Thousands of previously undetected tiny earthquakes have revealed the edge of a miniature tectonic plate slamming into Alaska near the Denali Fault.

The microplate could be focusing seismic energy in a straight line in a region under the Alaska Range of mountains, potentially contributing to large earthquakes and the development of small volcanoes in the area.

The Yakutat microplate is an ocean plateau that is thicker than the Pacific oceanic crust surrounding it. Formed by volcanoes tens of millions of years ago, this block of crust is now being pushed under the North American Plate in Alaska in a process called subduction. But because it is thicker and more buoyant than the surrounding oceanic crust, the microplate pushes up the Alaska Range, which includes North America's highest mountain, Mount McKinley (also known as Denali).

"Being able to identify where the Yakutat microplate is in the subsurface has helped us understand the tectonics," said Meghan Miller, the study's first author and a seismologist at the Australian National University.

Part of the plate is still off the coast of Alaska, sticking out like a slipper under a rug. But the precise location of the edge of the plate that has already subducted under the continent has been hard to pinpoint. Miller and her colleagues installed seven new seismometers south of the Denali Fault, which runs through the Alaska Range. This is a tectonically active region, most famous for a 2002 magnitude 7.9 earthquake that was felt as far away as Seattle.

But it wasn't a giant temblor like 2002's that revealed the hidden edge of the Yakutat. Instead, it was unmasked by about 3,000 newly discovered minuscule earthquakes clustered in a clean line running from northwest to southeast for 155 miles (250 kilometers) under the Denali Fault. The "very sharp, linear pattern" also aligns with a series of small volcanic cones and rock-type changes in the deep subsurface, Miller and her colleagues reported in the new study, published June 4 in the journal The Seismic Record.

The researchers suspect that the leading edge of the plate is focusing seismic energy toward the surface. The plate's location also aligns with the initiation point of the 2002 Denali quake, which started on a nearby fault, Miller told Live Science, but exploring that idea further will require computational modeling.

"What we were postulating is that the edge of the Yakutat plate is influencing all these different types of processes," Miller said.

This eye-catching satellite snap shows off a "bull's-eye-like" set of concentric cloud rings that formed above an erupting volcano on La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands.

The eruption, the first on La Palma in 50 years, began Sept. 19, 2021, when a fissure opened up on the western flank of Cumbre Vieja — a volcanic ridge that runs through the southern half of the island — and spewed massive lava fountains into the air. The violent outburst created a 660-foot-tall (200 meters) vent, dubbed Tajogaite, which continued to slowly pump out lava until Dec. 13, 2021.

The molten rock flowed into the Atlantic Ocean in a giant "river of fire" that destroyed a town and unleashed deadly gases that are still causing issues for locals today, Live Science previously reported.

The concentric cloud rings in this image are made up of steam, smoke and ash ‪—‬ known as an eruption plume ‪—‬ that rose above Tajogaite for weeks.

Normally, such a plume would continue to climb into the cold air of the stratosphere — the second layer of the atmosphere, which extends from around 6 to 31 miles (10 to 50 kilometers) above Earth's surface. However, when this image was captured, a rare "temperature inversion" created a layer of elevated warm air that acted as a lid, preventing the plume from rising and forcing it to spread outward, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The trapped plume created concentric rings that formed from the natural ebb and flow in the intensity of volcanic activity. This pulse in the emissions given off by the volcano is visible in time-lapse footage captured by the Izaña Atmospheric Research Center on Tenerife, another Canary Island.

The official name for this type of concentric cloud formation is a "gravity wave," according to the National Weather Service. However, the formation has nothing to do with gravity, and it's completely separate from the ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.

"River of fire"

During the 85-day eruption, around 7.1 billion cubic feet (200 million cubic meters) of lava — reaching temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius) — seeped from the ground.

This molten rock traveled around 4 miles (6.4 kilometers), destroying around 3,000 buildings in the town of Todoque, before falling into the Atlantic Ocean in a fiery waterfall. The estimated damage exceeded 700 million euros ($780 million), according to the Spanish newspaper El País.

Where lava fell into the sea, around 4.6 million square feet (430,000 square meters) of new land was created. The reaction between the molten rock and the water also released high levels of volcanic gases, such as sulfur dioxide and hydrogen cyanide.

At least one person, a 72-year-old man who returned to his home prematurely, is believed to have died from inhaling these toxic fumes, according to AFP. Thousands of wild and agricultural animals are also thought to have been killed by the gases.

The damage was "truly terrible," Marie Edmonds, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science at an event on La Palma in April 2025. "Most shocking to me is the closeness of the vent to the communities," she added when describing what it was like to visit the area. "It must have been absolutely terrifying to see the eruption so close."

This awesome astronaut photo shows the striking symmetry of "twin" stratovolcanoes at the heart of Java, Indonesia. The parallel peaks are an eye-catching reminder of the region's extreme tectonic activity.

Mount Sundoro (also known as Sindoro or Sindara) on the left of the image, reaches a maximum height of 10,331 feet (3,149 meters). Its partner, Mount Sumbing, sits to the southeast (on the right of the image) and is slightly taller, at 11,056 feet (3,370 m) above sea level.

Both are considered active. Although Sumbing has not erupted since 1730, Sundoro has blown its top more recently, in 1971, and has experienced seismic activity as recently as 2012, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

The volcanoes' peaks are just 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) apart. A raised ridge with a major highway runs perpendicularly between them.

Each volcano also has a smaller, secondary cone on its flank left over from previous eruptions (to the upper left of Sundoro and the upper right of Sumbing in the image), and their orientations make the volcanoes look like mirror images of each other.

The slopes of both cones are covered with rings of dark-green forest that sharply terminate at their bases. The volcanic soils surrounding the mountains are excellent for growing crops such as rice, corn, coffee and sugarcane, which has led to the deforestation of their surroundings, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

This matching coloration accentuates the similarities between the pair, especially when viewed from above.

One of the few differences between Sundoro and Sumbing is that the latter volcano has a sizable crater at its summit, which was carved out by the 1730 eruption. As a result, the larger volcano appears to have a darker point at its top.

The volcanoes are commonly referred to as "twins," due to their near-identical profiles. However, local people often call them "husband and wife," according to a local travel site. In this narrative, Sumbing is considered the husband due to its slight height advantage and "more masculine" profile.

Sundoro and Sumbing are part of the wider Dieng Volcanic Complex, which consists of around 20 volcanic cones stretching across central Java. Indonesia is also positioned along the "Ring of Fire," a roughly horseshoe-shaped arc of volcanoes that runs along a series of tectonic plate boundaries encircling the Pacific Ocean.

Over the past few years, there have been a number of significant eruptions in Indonesia, including a pair of violent blasts at Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, on Flores Island, in 2024 and 2025. As of June 2026, there are seven ongoing eruptions in Indonesia — the most of any nation.

A volcano that slept for more than 100,000 years before erupting is blowing up our understanding of when volcanoes should be defined as active or extinct.

Volcanologists officially classify sleeping volcanoes as extinct if they haven't erupted in the past 10,000 years or so, or in the past 11,700 years since the start of the current geological epoch, the Holocene.

And yet, an analysis of the active volcano Methana, near Athens, Greece, recently found that it once slept for nearly 110,000 years before bursting back to life. The finding could be the final straw for volcanologists, many of whom were already questioning the current definition of what makes a volcano extinct.

"The take-home message," said study co-author Răzvan-Gabriel Popa, a volcanologist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, "is that extinct volcanoes around us might not really be extinct."

Changing the way we define whether volcanoes are extinct or active is important because the misclassification of volcanoes leaves people exposed to the risk of an unexpected eruption. And many of these sleeping giants should be monitored more closely, experts told Live Science.

A sleeping giant wakes up angry

In a study published April 22 in the journal Science Advances, Popa and his colleagues reconstructed the history of Methana by dating and analyzing the chemistry of zircon crystals in the rocks around the volcano, which had been ejected in various eruptions.

This revealed 31 eruptions over roughly 700,000 years of volcanic activity and a long period in which it lay quiet. During this time, the volcano was building up its magma reservoir, and afterward, it erupted energetically about 168,000 years ago. "We discovered that it was surprisingly able to restart after 110,000 years of inactivity and erupted quite intensely afterwards," Popa told Live Science. "What's important from my point of view is to start looking at other volcanoes that we currently consider extinct, because they might be going through growth periods. Maybe they're going to wake up in this catastrophic stage."

Methana isn't the only "extinct" volcano that has roused after a long period, Popa said.

Last year, Pablo González, a volcanologist at the Spanish National Research Council's Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology, and his colleagues published a study showing that Taftan volcano in Iran had woken up and that its summit was rising, probably due to a buildup of gas pressure below the volcano's surface. It's not clear when it erupted last, but researchers estimate it was around 700,000 years ago.

Another volcano, Ciomadul in Romania, was thought to be extinct because it last erupted 30,000 years ago, but a 2019 study found magma still lurking beneath the volcano.

"It has a magma chamber which is brewing; it's very active," Popa said. "It just hasn't erupted. Ciomadul is definitely going through a growth stage, and maybe there are more such volcanoes."

Hayli Gubbi volcano, in the Afar region of Ethiopia, also erupted unexpectedly in 2025, after having lain dormant for an estimated 12,000 years. However, due in part to the volcano's remote setting, geologists are unsure of precisely how long ago it last erupted.

