Volcano Science Trivia

1. A supervolcano is a type of volcano. But what is it about supervolcanoes that make them so 'super'?

From Quiz Supervolcanoes

Answer: Their eruptions are large and catastrophic

There isn't a scientific definition for a supervolcano, however, the generally accepted definition is a volcano that ejects over 1,000 cubic kilometers of magma. To put it in perspective, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens was only 1 cubic kilometer.

From Quiz Fire in the Hole!

Answer: tephra

Also known as pyroclasts, tephra (from a Greek word meaning "ash") are airborne fragments ejected during a volcanic eruption. These fragments are classified according to size: ash refers to the smallest, fine-grained particles, while lapilli, or volcanic cinders. are pea- to walnut-sized (between 2 and 64 mm in diameter), and bombs and blocks are the largest. Ash tends to remain in the atmosphere for the longest time, while blocks fall to the ground relatively quickly. There are also specific kinds of tephra, such as the teardrop-shaped lapilli named "Pele's tears", and the fine filaments of basaltic glass known as "Pele's hair" (Pele being the Hawaiian goddess of fire). Tephra can become compacted into tuff, a relatively soft, pale-coloured volcanic rock that contains from 25% to 75% of ash; tuff was widely used as construction material by the Romans, due to its abundant presence in many parts of Italy. Consolidated tephra containing coarser particles is known as breccia. The layers of tephra that settle on the ground after an eruption are used by various scientific disciplines - for example, to date the fossils of living organisms buried and preserved by the tephra. The perfectly preserved ruins of the legendary city of Pompeii were found buried under a layer of volcanic ash and pumice that was 4 to 6 m (13 to 20 ft) thick.

From Quiz Supervolcanoes

Answer: Caldera

Volcanoes are formed when magma (liquid rock from under the earth's surface) erupts from the mountain and eventually cools and solidifies on the mountain itself. However, there is so much pressure during a catastrophic supervolcanic eruption that too much magma is ejected to form a mountain. The land then collapses and forms a caldera (a cauldron-like shape).

From Quiz Strange Facts about Volcanoes

Answer: Midocean ridges

Volcanism at mid-Atlantic ridges creates about 3 cubic kilometers of lava annually. Since it's at the bottom of the ocean, we're not usually aware of it. Here's how the process works. Tectonic plates pull apart at midocean ridges. This causes the mantle to upwell at that point, and the decreasing pressure causes some components of the mantle to melt. The magma emerges at that place, making a volcano. Since the magma comes from partial melting of the mantle, it is basaltic in composition. That all sounds very impressive, doesn't it?

From Quiz Fire in the Hole!

Answer: pyroclastic flows

The term Peléan comes from Mount Pelée ("bald mountain"), the volcano on the Caribbean island of Martinique whose catastrophic eruption of May 1902 - one of the deadliest in recorded history - utterly destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre, and caused the death of almost 30,000 people. The distinguishing feature of a Peléan eruption is the pyroclastic flows - called "nuées ardentes" (glowing clouds) in French, as they look like heavy, black clouds that glow in the dark - violently blown out of a volcano's crater. These ground-hugging clouds of gas, ash and other volcanic debris, with temperatures that can easily exceed 1,000º C (1,830 °F), can move at speeds of over 100 km/h (62 mph), and incinerate everything on their path. Though Peléan eruptions are relatively rare, a number of them have occurred over the past 75 years; some - such as the eruptions of Mount Hibok-Hibok in the Philippines (1948-1951), and the eruption of Mount Lamington in Papua New Guinea (1951) - have caused considerable loss of life as well as material damage. The April 2021 eruption of the volcano La Soufrière on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent was also classified as a Peléan eruption: fortunately, the population of the affected areas was evacuated in time.

From Quiz Strange Facts about Volcanoes

Answer: The Pacific Plate subducting

As the Pacific plate subducts under the neighboring plates consisting of continental crust, the continental crust heats up and eventually melts. The magma eventually shows up at the crust as volcanos. Interestingly enough, the subducting oceanic crust does not heat up significantly, because the continental crust acts as a heat sink. This results in a rare high-pressure, low-temperature metamorphism that can form a rock called "blueschist."

From Quiz Vulcan's Furnaces

Answer: Unlikely to erupt, but could

Volcanoes are loosely classified into three categories: extinct, dormant, and active. In ancient times before formal geologic study was possible, a volcano was often considered extinct if it hadn't erupted within anyone's memory and showed no signs of activity (such as smoke or lava production). The perils of such a system became clear in 79 AD when the "extinct" volcano Vesuvius erupted. Today an extinct volcano must meet several criteria, including having no signs of geologic or historic activity. A dormant (sleeping) volcano is one that has shown little or no historic activity but that still exhibits geologic potential for activity, like hot springs, fumaroles, etc. Dormant volcanoes often wake up...Mount St. Helens in Washington State, USA and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines were considered dormant before their spectacular eruptions in 1980 and 1991 respectively.

From Quiz Fire in the Hole!

Answer: Vesuvius

Though the term "Vesuvian eruption" is also occasionally used, the kind of violent, explosive eruption associated with Mount Vesuvius bears the name of Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder, who died during the volcano's infamous eruption of 79 AD. The trademark of a Plinian eruption is the huge column of hot gases and volcanic debris ejected from the crater high into the stratosphere. Numerous paintings and photos have captured this phenomenon, ominously resembling a nuclear mushroom cloud. Typical of stratovolcanoes, Plinian eruptions are also frequently accompanied by lightning strikes caused by the static electricity generated by colliding particles of ash within the eruption column. Pyroclastic flows are another hazard associated with Plinian eruptions: they were the cause of most of the deaths that happened in Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabia in 79 AD. Many of history's most destructive eruptions have been of the Plinian type - including those of Mount Tambora (1815), Krakatoa (1883), and Mount St Helens (1980). The summits of both Tambora and Mount St Helens were blown off by the violence of the eruptions, substantially reducing the mountains' elevations; in the case of Krakatoa, most of the island where the volcano was located disappeared, probably by collapsing into an empty magma chamber.

