Topic
Research on volcanic systems, magma behaviour, eruption processes and volcano monitoring.
Kilauea has produced 54 separate lava fountains since December 2024, some reaching 457 meters, researchers report in Science. Instrument records from the run suggest trapped gas drives the bursts by pumping magma through narrow vents like a piston.
Reality
Berkeley and Padua researchers dated eight Vesuvius sanidine samples to 1,938 years, give or take 13, against the 1,946 years that Pliny's account implies. The same historical date helped make potassium-40's half-life, the constant under every argon-argon age, twice as precise.
Reality
Crystals in lava from La Palma's 1712, 1971 and 2021 eruptions show hot mantle magma stirring a mush 18 to 25 km down days or weeks before each one. The authors say that record helps read future unrest at depths monitoring networks struggle to see, though it cannot date the next eruption.
Reality
Berkeley and Padua geochronologists dated eight crystals from Vesuvius to 1,938 years, plus or minus 13, against a recorded age of 1,946 years. The same eruption date let them measure potassium-40's decay twice as precisely. Carbon-14 and uranium-lead results can now be checked against that constant.
Reality
The crystals came from boreholes drilled 80 years ago and 65 kilometres apart, and their ages match a thick Baltic ash bed, which pins when this eruption happened far better than it pins how large it was.
Reality
A team led by Janine Krippner and Sam Poppe has catalogued 18 common misconceptions in the Journal of Applied Volcanology. The public summary works through only three of them in detail.
Reality