What is clear is that 10,000 years of silence is no guarantee a volcano is dead. "We have to look at a much longer time scale to be more certain about the level of activity of a volcanic area," González told Live Science.

Expanded monitoring

Fortunately, volcanoes don't usually erupt without warning —as long as scientists are monitoring them.

For example, González said, thousands of small eruptions heralded the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which had been quiet for about 500 years, and thorough seismic monitoring helps scientists anticipate eruptions at Mount Etna in Italy, one of the world's most active volcanoes.

But obvious seismic activity ramps up mainly in advance of imminent threats.

Other geophysical signs help reveal which volcanoes are quietly building up their magma stores — and those need to be monitored too, experts told Live Science. For example, satellites can detect a growing magma chamber if they pick up bulging in the ground of just an inch a year, Popa said. Scientists can also use magnetotellurics, a method that leverages Earth's magnetic and electric fields to give CT-scan-like images that reveal how much rock is being melted to create more magma.

Such assessments should be extended to many volcanoes assumed to have a lower risk level, the experts said. "I think it's important that as much as possible we are monitoring all potentially active volcanoes for signs of subsurface unrest," Jenni Barclay, a volcanologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K., told Live Science. This could reveal magma that is actively melting and building up to potentially fuel future eruptions.

The monitoring of quiet volcanoes should first focus on volcanoes in relatively populous regions, including Eifel in western Germany and La Garrotxa in northeastern Spain, the experts said.

Some such volcanoes are already monitored. Yellowstone, which is considered dormant even though it last erupted 70,000 years ago, is watched closely because it sits on a hotspot of magma production and the high flux of heat means the rocks in the crust behave in a plastic way, deforming to create space for even more magma. This means Yellowstone is likely to erupt one day, Popa said, and it is unlikely to be a complete surprise.

"When a giant like Yellowstone wakes up, there will be lots of signs," he said

New classification system needed

The studies on reawakening volcanoes are leading ever more volcanologists to question the time-linked definition of an extinct volcano. "The definition is more or less an arbitrary date," Popa said. "It just means that we can find evidence of eruptions easily in the geological record and we have experienced them."

Inspired by the issue, volcanologists Luca Caricchi at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and Ben Kennedy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand surveyed attendees at an international meeting of volcanologists in Geneva last year. Caricchi told Live Science that about 70 to 80 people there agreed that the 10,000-year definition was flawed, but consensus hasn't coalesced around a new definition.

"The big challenge that we have as volcanologists is that thinking about the state of the volcano really depends on the time scale that you're thinking of," Barclay said. "These gaps of 100,000 years are all very well, but most people are wanting to know if it is going to erupt during their lifetime, and given unrest, is it going to erupt over the next few days or weeks?"

All of the experts Live Science spoke to suggested that a new classification system should rely on measures of volcanic or magmatic activity, rather than on time passed. Some also don't like the term "dormant," which implies a volcano that has magma beneath it but isn’t active, because even if a volcano isn't erupting, an active magma chamber is never sleeping.

Classification should probably be done on a case-by-case basis by looking at the system to see whether the magma chamber is alive, Popa said, "because that's telling us if the volcano is really dead."

González agreed. As long as the conditions for magma to erupt exist below the surface, "that's a good indication that a volcanic area can have a future eruption," he said.

What do you know about volcanos? Test your knowledge with our volcano quiz!

Campi Flegrei, a volcanic caldera west of Naples, is speeding toward a transition within the next decade, a new study suggests, but researchers can't yet say whether that transition will be an eruption or some other change in the volcano's internal plumbing.

The caldera, also known as the Phlegraean Fields, is home to about 500,000 people who would be at risk in the event of an eruption. The caldera stretches about 9 miles (15 kilometers) in diameter and formed in a massive eruption 40,000 years ago. Other, smaller eruptions have happened since, including an explosive one in 1528 that built Monte Nuovo, a 433-foot (132 meters) cinder cone.

In the past 75 years, Campi Flegrei has been restless, with periods of particularly frequent earthquakes and ground uplift in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s, which weakened the caldera's crust. Since 2005, the volcano has been increasingly active, and the floor of the caldera has risen about 4.6 feet (1.4 m), possibly indicating the movement of volcanic gases below the surface. The new research suggests that this increased activity has reached a point where even its acceleration is accelerating, indicating that something will change soon. What that "something" is remains a question, however.

"Our paper identifies when the system is likely to reach a breaking point, but it cannot determine what will happen at that breaking point with the current data," said study first author Davide Zaccagnino, a postdoctoral researcher who studies geological hazards at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China.

The paper is currently under review for publication in a peer-reviewed journal but has yet to be formally published; Zaccagnino and his colleagues posted it ahead of publication on the preprint database arXiv.

The researchers used a physics-based model to determine whether Campi Flegrei's accelerating activity falls into one of two categories. One is exponential acceleration, in which the speed of activity increases at a fixed rate. The other is called finite-time singularity, which means the acceleration itself is accelerating. Like a car with a stuck brake, the faster you go, the faster your rate of speed picks up.

This is important because it's not just an uptick in activity that determines whether a volcano will blow its top. The key, Zaccagnino told Live Science, is whether the crust has reached the point that it can no longer support the accumulating stress. It's like an athlete at the end of a marathon: A single step they could have taken with ease at the starting point might be the one that leads them to collapse at the finish line.

In other words, those previous periods of unrest in the 20th century matter, said Christopher Kilburn, a volcanologist at University College London who was not involved in the research.

"At each emergency, the crust is being stretched just that bit further, so the later emergencies are building on the previous ones," Kilburn told Live Science. .

What Zaccagnino and his colleagues found was that at Campi Flegrei, the pattern of seismicity fits a pattern of accelerating-accelerating change. That means the process feeding this change is self-feeding. Both ground uplift data and earthquake data indicate that this increasing rate of acceleration can self-sustain until around 2030 to 2034. At that point, something's got to give.

The movement of deep magmatic fluids are driving this process, fracturing and uplifting the brittle crust of the caldera, Zaccagnino said. What isn't clear is what happens when that process hits its end point. The nature of that transition could be an eruption, or it could be some other geological change that shifts the activity or settles it down. Nor does the research say what size or kind of eruption might occur, if one does, Kilburn noted.

Zaccagnino and his team are working to build a system that updates this activity prediction every few months based on the latest earthquakes and uplift from Campi Flegrei. The idea is to have a continuous, time-stamped record of forecasts for use by emergency management agencies, he said.

Kilburn warned that he would be leery of putting a potential date on an upcoming eruption, but he said the paper was an important additional piece of information pointing to fundamental shifts in how Campi Flegrei is behaving.

"Things are changing," he said, "and, therefore, past experience is not necessarily a good guide to the future."

What do you know about volcanos? Test your knowledge with our volcano quiz!

Yellowstone's famous supervolcano is likely being fueled in a completely different way from what many scientists assumed. New research suggests that Yellowstone's volcanic activity is actually driven by shifts in Earth's crust, rather than a deep well of magma underground as previously thought.

This finding could help scientists predict future volcanic activity and better understand how the volcano will behave.

"Our work changes the [understanding of how] the magma plumbing system works, so future eruption models have to take this into account," study co-author Lijun Liu, a geologist with the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Live Science.

The Yellowstone area, where Earth's crust is relatively thin, is a hotbed of volcanic activity. In the last 2.1 million years, Yellowstone has seen three major eruptions, with the most recent taking place 631,000 years ago. The last supereruption created the Yellowstone caldera, which is more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) wide. A caldera is the bowl-shaped depression left in the ground after the volcano's molten rock has exploded to the surface.

There is a long-standing debate about the origin of Yellowstone's volcanics. Some scientists think there is a deep mantle plume beneath its surface. A mantle plume is a column of very hot rock that travels from Earth's core-mantle boundary, which heats material in the crust. But others argue that Yellowstone's volcanic activity is due to pressures within the crust and mantle.

"The consequences of these differing hypotheses is what we would expect in the future for the Yellowstone volcanic system," Jamie Farrell, chief seismologist of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory who was not involved in the new research, told Live Science.

In the new study, published April 9 in the journal Science, the researchers argued that tectonics alone can heat the magma reservoirs underneath Yellowstone without the need for a deep mantle plume.

They created a 3D model, which incorporated past tectonic plate movements around western North America, the present-day mantle structure under Yellowstone, and data about the lithosphere, which is Earth's hard rocky crust.

The team found that Yellowstone's magma plumbing was controlled by tectonics, rather than a mantle plume, and that two opposing forces are pulling at the system, Liu said.

The lithosphere underneath Yellowstone has different densities, making some parts of it heavier than others. This causes the outer crust to stretch towards the west coast of the U.S., Liu said. It is a bit like dough being stretched.

At the same time, an old tectonic plate — the Farallon slab — is sinking below central-eastern North America, dragging the bottom of the crust downward and tilting the volcanic plumbing system, he said.

At Yellowstone, these two forces compete directly with each other. "This competition pulls open the lithosphere below Yellowstone," Liu said, adding that the plumbing system connects the surface of Yellowstone with layers below Earth's crust and draws the magma upwards.

Ninfa Bennington, a volcano seismologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory who wasn't involved in the research, told Live Science that a recent geophysical study showed that Yellowstone's magma originates in the southwest of the complex in the upper mantle, just below the lithosphere. From there, the magma migrates to the northeast, underneath the crust below the Yellowstone caldera. The new study shows how the magma could follow this route.

