Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here are some of my highlights from last week’s European Geoscience Union conference.  These were presentations dirty hailstones formed in subglacial volcanic eruptions, a workshop on social media and blogging in geosciences, a splinter meeting on open source software in … Continue reading →

This week is the second anniversary of volcan01010.  With this post, I want to give an overview of what I have been writing about over the past year.  If you are new to the blog, then it should give you … Continue reading →

The UK National Environment Research Council’s Airborne Research and Survey Facility (NERC ARSF) is an aircraft used for scientific research. The on-board instruments include LiDAR, high resolution camera, and multispectral and hyperspectral infrared scanners.  The aim of this post is … Continue reading →

A recent study by Jacqui Owen (Lancaster University), Hugh Tuffen and Dave McGarvie shows that the explosivity of a subglacial rhyolite eruption is determined while the magma is still deep beneath the ground. Rhyolite is a particularly thick and gloopy … Continue reading →

If you are in any doubt that climate change is the biggest issue of our time, then I highly recommend watching the talk given by Prof Robert Watson, the former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK’s Department for Environment, Food … Continue reading →

Python is an easy-to-use programming language which, thanks to a growing number of cool extension modules, is really taking off in the world of scientific data handling.  The Proj4 libraries are a set of programs for performing coordinate system transformations.  … Continue reading →

When a volcano erupts explosively, the tephra that comes out is a mixture of material that was molten at the time and bits of other old, cold rock that happened to get caught up in the blast.  These are referred … Continue reading →

An article published this week reveals the volume, grainsize and eruption rate characteristics of the tephra (volcanic ash, pumice and other materials) erupted during the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010.  This information is important because these are the inputs needed … Continue reading →

Ever the practical joker, Dobbin thought it would be hilarious to rohypnol the water trough…

This is a quick post to let you know how the fieldwork is going so far. Sampling the distal deposits of Hekla’s largest eruptions since the ice age The aim of my project is to sample the deposits of the … Continue reading →