satellite and drone data with field observations. Syn-eruptive shallow intrusion (laccolith) uplift and subsequent subsidence at Cordón Caulle are found to be responsible for the creation of faul…

A team of scientists has made an astonishing discovery on an underwater volcano off the Pacific coast: it is still active, covered in giant eggs, and that’s not all.

Pyroclastic density currents (PDCs) are among the most lethal volcanic phenomena and are mainly generated by column collapse, lateral blasts, or dome failure. An additional but still poorly constrained hazard is represented by PDCs produced by the collapse of hot volcaniclastic deposits. Here we investigate deposit-derived (dd) PDCs emplaced during the 1944 eruption of Vesuvius (Italy). We integr…

Researchers have figured out how to use lunar samples to determine the nature of volcanic activity on ancient Mercury. It's all based on SiO2, or silicon dioxide. Its abundance in a planet's crust reveals a lot about magma and volcanic activity.

Underwater sound signals created by 2022’s enormous Hunga eruption have pointed scientists to a new way to warn people of unpredictable volcanic tsunamis.

Following the 2018–2020 Fani Maoré submarine eruption near Mayotte Island, Indian Ocean, multiple oceanographic expeditions provide unprecedented access to fresh alkaline volcanic glasses spanning basanite to phonolite compositions from the East-Mayotte Volcanic Chain (EMVC). We applied Fe and S K-edge X-ray Absorption Near-Edge Spectroscopy (XANES) to determine iron and sulfur oxidation states i…