"Before this paper, to my knowledge, there has not been a study explaining why the magmas that fuel the Yellowstone volcanic system follow this path of migration," she said.

Understanding how the magma gets heated will help scientists to more accurately predict future activity in the area. It "will allow for a better estimation of what we can expect in the future", Farrell said. Over the last 17 million years, the active volcanics have been "burning" through relatively warm and thin crust, but fairly soon — in geologic terms, at least — it will start burning through the much colder, harder and thicker crust that lies just to the east of current Yellowstone, he said.

"Depending on what the source is — mantle plume or tectonics — the resulting activity may be different," Farrell said.

Yellowstone is not the only volcanic system that could benefit from this type of modeling, Liu said. It could also be used to better understand Toba in southeast Asia, Taupo in New Zealand and the active volcanoes in northeastern China, he said.

Bennington agreed that the new study and the accumulated knowledge about Yellowstone could help scientists explain other volcano systems. "This same type of analysis can be applied to improve our understanding of how magma migrates into high hazard caldera systems around the world," she said.

What do you know about the US's first national park? Test your smarts with our Yellowstone quiz!

Mount Etna is like no other volcano on Earth, new research finds. In fact, the volcano may have formed in a bizarre way, reminiscent of how some seamounts, called petit-spot volcanoes, grow on the ocean floor, researchers reported April 7 in the journal JGR Solid Earth. Although these seamounts are tiny —‬ just a few hundred feet tall — Mount Etna towers 11,165 feet (3,403 meters) above sea level.

"This actually represents a new type of volcanism," Sarah Lambart, a petrologist at the University of Utah who was not involved in the new research, told Live Science.

Before this study, researchers split volcanoes into three types, Sébastien Pilet, a lecturer in Earth sciences at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, told Live Science.

Mid-ocean ridge volcanoes form where the oceanic plate pulls apart and magma from below rises to form a new crust. Then, there are intraplate volcanoes, like the Yellowstone caldera or the volcanoes forming the Hawaiian Islands, where a "hotspot" in the mantle causes a concentrated zone of eruptions. Finally, there are subduction zone volcanoes, like Mount Rainier in Washington and Mount Fuji in Japan. These volcanoes form on the continental crust inland from a subduction zone, where an oceanic plate pushes under the continent, and they're driven by the water in the oceanic plate causing rocks to melt in the subsurface.

Mount Etna, located on the Italian island of Sicily, fits none of these categories. It sits near where the African Plate is sliding under the Eurasian Plate, but it's right on top of where the plates meet, rather than inland like most subduction zone volcanoes. Chemically speaking, Mount Etna's lava also looks like hotspot volcano lava, even though there is no evidence for a hotspot underneath it.

On top of that, Etna's evolution has been weird. Early in the volcano's history, it erupted small amounts of silica-rich lava. Later, it started spewing a lot of lava rich in alkali metals, like potassium and sodium. This is unusual, Pilet said; normally, silica-rich lava comes from magma reservoirs with a lot of melt, so they erupt in large volumes, while alkali-rich lava comes from less-melted rocks in the mantle and thus tends to erupt in small amounts.

To figure out what's been happening at Etna, Pilet and his colleagues studied the geochemistry of the lava layers across the volcano's history.

They found that Etna's lava seems to arise from a melty layer at the top of the mantle known as a low-velocity zone, because seismic waves slow down in these regions. These low-velocity zones are likely widespread, Pilet said, but the melt rarely reaches the surface. What makes Etna special is its location in a complicated tectonic zone. The subducting plate isn't diving under the Eurasian Plate evenly, Pilet said; it's partially stuck, leading to the rock folding and deforming. "The folds are allowing the magma to rise up," he said.

The initial magma had to travel from the low-velocity zone through the African Plate, and it reacted with the crust along the way to form large amounts of silica-rich lava, Pilet said. (Continental crust is rich in silica.) After that passage, a more direct conduit from the mantle to the surface brought up less-adulterated alkali lava from the low-velocity zone, but in smaller supply.

This finding is intriguing, Lambart said, because the role of magma's interactions with the lithosphere, which includes the crust and upper mantle, in volcanic eruptions is underexplored. That means that, although Etna is one of a kind, the unique type of volcanism it represents might point to more widespread phenomena.

"The lithosphere might actually have a very important role in contributing one way or another to the magmatic activity we are seeing everywhere, not only Mount Etna," she said.

What do you know about volcanos? Test your knowledge with our volcano quiz!

Scientists know that Mars spins a little faster each year, but the cause has been a mystery. Now, a new study published Feb. 18 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets suggests the reason may lie deep underground, where a huge plume of buoyant rock could be stirring beneath the Red Planet's crust.

This strange plume could help to explain not just Mars' quicker rotation but also how the planet holds on to geologic heat far longer than expected — forcing scientists to rethink how small, rocky worlds cool and die.

"The Martian surface is so old and shows all these complex but largely not well understood process[es], which I think we can start to unravel by combining interior with surface," Bart Root, an assistant professor of planetary exploration at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and first author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "Understanding Mars will help in understanding our solar system, as its history is laid out on the red soil."

Looking under the surface

Mars has some of the largest volcanoes and mountains in the solar system. This is because, unlike Earth, Mars does not seem to have plate tectonics, the shifting crustal plates that drive much of our planet's volcanic activity. Instead, the lava from Mars' ancient active volcanoes just sits there, piling up and building far bigger structures over time. This resulted in the formation of the Tharsis volcanic province, a volcano-strewn region that stretches 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) across the planet's surface.

In 2018, NASA sent the InSight lander to the Red Planet to better understand the planet's interior, which, in turn, could help reveal more about its volcanoes. For years, the lander studied Mars' interior, giving scientists a direct estimate of the crust's thickness.

Using data from InSight, Root and the team ran computer simulations to test what kinds of structures could explain why the volcanic region has dominated one side of Mars. Those models pointed to a plume of unusually light material — called a "negative mass anomaly," or something less dense than the rock that surrounds it — in the mantle beneath the Tharsis region.

According to the researchers, this anomaly may explain how the Tharsis region became so large and full of volcanoes. It could also signal that fresh volcanic activity on Mars may be possible in the future.

"The negative or light mass anomaly will move upwards and hit the lithosphere of Mars, introducing melt pockets that have the potential to penetrate the crust and erupt as volcanoes," Root said. (The lithosphere is a single rigid outer shell approximately 310 miles (500 km) thick.

A solution to spin?

The researchers then asked whether that same hidden plume of material could also explain Mars' strange spin rate. Earlier measurements comparing data from the Viking landers, which explored Mars in the 1970s, with data from InSight showed that Mars' day is shrinking by roughly 70 microseconds per year. That means the planet is rotating slightly faster over time.

Root and his team used their simulations to calculate whether this less-dense material underneath Tharsis could shift mass inside Mars enough to influence the planet's spin.

"With some simple back-on-the-envelope calculations, we can explain the order of magnitude of the observed speed up," Root said. "Of course more complicated modeling will be needed to actually link this better."

Root compared this process to someone spinning in a desk chair while holding heavy books. If the books are pulled inward, the spin speeds up. Mars may be doing something similar with this less-dense material.

"A negative mass flowing upwards means something heavier needs to go down, and because the mass anomaly is located on the equator of Mars, this means the heavier mass is going closer to [the] rotation axis, hence a speed up," Root said.

Besides being a possible solution to some of Mars' biggest mysteries, these models could help scientists better understand how rocky planets cool and eventually die. Mars is much smaller than Earth, so researchers have long assumed it lost its internal heat relatively quickly. But if the Red Planet still has enough energy to drive deep mantle motion, that suggests smaller worlds may stay active longer than expected.

"I would love to show that Mars is more interesting than was assumed," Root said.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Mar. 25 to make clear there isn't currently an active volcano on Mars, as a previous headline suggested. The new discovery hints that fresh volcanic eruptions may be possible in the future, and that Mars is not volcanically dead after all.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

A photograph of an amateur volcanologist standing barefoot on the lava fields of Vanuatu's Mount Yasur has won the Portraiture category of the Open competition of this year's Sony World Photography Awards. Fine art and documentary photographer Elle Leontiev captured the image of Philip, the "barefoot volcanologist" on Tanna, a remote Pacific island approximately 120 miles (190 kilometers) from the main island of Efate.

"It was actually tough conditions on the day. The volcano was spewing a lot of ash that day, a lot of sulfur," Leontiev told Live Science. "It was really hard just to breathe; I was struggling. It was really windy, and a lot of the ash and sulfur was just being blown straight at us. We actually got off the volcano because it was too dangerous to stay up there."

Mount Yasur is a 1,184-foot (361 meters) active volcano on the eastern side of Tanna. It has been erupting since at least 1774, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program, with regular low-to-moderate Strombolian explosions. The last period of major unrest was December 2025. Because of its frequent, moderate explosive activity, Mount Yasur is one of the most accessible Strombolian volcanoes in the world.

Philip, who was born and lives at the base of the volcano, has spent years studying and monitoring Mount Yasur. He trained with French volcanologist Thomas Boyer — but with limited access to further education and the high cost of fees, Philip has no formal qualifications.

Boyer, lab manager and chief scientist at Geolab XP, a Vanuatu-based independent geological laboratory, met Philip in 2011 while visiting Yasur.