From Quiz Supervolcanoes

Answer: Lake Toba

Toba was one of the world's largest known eruptions, ejecting over 2,500 cubic kilometers of magma. The caldera that was created is 30 by 100 kilometers and is located under a lake.

From Quiz Vulcan's Furnaces

Answer: Subduction

Most of the earth's most devastating volcanic eruptions are due to tectonic plate subduction (where one plate goes under another) into the mantle. The immense pressure eventually bursts into a massive eruption. Many of the world's most destructive volcanic events have been of this type, among them Tambora, Krakatoa, and Pelée. Erosion is the wearing or washing away of soil or rock by geologic forces, convection is heat transfer or movement in a gas or liquid, and conservative-margin plate tectonics is when geologic plates meet without either destruction or creation of material.

From Quiz Vulcan's Furnaces

Answer: Volcanic Explosivity Index

"The size of a volcanic eruption is quantified using a scale called the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), which takes into account the volume of material erupted, the height of the eruption cloud, the duration of the main eruptive phase, and other parameters to assign a number from 0 to 8 on a linear scale. For example, the 18 May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, which destroyed 632 km² of land, expelled 1.4 km³ of magma, and produced an eruption column that rose to 24 km, was assigned a VEI of 5. On the other hand, the last large eruption from the Yellowstone caldera, which occurred 600,000 years ago and expelled over 1000 km³ of magma, would be assigned a VEI of 7. However, the vast majority of volcanic eruptions have VEIs from 0 to 2." (http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/gsc/pacific/vancouver/volcanoes/05_haz_e.php)

From Quiz Fire in the Hole!

Answer: lahars

A word of Javanese origin, "lahar" denotes a thick slurry of water and volcanic debris (such as ash and rock fragments) flowing down the slopes of a volcano, often at very high speed. Lahars can be over 100 m (328 ft) deep, and hundreds of metres wide, covering very large areas: a large enough lahar can destroy everything in its path, and it is practically impossible to escape on foot. In 1985, the town of Armero in Colombia was completely buried by massive lahars that followed the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz, causing the death of 23,000 people. In general, lahars are one of the most hazardous phenomena associated with Plinian eruptions, when pyroclastic flows running down the sides of a volcano melt snow or ice (as in the case of Nevado del Ruiz). Lahars can also be triggered by heavy rainfall or floods mixing with pyroclastic material. Because of the presence of large amounts of glacial ice, Mount Rainier (Washington, USA) - one of the 16 highly monitored volcanoes known as Decade Volcanoes - is considered particularly prone to lahars. Base surges are similar to pyroclastic flows, though they contain more gas than debris; lava tubes are formed by the crusting over of lava channels; fumaroles are vents from which volcanic gas escapes.

From Quiz Fire in the Hole!

Answer: famine

As its name implies, volcanic winter is a sharp drop in temperatures due to clouds of volcanic ash and sulfur aerosols reflecting a portion of incoming sunlight; this phenomenon occurs after a particularly violent explosive eruption. In recent times, the global climate has occasionally been affected by one of those events - most significantly after the Pinatubo eruption of 1991, when temperatures worldwide cooled for several years. However, in the past volcanic winter may have caused more deaths than the eruptions themselves. The most egregious example was the aftermath of the disastrous Tambora eruption: 1816 has become known in history as "The Year Without a Summer", which badly affected many countries in Europe and elsewhere. Crop failures and major weather disruptions led to widespread unrest, and rampant epidemics of various diseases sharply increased the fatality rate in Europe. Even worse happened in 1783, when the eruption of the Laki fissure in Iceland released huge amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, killing most of the island's livestock, and causing one-fifth of the island's population to die of starvation. The Laki eruption triggered a series of extreme weather events throughout most of Europe; some historians blame the ensuing famine and poverty for the outbreak of the French Revolution. Even further back in history, the Hekla 3 (also in Iceland) eruption of about 1,000 BC has been associated with the famines that occurred during the Late Bronze Age collapse.

From Quiz Strange Facts about Volcanoes

Answer: Benjamin Franklin

Franklin's scientific prowess extended beyond the lightning-and-kite experiment that everyone hears about. Franklin thought "smoke might be spread by various winds, over the northern part of the world," causing the massive crop failure in the US of A. Right on. To elaborate further, volcanos spew stuff above the troposphere, where weather occurs, and into the stratosphere. While the stuff in the troposphere is washed out by rain relatively quickly, the stuff that reaches the stratosphere can persist for years and years.

From Quiz Vulcan's Furnaces

Answer: Phreatic eruption (Turbulent lava eruption)

A phreatic eruption typically involves steam only. It is caused by water underground encountering magma and explosively erupting through the volcano's vent or fissures. Tephra, which is Greek for "ash", can be extremely destructive when ejected from a volcano. In addition to killing people, animals and vegetation directly in its blanketing fall, tephra contains tiny particles of quartz which can become lodged in people's lungs and cause the disease silicosis. Lahar, an Indonesian word for mudflow, is often a deadly consequence of volcanic eruption. In 1985, an otherwise insignificant eruption of Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Columbia killed 23,000 people when mud inundated the village of Armero. Scoria is formed when bubbly, frothy lava cools quickly. Some volcanic cones are composed largely of scoria and are known as scoria cones.

From Quiz Supervolcanoes

Answer: Horizon

The term seems to have first been mentioned in the 1940s by the American scientist F. M. Byers jr., but it was the Horizon program which made it popular.

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