It’s 3 years since I started blogging at volcan01010. This post has some highlights from the last year. If you are into Iceland, volcanoes, Python, or open source software (especially GIS) then there should be something here for you.
Buzzfeed headlines
Those annoying Buzzfeed headlines seem to be everywhere these days. I jumped on the bandwagon recently and sent out a series of tweets about the Seven volcan01010 Posts You Can’t Afford to Miss!
- Tensile strength of rapidly expanding and accelerating magma #fail!
- The amazing reason why Hekla looks so different to other South Iceland volcanoes.
- This fact about transatlantic flight will blow your mind.
- The 65
#opensource geoscience software tools that Adobe, ESRI and Microsoft don’t want you to know about. - Can you hear the difference between a volcano and a mating whale?
- Will your children outlive Iceland’s glaciers?
- You’ll never believe the chances of another airport-closing ash cloud!
Iceland and volcanoes (volcan…)
- Grímsvötn 2011 (Part 1): UK ash deposition from the biggest Icelandic eruption since Katla 1918
- Grímsvötn 2011 (Part 2): Effects on aviation of the biggest Icelandic eruption since Katla 1918
These two posts summarise a paper that we published about the 2011 eruption of Iceland’s Grímsvötn volcano. The first describes where ash was detected in the UK and includes results from a citizen science tape sampling exercise that we ran. The second compares our findings to predictions from computer models of ash clouds. The models did a good job at saying where and when as would fall, but there is still room for improvement.
- Soup or volcano?Inspired by media obsession with supervolcanoes, I created this fun quiz for anyone aged 9 to 99 (centenarians have a notoriously poor sense of humour). See if you can be it!
- Volcano suit / What to wear in IcelandYou can have sun, rain and snow all on the same day, but the most important weather factor in Iceland is the wind. Here’s my guide to what to wear.
Open source software and GIS (…01010)
Which five countries have the most volcanoes per person? This intro shows how to use SQLite to extract useful data from massive spreadsheets and how to use it to organise your own sample data.
There are different ways of describing a lognormal distribution and I found the way that they are used in Python quite confusing. I couldn’t find any good guides online, so I made my own.
Highlights from 2011, 2012
The previous two anniversary posts are still available:
Progress since last year
Volcan01010 now has 881 followers on Twitter (up from 459 last year), and in the last 12 months the blog had 27,894 page views from 17,435 unique visitors in 170 countries (with the vast majority in the UK and USA). The numbers of hits are up about 50% from last year. Traffic comes in more steadily now and is spread across more posts, but the software how-to’s are usually most popular. I’m pretty happy that there were 13 days last year when over 100 people visited the blog; that’s a lot more people than come to any of my lectures!
If you find the blog interesting or useful, then please tell all your friends. Or make a video of yourself reading a post, and at the end nominate two of your friends to do the same in 24 hours.