"I started to teach him stuff about volcanoes at the same time he was teaching me how to approach the Yasur and (volcano) field techniques he learned since he was a small boy," he told Live Science in an email. "We complemented each other from the start and have since successfully blended our two worldviews: science and Melanesian customs. … Philip has progressively played an increasingly important role locally as a knowledgeable observer of Yasur and as a bridge between the volcano, visiting scientists, and the communities of Tanna."

Because of the volcanic soil, Tanna is extremely fertile. People on the island, which has a population of around 30,000, rely on farming and tourism, focusing on basic needs and cultural customs. "Philip's sort of that exception to the rule in a sense that, yeah, he's a man of science; he loves science," Leontiev said.

Activity at Yasur generally consists of explosive bursts that eject "volcanic bombs," ash and gas from the vents in the summit crater, Boyer said. It's relatively predictable, he added, which is why controlled tourism is possible.

As a guide, Philip takes researchers and tourists up the volcano, but there's been a significant decline in visitors to Vanuatu in recent years.

"It's pretty isolated out there now," Leontiev said. In 2015, Tropical Cyclone Pam, one of the worst Pacific storms in recorded history, severely damaged Vanuatu's infrastructure and wiped out crops, livestock and fisheries. Tourism was also severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2024, the main domestic airline, Air Vanuatu, was placed into liquidation. Then, in December 2024, the country was hit by a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that caused extensive destruction and affected over 80,000 people.

Vanuatu, a chain of around 80 volcanic islands, is also at huge risk from climate change, with extreme weather, coastal erosion, sea level rise and ocean acidification affecting resources and tourism.

Leontiev said Philip now collaborates with the Vanuatu Meteorology & Geo-hazards Department, visiting the seismic stations on the volcano and occasionally carrying out sampling. He also works at the nearby volcano museum that Boyer set up.

"Yasur is embedded in the cultural and spiritual life of Tanna," Boyer said. "All communities consider it part of their identity and history, and people have lived safely around it for generations, respecting the volcano and understanding its rhythms. Philip and I tried to highlight that in our museum, that science and traditions are not at odds with each other."

The museum, Haos Blong Volkeno, is an educational center and hub for visiting scientists. "It provides an important local base for logistics, field coordination, and scientific exchanges between international researchers and the local community," Boyer said, adding that both he and Philip help visiting scientists access craters, carry out observations, and maintain and check monitoring equipment.

"On a day-to-day basis, Philip's work is a mix of observation, guiding, and informal monitoring," Boyer said. "Because he lives directly next to the volcano, he has a continuous awareness of its behaviour. This kind of long-term visual and experiential knowledge is extremely valuable for us as volcanologists, it can help [build] models and better predict future eruptions."

The suit Philip is wearing in the photograph was donated by a group of scientists who visited the volcano, Leontiev said. He goes barefoot because he always has. "[His feet are] pretty resistant to the elements," she said. "Also his feet are so huge that no shoes fit him." Actor Will Smith, whom Philip helped guide for the 2021 National Geographic documentary "Welcome to Earth," had a pair of shoes custom-made for him, "but I don't know if he wears them," Leontiev added.

Philip's aim is to send his son, John, to university to become Tanna's first official volcanologist. John, who is of university age, is now working with Boyer to learn about volcanoes. "The passion has been passed on to the next generation," he said. "We want to help John do what Philip was unable to do formally: study science and volcanology."

Because Vanuatu has no dedicated volcanology program, he hopes to study in New Caledonia or New Zealand. "Education in Vanuatu is limited, and they also have to pay it out of their own pocket," Leontiev said. "It's around $2,000 a year, which is really high." According to the United Nations Urban Resilience Hub, the average income for a person in Vanuatu's capital, Port Vila, is around $350 per month.

Cinematographer Guillaume Beaudoin, who made a short film about Philip's work after meeting him while filming volcanoes on Vanuatu's remote islands, launched a campaign to raise funds for John's education.

"Philip is a really good person, a really kind person," Leontiev said, "and someone who believes a lot in his community and looks out for everybody. I think that desire to see the youth succeed and get an education is something really admirable about him and something that he strives for regardless of his circumstances. He's also someone that hasn't let his dreams die in the face of any obstacles. I think that's pretty special."

Sony World Photography Awards 2026. Exhibition at Somerset House in London, April 17 to May 4, 2026. worldphoto.org

The next global volcanic disaster is more likely to come from volcanoes that appear dormant and are barely monitored than from the likes of famous volcanoes such as Etna in Sicily or Yellowstone in the US.

Often overlooked, these "hidden" volcanoes erupt more often than most people realise. In regions like the Pacific, South America and Indonesia, an eruption from a volcano with no recorded history occurs every seven to ten years. And their effects can be unexpected and far-reaching.

One volcano has just done exactly that. In November 2025, the Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia has erupted for the first time in recorded history (at least 12,000 years that we know of). It sent ash plumes 8.5 miles into the sky, with volcanic material failing in Yemen and drifting into air space over northern India.

You don't have to look far back in history to find another example. In 1982, the little-known and unmonitored Mexican volcano El Chichón erupted explosively after lying dormant for centuries. This series of eruptions caught authorities off-guard: hot avalanches of rock, ash and gas flattened vast areas of jungle. Rivers were dammed, buildings destroyed, and ash fell as far as Guatemala.

More than 2,000 people died and 20,000 were displaced in Mexico's worst volcanic disaster in modern times. But the catastrophe did not end in Mexico. The sulphur from the eruption formed reflective particles in the upper atmosphere, cooling the northern hemisphere and shifting the African monsoon southwards, causing extreme drought.

This alone would test the resilience and coping strategies of any region. But when it coincided with a vulnerable population that was already experiencing poverty and civil war, disaster was inevitable. The Ethiopian (and East African) famine of 1983-85 claimed the lives of an estimated 1 million people. This brought global attention to poverty with campaigns like Live Aid.

Few scientists, even within my field of Earth science, realise that a remote, little-known volcano played a part in this tragedy.

Despite these lessons, global investment in volcanology has not kept pace with the risks: fewer than half of active volcanoes are monitored, and scientific research still disproportionately focuses on the well-known few.

There are more published studies on one volcano (Mount Etna) than on all the 160 volcanoes of Indonesia, Philippines and Vanuatu combined. These are some of the most densely populated volcanic regions on Earth – and the least understood.

The largest eruptions don't just affect the communities around them. They can temporarily cool the planet, disrupt monsoons and reduce harvests across entire regions. In the past, such shifts have contributed to famines, disease outbreaks and major social upheaval, yet scientists still lack a global system to anticipate or manage these future risks.

To help address this, my colleagues and I recently launched the Global Volcano Risk Alliance, a charity that focuses on anticipatory preparedness for high-impact eruptions. We work with scientists, policymakers and humanitarian organisations to highlight overlooked risks, strengthen monitoring capacity where it is most needed, and support communities before eruptions occur.

Acting early, rather than responding only after disaster strikes, stands the best chance of preventing the next hidden volcano from becoming a global crisis.

Why 'quiet' volcanoes aren't safe

So why do volcanoes fail to receive attention proportionate to their risk? In part, it comes down to predictable human biases. Many people tend to assume that what has been quiet will remain quiet (normalcy bias). If a volcano has not erupted for generations, it is often instinctively considered safe.

The likelihood of an event tends to be judged by how easily examples come to mind (this mental shortcut is known as availability heuristic). Well-known volcanoes or eruptions, such as the Icelandic ash cloud from 2010, are familiar and can feel threatening, while remote volcanoes with no recent eruptions rarely register at all.

These biases create a dangerous pattern: we only invest most heavily after a disaster has already happened (response bias). El Chichón, for instance, was only monitored after the 1982 catastrophe. However, three-quarters of large eruptions (like El Chichón and bigger) come from volcanoes that have been quiet for at least 100 years and, as a result, receive the least attention.

Volcano preparedness needs to be proactive rather than reactive. When volcanoes are monitored, when communities know how to respond, and when communication and coordination between scientists and authorities is effective, thousands of lives can be saved.

Disasters have been averted in these ways in 1991 (at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines), in 2019 (at Mount Merapi in Indonesia) and in 2021 (at La Soufrière on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent).

To close these gaps, the world needs to shift attention towards undermonitored volcanoes in regions such as Latin America, south-east Asia, Africa and the Pacific – places where millions of people live close to volcanoes that have little or no historical record. This is where the greatest risks lie, and where even modest investments in monitoring, early warning and community preparedness could save the most lives.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Colombia's Coconucos volcanic chain is a high mountain ridge pockmarked with at least 14 volcano craters. These craters form a line that runs northwest-to-southeast, offering striking aerial views and images.

Twelve volcanoes in the Coconucos volcanic chain have summits higher than 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level. The tallest volcano, at about 15,400 feet (4,700 m) above sea level, is the Pan de Azúcar, which until a few decades ago was permanently covered in snow.

The second-tallest volcano in the chain, known as Puracé, is Coconucos's only active volcano and one of the most active volcanoes in Colombia. Puracé, meaning "fire mountain" in the Quechua family of languages, stands 15,260 feet (4,650 m) high and sits at the northwesternmost end of the chain. Its last eruption was in early December 2025, when the volcano spewed gas and ash up to 3,000 feet (900 m) into the sky and showered nearby areas with fine debris. Colombian authorities issued an alert on Nov. 29 and the outburst continued Monday (Dec. 15).

Puracé showed signs of activity in 2022 and 2023, but the volcano's last recorded eruption before the most recent one was in 1977. The last measurements before the 2025 eruption showed that Puracé's crater has a diameter of 1,640 feet (500 m).

The Coconucos volcanic chain is located in Puracé National Park in the Andes mountains. The region is a misty grassland ecosystem known as páramo, with temperatures ranging between 37 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 18 degrees Celsius). Snow was widespread on mountain tops in Puracé National Park until a century ago, but this is rare nowadays, according to Colombia's national parks website.

Several of Colombia's most important rivers originate in Puracé National Park, including the Cauca, Magdalena, Patía and Caquetá. The national park is peppered with sulfur springs and clear lagoons, attracting tourists and hikers.

The Coconuco people have traditionally inhabited, and continue to live in, the region.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

A restless Russian volcano sent an ash cloud 32,800 ft feet (10 kilometers) into the air in late November in an eruption that may bring the mountain closer to its original height.

The Bezymianny volcano is a dramatic, cone-shaped stratovolcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. It blew itself apart in 1956, but a 2020 study found that it has nearly grown back — and eruptions like the one that created an ash plume on Nov. 26 are the reason. That study found that the mountain should achieve its pre-collapse height between the years 2030 and 2035.

Seven decades ago, Bezymianny towered at least 10,213 feet (3,113 meters) above sea level. Then, on March 30, 1956, a massive eruption blew out the slope of the volcano, collapsing the summit and turning the cone-shaped mountain into a horseshoe-shaped stone amphitheater.

Almost immediately, though, the mountain started to reform, starting as a lava dome perched in the midst of this amphitheater. Over the years, the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology in Kamchatka, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has monitored the mountain's growth with fieldwork, web cameras and observation flights. A series of photographs taken from flights between 1949 and 2017 shows that the volcano has nearly reached its previous height, the researchers reports in 2020. Between 1956 and 2017, the researchers found, the mountain added 932,307.2 cubic feet (26,400 cubic meters) of rock per day, on average, the researchers found.

"The most surprising thing was the fast growth of the new volcanic edifice," study co-authors Alexander Belousov and Marina Belousova, both volcanologists at the Institute of Volcanology, told Live Science in an email.

The volcano now produces a couple of explosive eruptions a year, on average. The late-November event featured not only a billowing ash cloud, but also hot avalanches of gas and rock known as pyroclastic flows, Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program reported Dec. 2.

As the volcano reaches its original height, the stability of its slopes is an important question, Belousov and Belousova told Live Science.

"It is known that similar edifices located inside horseshoe-shaped craters can experience one more large scale collapse and, as a result, a large scale explosive eruption," they said.

The flyover images reviewed in 2020 showed that the volcano not only sends out explosive clouds of ash and gas, but that it grows by what scientists called effusive eruptions: non-explosive flows of lava. The first of these was visible in 1977. Over time, this lava has become less rich in the mineral silica and less viscous, or goopy. Layers of this effusive lava have built up to turn Bezymianny back into a cone-shaped stratovolcano.

Researchers are still monitoring the mountain from the ground as well as by satellite, Belousov and Belousova said. Though each volcano has its own trajectory, there are many volcanoes around the world that have experienced collapse and regrowth, such as Mount St. Helens in the U.S.

"The collected dataset is very important because the obtained knowledge allows volcanologists all over the world to make long-term forecasts of the behavior of different volcanoes which experienced large-scale collapses in their history," the researchers said.

Homo floresiensis — a small ancient human species nicknamed the "hobbit" — may have gone extinct around 50,000 years ago because declining rainfall levels reduced the prey available for hunting. This may have forced them to migrate to areas where they competed with modern humans, new research suggests.

The rainfall shortage would not have been the only reason why they went extinct, the team noted. A volcanic eruption that occurred around 50,000 years ago may also have been a significant factor in their extinction.

So far, fossils of the hobbit have been found in only one cave, known as Liang Bua, on Flores island in Indonesia. Since the discovery of H. floresiensis was first reported publicly in 2004, scientists have been trying to determine how the diminutive species lived and why it went extinct.

Now, in a paper published Monday (Dec. 8) in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, scientists report that rainfall on the island appears to have declined considerably before 50,000 years ago. They also found that the population of Stegodon, a genus of a now-extinct elephant relative that the hobbits hunted, also diminished before vanishing from Flores around 50,000 years ago.

To determine how rainfall on the island changed, the team studied a stalagmite from Liang Luar, a cave on Flores that is close to Liang Bua. Stalagmites grow when water evaporates and forms calcium carbonate. The new growth also has small amounts of other minerals, such as magnesium. Stalagmites don't grow as fast during times of water shortage, and the growth that does occur tends to have less calcium carbonate and more magnesium, the researchers noted in their paper. This means that by measuring the ratio of magnesium to calcium carbonate, the team can determine when rainfall decreased or increased, and by how much.

The researchers found that average annual rainfall declined from 61.4 inches (1,560 millimeters) 76,000 years ago to 40 inches (990 mm) 61,000 years ago. The island continued to have this reduced rainfall level through 50,000 years ago. At that point, there was an eruption at a nearby volcano, and a layer of ejected rock covered the island.

When the team analyzed the remains of Stegodon teeth, they found that the number of these animals decreased on the island between 61,000 and 50,000 years ago, before vanishing after the eruption. The researchers think the reduction in rainfall led to a decrease in Stegodon populations, making life more difficult for the hobbits as they formed a major part of their diet.

As rainfall declined, Stegodon populations may have migrated to the coasts of the island, with the hobbits following them.

"We suspect that if the Stegodon population were declining due to reduced river flow then they would have migrated away to a more consistent water source," Nick Scroxton, a research scientist of hydrology, paleoclimate and paleoenvironments at University College Dublin and co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. "So it makes sense for the hobbits to have followed."

It's possible that moving to the coast could have brought the hobbits into contact with Homo sapiens groups who were expanding throughout the region. This contact could have resulted in competition for resources and even intergroup conflict, Scroxton suggested. Additionally, the volcanic eruption around 50,000 years ago would have made things even worse for the hobbits.

"This looks like a very impressive study," said Julien Louys, a palaeontologist at Griffith University in Australia who has conducted extensive research on hominins but was not involved in the new research, told Live Science in an email. A reduction in rainfall can have a major impact on an island as small as Flores, he noted.

"There's only a limited amount of space on an island, and only so many types of environments that can be harboured," Luoys said. "When things get drier, an animal can't simply move off the island, and any potential refugia they could use are going to either disappear or become very crowded, very quickly."

Debbie Argue, an honorary lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the work, also praised the research. "The paper gives us an excellent insight into a changing climatic environment in the region and is a most welcome contribution to knowledge about past conditions on Flores," Argue told Live Science in an email.

An unknown volcanic eruption in the mid-14th century may have set the stage for the spread of the Black Death in Europe, according to a new study. By triggering a cool and overcast period in the Mediterranean, the eruption started a domino effect that led to a downturn in agricultural production, which required merchants to import grain — and the bacterium Yersinia pestis that causes bubonic plague — via the Black Sea.

The bubonic plague pandemic, more commonly known as the Black Death, reached Europe in 1347 and quickly affected Italian port cities. The plague then spread throughout Europe over the next few years, resulting in the deaths of between 30% and 60% of the population.

Martin Bauch, a historian at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Germany, told Live Science in an email that one very specific aspect of the plague pandemic intrigued him: "How and why did the Black Death reach Italy from the Black Sea at precisely this moment?"

To answer this question, Bauch and Ulf Büntgen, a geographer at the University of Cambridge, investigated climate-driven changes in the Mediterranean that could explain the sudden appearance of the Black Death in 1347. Their research was published Thursday (Dec. 4) in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

When combing through contemporaneous historical accounts, the researchers noticed reports of reduced sunshine, increased cloudiness and a dark lunar eclipse, all independently reported by observers in parts of Asia and Europe between 1345 and 1349. All of these astronomical and weather phenomena could be attributed to a large-scale volcanic aerosol layer, which has been known to cause cold spells as the sulfate aerosols reflect sunlight back into space.

Paleoclimate data gave the researchers a clue: High amounts of sulfur in polar ice cores suggested one or more eruptions of a previously unknown volcano around 1345.

"We cannot say very much about the volcanic eruption," Bauch said. "From the ice cores, we know that the eruption must have taken place in the tropics, because sulfate was found in similar concentrations in the ice of both the North and South Poles."

The researchers also looked at tree-ring data from around Europe and discovered that the summers of 1345, 1346 and 1347 were much colder than normal while the autumns were much wetter, causing soil erosion and flooding. Historical records also confirmed that changes in the environment had decreased the yield of a number of crops, including the grape harvest and grain production in Italy, requiring merchants to begin importing products from the Black Sea area to prevent famine.

"Upon return in the second half of 1347 CE, the Italian trade fleets, however, not only brought grain back to the Mediterranean harbours, but also carried the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis most likely via fleas that were feeding on grain dust during their long journey," the researchers wrote in the study.

The first cases of plague in humans were reported in Venice just a few weeks after the arrival of the last grain ships. "This initiates the typical infection cycle," Bauch said. "Rodent populations are infected first; once they die off, the fleas shift to other mammals and ultimately to humans."

Importing grain after several years' worth of volcano-induced climate change therefore prevented a Mediterranean-wide famine but also introduced the Black Death into Europe, the study authors proposed.

"This study brings in new information on the 1345 volcano, which helps explain why the Black Death — that is, the epidemic well-documented in sources from 1346 to 1350 — happened when it did," Monica H. Green, an independent scholar and expert on the Black Death who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "But it happened how it did — with a 'plague infrastructure' of rodents and insect vectors already established — because local reservoirs had already been established."

The onset of the Black Death resulted from a unique-but-random combination of short-term factors, like climate, and long-term factors, like the grain distribution system in Italy, the researchers wrote in the study.

Even though the Black Death resulted from a rare confluence of environmental and social factors, it's important to gain a better understanding of the causes of past pandemics, the researchers wrote, because "the probability of zoonotic infectious diseases to emerge and translate into pandemics is likely to increase in both a globalised and warmer world."

A volcano in Ethiopia erupted for the first time in at least 12,000 years on Sunday, sending a cloud of ash and smoke northeast across the Red Sea.

Hayli Gubbi, a volcano in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, erupted at around 8:30 a.m. UTC (3:30 a.m. EST) on Nov. 23. By 8 p.m. UTC (3 p.m. EST), the explosive phase of the eruption had stopped, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC) in France.

This is the first time Hayli Gubbi is known to have erupted in the Holocene — the present geological epoch that began at the end of the last ice age, around 11,700 years ago. Generally, if a volcano hasn't erupted in the Holocene, it is considered extinct.

The area where the volcano sits, however, is largely understudied, so past eruptions may have gone unnoticed.

Hayli Gubbi is the southernmost volcano in the Erta Ale Range, a chain of volcanoes in the Afar region. The range is part of the East African Rift System, where a major tectonic plate that makes up most of Africa is splitting in two. Though Hayli Gubbi has lain dormant for millennia, the Erta Ale volcano from which the range takes its name has been continuously active since at least 1967.

Arianna Soldati, a volcanologist at North Carolina State University, told Scientific American: "So long as there are still the conditions for magma to form, a volcano can still have an eruption even if it hasn’t had one in 1,000 years, 10,000 years."

The ash cloud from the eruption reached at least 45,000 feet (13,700 meters) in height and initially blew northeast over Yemen and Oman. Throughout Monday (Nov. 24) the plume continued northeast, billowing across northern India and into parts of China.

The Toulouse VAAC detected the volcanic plume via satellite and issued several updates on its progress before transferring responsibility for issuing advisories to the Tokyo VAAC Monday evening. Satellites captured images of the eruption from space.

No casualties have been reported, but one local official expressed concern over the impacts of the eruption on farmers and livestock in the region.

"While no human lives and livestock have been lost so far, many villages have been covered in ash and as a result their animals have little to eat," Mohammed Seid, a local administrator, told the Associated Press.

Ahmed Abdela, a resident of the nearby village of Afdera, told the Associated Press that the eruption "felt like a sudden bomb had been thrown with smoke and ash."

The eruptions of some mid-ocean volcanoes may be the echoes of supercontinent breakups that persisted for tens of millions of years after the rearrangement of Earth's surface, a new study suggests.

The new research hints that long after continents rift apart, instabilities in the mantle created by the breakups continue to eat away at the bases of continents, peeling off crust and feeding ocean volcanoes with unusual magma.

This phenomenon could explain why these volcanoes exist and create ocean outposts like the Christmas Island Seamount, a mountain chain in the Indian Ocean. One of these mountains, Christmas Island, pokes above sea level. It's a nature preserve famous for its lush rainforests and the annual migration of millions of crabs (Gecarcoidea natalis) — an event that coats the island in red carapaces.

The discovery is a "completely new mechanism" that also shapes the composition of the mantle, Thomas Gernon, a professor of geology at the University of Southampton in the U.K. and lead author of the new study, said in a statement.

The Christmas Island Seamount and similar undersea volcanoes have magma with odd compositions; they contain minerals that seem more like continental crust than oceanic crust. Researchers have hypothesized that perhaps these volcanoes are dredging up the remnants of oceanic crust that, long ago, was subducted into the mantle, carrying coastal sediments from the continents along with it.

Another idea is that mantle plumes — upwellings of rock from the deep mantle — are carrying ancient continental material back to the surface. But the unusual magmas are different enough that there may not be a single source that explains all of them, Gernon and his colleagues wrote in their new paper, published Nov. 11 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Instead, Gernon and his colleagues suggest that these volcanoes may be fed by continental rocks of various ages and compositions that peel off into the mantle after cataclysmic continental breakups. They examined volcanic rocks from the Walvis Ridge, an ocean ridge that stretches away from Africa starting near northern Namibia. These rocks showed a pattern where older eruptions contained magma that was more continent-like and gradually transitioned to more ocean-rock-like compositions.

Using computer models, the researchers found that after a continental breakup, a series of roiling waves in the mantle can travel toward the interior of the shifting continent, scraping continental crust off the bottom like a peeler against potato skin. This mineral-enriched material enters the mantle within a few million years of the continental breakup and does not return to the surface for about 5 million to 15 million years, the simulations showed. The process supplies tens of millions of years' worth of continental rock to the mantle, peaking about 50 million years after the rift of continents.

To test these ideas in the real world, the researchers next turned to the Christmas Island Seamount, again studying the ages and compositions of the volcanic rocks there. They found a pattern that matched the simulations: About 116 million years ago, 10 million years after India split from what would become Antarctica and Australia, the first volcanoes at the seamount started to erupt. The magmas were rich in continent-like minerals — a pattern that peaked within 40 million to 60 million years of the breakup. This enrichment gradually declined over time so that the magma looked more typical of oceanic rock.

The discovery points to the long-lasting impacts of a continent's breakup, the study authors said.

"We found that the mantle is still feeling the effects of continental breakup long after the continents themselves have separated," study co-author Sascha Brune, a geodynamicist at GFZ Potsdam in Germany, said in the statement. "The system doesn't switch off when a new ocean basin forms — the mantle keeps moving, reorganising, and transporting enriched material far from where it originated."

What's inside Earth quiz: Test your knowledge of our planet's hidden layers

An underwater volcano off the coast of Oregon could now blow its top by mid-to late-2026, scientists say.

In December last year, scientists said the Axial Seamount was nearing the threshold seen before an eruption a decade earlier and could erupt within a year. Now, they predict the eruption will likely come later than previously expected, by mid-to-late 2026.

Axial Seamount is located on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, a divergent plate boundary off the U.S. Pacific Northwest coast. It is the most active submarine volcano in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, with known eruptions in 1998, 2011 and 2015.

"After successfully forecasting the 2015 eruption at Axial, we've been attempting to forecast the next since then," Bill Chadwick, a research associate at Oregon State University who co-runs a blog about the seamount, told Live Science in an email.

In a presentation to the American Geophysical Union in December 2024, Chadwick and colleagues said that eruptions at Axial Seamount follow a period of high seismicity and steady ground inflation caused by magma rising below the seafloor. The last three eruptions happened at similar — though slightly increasing — levels of inflation, so the volcano would likely erupt again once it reached or exceeded this threshold, they argued.

Following the 2015 eruption, inflation below the seamount started to build again. But the inflation rate gradually declined through 2023, and "by the summer of 2023 the uplift rate was nearly zero," Chadwick noted in the presentation abstract, which he wrote in July 2024.

Then, in the fall of 2023, rates of inflation and seismicity picked up again, indicating "a fundamental change in the magma supply to the volcano," Chadwick wrote in the abstract. "Based on the current trends, and the assumption that Axial will be primed to erupt when it reaches the 2015 inflation threshold, our current eruption forecast window is between now (July 2024) and the end of 2025," he wrote.

By late 2024, Axial had reached 95% of the inflation level that preceded the eruption in 2015.

But by late April 2025, inflation rates had slowed again, and on Oct. 27, Chadwick updated the Axial Blog to say that it was time to revisit the December 2024 forecast. "It will take a bit more time than we anticipated to reach the same inflation threshold that the volcano reached before the last eruption," he wrote. "At the current rate of inflation, we won't get to that higher inflation threshold until mid-to-late 2026."

Axial Seamount is thought to behave similarly to Iceland's Krafla volcano, where the amount of inflation needed for an eruption increases slightly with each eruption, Chadwick told Live Science. The inflation threshold in 2015 was about 12 inches (30 centimeters) higher than it had been in 2011, so scientists assume that a similar increase in uplift might be needed now before another eruption occurs, he said.

Currently, the ground is 4 inches (10 cm) higher than it was minutes before the 2015 eruption, with potentially another 8 inches (20 cm) to go before the next eruption. "It's really just an educated guess, but also based on the previous behavior of volcanoes like Krafla," Chadwick said.

The reason for this increase in inflation with each eruption may be that magma rising to the surface compresses the surrounding crust, making it harder for magma to rise again in the same spot years later, Chadwick said. But inflation thresholds won't increase indefinitely, because the Juan de Fuca Ridge releases compressive stress in the crust as it spreads, he added.

Inflation rates and thresholds are unpredictable, which makes estimating the timing of an eruption difficult. "The forecasting attempts described in the Blog are based on simple pattern recognition in past monitoring and speculation about how that might play out in the future," Chadwick said.

However, a new wave of physics-based models could make the process easier: One model that Chadwick and colleagues have been working on can use previous monitoring data to accurately predict past eruptions, he said.

Starting this week (Nov. 10), the researchers will use this model to analyze real-time data from Axial Seamount and attempt to predict its next eruption, Chadwick said. The results won't be released until after the next eruption, as only that can demonstrate the success or failure of the model, he noted.

This striking satellite photo shows a barren Mars-like volcano lurking in the heart of the Costa Rican rainforest. The alien landscape contains a super-acidic lake that is a "paradise" for extreme microbes and provides researchers with an excellent analog for studying potential lifeforms on the Red Planet.

The unique volcano, named Poás, is the focal point of the Poás Volcano National Park in Costa Rica's Alajuela province. It is a stratovolcano that formed between 1.5 million and 700,000 years ago, with a summit that reaches 8,848 feet (2,697 meters) above sea level.

Satellite images make it look like Poás is situated in the middle of nowhere. However, around 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of the volcano (just out of shot in this photo), lie the suburbs of Costa Rica's capital San José, which is home to around 1.5 million people. As a result, the volcano is a popular tourist destination, despite being one of the most active volcanoes in Central America.

Poás has had dozens of major eruptions in the last 200 years, but also experiences many more smaller outbursts, where it puffs out a mix of steam, smoke and toxic gases, as well as the occasional ash cloud. Since 2005, the volcano has had 13 of these minor eruptive phases, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

Its most recent eruption began on Jan. 5 and persisted for the majority of 2025, although it has likely now come to an end. This phase's activity peaked in early May, when sulfur dioxide levels briefly impacted air quality in San José and ashfall damaged some nearby crops, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The main crater of Poás contains a highly acidic volcanic lake, named Laguna Caliente, which has an average pH value of just over 0, which is roughly equivalent to battery acid, according to the Earth Observatory. This crater, which is around 0.8 miles (1.3 km) wide, is also home to sporadic geysers.

While these extreme conditions mean no animals or plants live within the crater, the lake's acidic waters are home to a thriving microbial community dominated by extremophile bacteria in the genus Acidiphilium, which feast on metal compounds dissolved in the water.

"We have a very human-centric bias for what a nice, happy, temperate environment is to grow in," Rachel Harris, a microbial ecologist and geochemist at Harvard University who is currently involved in devising NASA's Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy, told the Earth Observatory. "The Poás system may be hostile to most forms of life we are familiar with. But for a microbe adapted to acid, heat and toxic metals, it's paradise," Earth Observatory representatives added.

Researchers are interested in Poás' extreme ecosystem because it is very similar to volcanic environments that likely existed on Mars more than 3 billion years ago, when the Red Planet was more similar to our own.

A 2022 study, for example, revealed that the low biodiversity and high resilience within Laguna Caliente's microbial community is very close to what researchers expect could have developed within potential Martian ecosystems.

Poás is particularly similar to a region of Mars, known as Home Plate, which was surveyed by NASA's Spirit rover in 2009. This 300-foot-wide (90 m) plateau likely had an acidic hydrothermal system that may have been almost identical to Laguna Caliente, according to the Earth Observatory.

Other types of extremophiles may also have once thrived on Mars, including lifeforms similar to lichens or photosynthetic algae. However, despite some promising recent findings from NASA's Perseverance rover, there is no hard evidence that the Red Planet has ever supported alien life.

This eerie astronaut photo shows a ghostly structure with a skull-like appearance glowering up into space from the floor of a giant volcanic pit in the Sahara.

The cranium lookalike is located on the floor of Trou au Natron, also known as Doon Orei — a 3,300-foot-wide (1,000 meters) volcanic caldera, or crater, in northern Chad. (Trou au Natron translates to "natron hole" in French, while Doon Orei means "big hole" in Teda.)

The volcanic pit was carved out by a massive eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago and sits at the heart of the Tibesti Massif, a 300-mile-long (480 kilometers) mountain range that stretches across the center of the Sahara desert through Chad and Libya, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

When viewed from space, the caldera's floor has an unmistakable skull-like appearance. But when viewed from ground level (see below), it looks almost unrecognizable.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The white color of the skull's mouth, nose and cheeks is the result of natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. This salty mix is extremely flaky and looks like cracked paint when viewed up close.

The eyes and nose hole areas are actually cinder cones — steep conical hills built around volcanic vents that tower above the rest of the caldera floor. The darker area to the left of the face is the shadow cast by the tall rim of the crater, which helps give the skull its distinctive shape.

Trou au Natron is barren and lifeless today, but experts believe it was once a thriving glacial lake. In the 1960s, researchers discovered fossils of sea snails and plankton beneath the pit's natron-covered floor, which date back to 14,000 years ago. In 2015, a follow-up expedition found algal fossils that date back as far as 120,000 years ago.

The caldera has been volcanically dormant since shortly after it formed. However, it is situated close to Tarso Toussidé, a broad volcanic feature covered with a sea of frozen lava (located just beyond the top of the satellite image). Tarso Toussidé is home to a stratovolcano that is still believed to be volcanically active despite not erupting for more than 12,000 years, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

Trou au Natron is not the only volcanic structure that looks like a skull when viewed from space: The Chiltepe Peninsula in Nicaragua's Lake Managua has a pair of volcanic lakes, each sitting within its own caldera, which give the landmass a very similar appearance to the caldera in Chad.

A newly discovered way to monitor magma movements beneath Mount Etna could help scientists forecast when it might erupt.

Mount Etna, located on the Italian island of Sicily, is Europe's largest active volcano. Humans have documented its activity for the past 2,700 years, but the volcano's eruptive history stretches as far back as 500,000 years.

Etna's most recent eruption, in June 2025, ejected a giant, 4-mile-high (6.5 kilometers) cloud of ash and triggered an avalanche of hot lava blocks and other debris. The eruption was expected, so officials were able to issue warnings on the morning of the event, but predictions don't always hit the nail on the head.

The novel method could make it easier to predict Mount Etna's eruptions. In a new study, researchers at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) analyzed a parameter called the b value, which describes the ratio of low-magnitude to high-magnitude earthquakes in a region of Earth's crust. This ratio can change as magma rises through the crust to the summit of a volcano, the researchers reported in a study published Oct. 8 in the journal Science Advances.

"Changes in the b value over time reflect how the stress inside the volcano is evolving," study lead author Marco Firetto Carlino, a geophysicist at INGV's Etna Observatory, told Live Science in an email. "Since magma ascent induces stress changes within the crust, tracking the b value can help reveal different stages of magma transfer from depth to the surface."

The b value is an established parameter in volcanology, but the researchers examined it in a novel way, with an updated statistical model. By compiling 20 years' worth of earthquake data from Mount Etna, they found a "very strong" correlation between the b value and Etna's volcanic activity, Firetto Carlino said.

Mount Etna sits in the collision zone between the African and European tectonic plates. As a result, a vertical fracture in Earth's crust known as a strike-slip fault underlies the volcano, thus facilitating the rise of magma to the surface, according to the study.

The crust beneath Mount Etna is up to 19 miles (30 km) thick. Magma rises through this volume before an eruption, but instead of replenishing a single magma chamber, the molten rock feeds a series of interconnected storage zones that are embedded in the crust at different depths.

The deepest magma storage zone is 7 miles (11 km) below sea level, Firetto Carlino explained, and it feeds an intermediate storage system with different zones likely extending 2 to 4 miles (3 to 7 km) deep. As magma rises, it travels through an intricate network of fractures and eventually reaches the last storage zone, which is located above sea level inside the volcano edifice.

The researchers had a wealth of data to work with and extract b values from, due to Etna's frequent activity. They analyzed seismic patterns in the 19 miles of crust beneath the volcano from 2005 to 2024, paying particular attention to how these patterns varied between crustal regions.

Generally, regions of Earth's crust with active magma storage zones show higher b values than more stable regions do, because the active zones experience more small earthquakes than bigger ones.

"This happens because rocks affected by moving magma become weak and highly fractured," Firetto Carlino said. "For example, when magma inside a storage releases volatiles, they permeate the surrounding rocks, making it easier for small fractures to slip."

Conversely, regions of Earth's crust that are more stable typically experience more big earthquakes than smaller ones, because it takes more force to break the rock. "Rocks with good mechanical properties can store stress for longer periods," Firetto Carlino said. "When they finally break, they produce larger earthquakes, corresponding to lower b values."

So, by tracking the b value over time, it may be possible for researchers to follow the movement of magma through the deep crust to the first storage zone, up from there to the intermediate storage system, and up again to the shallow storage zone. This method could help experts estimate the timings of eruptions at Mount Etna.

"Monitoring the b value offers a powerful way to track magma movement within the crust and assess the volcano's evolving state before eruptions," Firetto Carlino said.

Mount Etna was a good test for the study due to its layered magma storage zones and enormous seismic catalog, but the results might also apply elsewhere.

"In principle, the b value could also be used to track magma movements in other volcanic areas, provided that a sufficient number of earthquakes is available and that their locations are distributed across different crustal sectors, well constrained by previous geological studies," Firetto Carlino said.

A volcano in southern Iran thought to have been extinct for some 710,000 years has stirred.

New research published Oct. 7 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that an area of ground near the Taftan volcano's summit rose 3.5 inches (9 centimeters) over 10 months between July 2023 and May 2024. The uplift has not yet receded, suggesting a buildup of gas pressure below the volcano's surface.

The findings reveal the need for closer monitoring of the volcano, which hasn't been considered a risk to people before, said study senior author Pablo González, a volcanologist at the Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology, a research center of the Spanish National Research Council (IPNA-CSIC). Volcanoes are considered extinct if they haven't erupted in the Holocone era, which started 11,700 years ago. Given its recent activity, González said, Taftan might be more accurately described as dormant.

"It has to release somehow in the future, either violently or more quietly," González told Live Science. There is no reason to fear an imminent eruption, he said, but the volcano should be more closely monitored.

Taftan volcano is a 12,927-foot (3,940 meters) stratovolcano in southeastern Iran, situated among a rumple of mountains and volcanoes that was formed by the subduction of the Arabian ocean crust under the Eurasian continent. Today, the volcano hosts an active hydrothermal system and smelly, sulfur-emitting vents called fumaroles, but it isn't known to have erupted in human history.

When Mohammadhossein Mohammadnia, a doctoral student working under González at IPNA-CSIC, first examined satellite imagery of the volcano in 2020, he saw no evidence that it was doing much of anything. But then, in 2023, people started reporting gaseous emissions from the volcano on social media. The emissions could be smelled from the city of Khash about 31 miles (50 kilometers) away.

Mohammadnia took another look at the satellite imagery from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 mission, which provides round-the-clock imagery of Earth's surface. Taftan is remote and does not have a GPS monitoring system such as those found on volcanoes like Mount St. Helen's. The satellite imagery revealed a slight rise of the ground near the summit, indicating increased pressure below.

Mohammadnia calculated that the driver of this uplift sits 1,608 to 2,067 feet (490 to 630 m) below the surface. It's impossible to know exactly what is going on, but the researchers ruled out external factors like nearby earthquakes or rainfall, Mohammadnia told Live Science. The volcano's magma reservoir sits more than 2 miles (3.5 km) down — far deeper than whatever is driving the uplift.

Instead, either the uplift is caused by a change in the hydrothermal plumbing below the volcano that is leading to the buildup of gas, or a small amount of magma may have shifted beneath the volcano, allowing gases to bubble up into the rocks above, raising the pressure in rock pores and fractures, and causing the ground to heave up slightly.

The next stage in the research, according to González, will be to collaborate with scientists who do gas monitoring at volcanoes.

"This study doesn't aim to produce panic in the people," he said. "It's a wake-up call to the authorities in the region in Iran to designate some resources to look at this."

An artificial intelligence (AI) model has revealed never-before-seen geological structures at Italy's Campi Flegrei volcano, including a clear "ring fault" that could unleash magnitude 5 earthquakes.

So far in 2025, Campi Flegrei has produced five earthquakes above magnitude 4, and the volcano has been showing signs of unrest since 2005. But most of the earthquakes triggered in the region are going undetected, according to a new study that used AI to pinpoint tens of thousands of seismic events that have gone under the radar over the past few years.

"We've known that this is a risky place for a long time," study co-author William Ellsworth, a professor emeritus of geophysics at Stanford University, said in a statement. "Now we're seeing for the first time the geologic structures that are responsible."

Over the past 40,000 years, Campi Flegrei has produced two of the largest eruptions in Europe, and evidence suggests the volcano's earlier history was just as explosive. Scientists have been recording unrest at Campi Flegrei since the 1950s, but monitoring efforts increased in the 1980s after a swarm of 16,000 earthquakes prompted the evacuation of 40,000 residents.

To investigate modern threats from Campi Flegrei, Ellsworth and his colleagues developed an AI tool capable of identifying earthquakes that previous methods couldn't pick out.

Traditionally, seismologists identify earthquakes by analyzing seismograms, which are graphs with wiggly lines that represent shaking in the ground over time. Researchers look for a sudden increase in the wiggles' size, and this process is known as "phase picking," said study co-author Greg Beroza, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University.

"That's a simple and often effective means of picking a phase, but it doesn't 'learn' how to do it better so that it improves with time," Beroza told Live Science in an email. "In our approach, we train a machine learning model to pick phases. We base it on the collection of millions of examples where experts have done this already, and our method is designed to learn how to do this more effectively."

The team chose to have their tool analyze Campi Flegrei before other volcanoes for several reasons, including there being an urgent need to better understand this volcano's behavior, Beroza said. More than 360,000 people live inside Campi Flegrei's 7-mile-long (11 kilometers) caldera, and roughly 1.5 million people reside in the wider area. Unrest over the past 20 years ticked up in 2018 — and while there are currently no signs of an eruption, a particularly violent or shallow earthquake could present a huge danger to people as well as damage buildings, according to the statement.

The results from the AI tool, published Sept. 4 in the journal Science, reveal that three-quarters of earthquakes at Campi Flegrei between 2022 and mid-2025 went undetected. While traditional methods documented 12,000 earthquakes in this period, AI shows the number was closer to 54,000.

By mapping the location of these earthquakes, the researchers discovered faults — cracks in Earth's crust that can grind against each other and cause earthquakes — that previous methods hadn't highlighted. Notably, the team found two faults converging beneath Pozzuoli, a town west of Naples where evacuations took place in the 1980s. The location of these faults suggests "an earthquake in the magnitude 5 range is not out of the question," Ellsworth said.

This wasn't the only striking finding. Pozzuoli experienced uplift in the 1980s, and the same is happening again now, with the ground beneath the town rising by about 4 inches (10 centimeters) each year. It turns out, the area of uplift is encircled by several faults, forming a thin, well-marked "ring fault" that extends offshore, according to the statement.

"Our Italian colleagues were surprised to see the ring so clearly," study lead author Xing Tan, a doctoral student in Beroza's lab, said in the statement. "They expected to see something in the south where previous data had revealed scattered seismicity, but in the north, they'd never seen it so clearly."

Seismic activity along the ring fault could help predict changes in the system, as well as hint at the magnitudes of future earthquakes, Beroza said. But it doesn't provide new information about the likelihood or timing of Campi Flegrei's next eruption.

"All the analyzed seismicity from 2022 to mid-2025 is shallow, at depths above 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) and does not indicate any migration of magma towards the surface," Beroza said.

The team's results for Campi Flegrei indicate that the AI tool could be useful for other volcanoes, too. Places that have recently seen an uptick in seismic activity, such as Santorini in Greece, could benefit from a clearer understanding of the underlying geology, the researchers said in the statement.

This intriguing astronaut photo shows two volcanic lakes appearing to peer into space from a skull-like peninsula in Nicaragua, like a pair of heterochromatic googly eyes. This unusual scene, which is influenced by a subtle optical illusion, is completely unrecognizable from ground level.

If these lakes are considered eyes, then their head is the Chiltepe Peninsula, a rounded landmass that extends into the waters of Lake Managua. Known locally as Lago Xolotlán, it covers an area of around 400 square miles (1,040 square kilometers) in the heart of the Central American nation.

The peninsula, located around 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the capital city of Managua, was formed by a series of pyroclastic shield eruptions. During these blasts, mostly low-density materials, such as pumice, are violently ejected from beneath the surface, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. These major eruptions ended around 17,000 years ago. However, more recent volcanic activity has occurred there within the past 2,000 years.

The smaller lake (on the left), which is around 1.1 miles (1.7 km) wide, is located within the Apoyeque caldera. The larger lake (on the right), known as Laguna Xiloa, is around 1.5 miles (2.4 km) across at its widest point. It was formed by an explosive outburst that occurred when magma from below Apoyeque interacted with submerged groundwater.

When viewed from space, the lakes appear side by side. However, the surface of the Apoyeque lake sits at an altitude of around 1,300 feet (400 m), while Laguna Xiloa is close to sea level — meaning you would not be able to see both unless you stood on the crater rim of Apoyeque.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The two lakes are slightly different colors: Laguna Xiloa is a deep blue, while Apoyeque is greenish. If these bodies of water were really eyes, then they would be a rare example of heterochromia — a rare condition in which a person's eyes are different colors.

At first glance, the two lakes have a fairly similar size and shape. However, Apoyeque's lake is smaller and more rounded than Laguna Xiloa. The reason for this subtle illusion is that the rim of Apoyeque's crater is much more closely aligned to the outline of Laguna Xiloa, making them seem more similar at first glance.

Explosive potential

Both Apoyeque and Laguna Xiloa are technically active volcanoes, but they have not erupted for millennia and are unlikely to do so anytime soon, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

Laguna Xiloa last erupted approximately 6,000 years ago, whereas Apoyeque has had four major eruptions since then. The most recent and explosive of these is estimated to have occurred in around 50 B.C. and sculpted the shape of the crater that now holds its lake.

In 2012, a swarm of minor earthquakes was triggered by the movement of magma beneath Apoyeque, according to the Earth Observatory. However, this was not a sign of an imminent eruption.

If the larger volcano were to blow its top, it could impact some of the residents of Managua, as well as significantly endanger the residents of Bosques de Xiloa, a small town on the shores of Laguna Xiloa (visible in the satellite image).

A viral video created with artificial intelligence (AI) shows the catastrophic impact that a volcanic eruption at Mount Fuji could have on Tokyo, Japan, and its 37 million inhabitants. Fortunately, the informational video is not timed to any increased risk of an eruption — it's merely a public service announcement tied to Japan’s Volcanic Disaster Preparedness Day 2025.

The AI-generated video, released Aug. 22 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, warns of the speed with which volcanic ash could travel from the volcano to Japan's capital city before raining down on its roads, buildings, railways and other infrastructure. Clouds of debris from Mount Fuji could reach Tokyo in just one to two hours, subtitles beneath the video read, paralyzing the city's transport networks, cutting power supplies and affecting the respiratory health of millions of people.

"The moment may arrive without any warning," the subtitles, translating the video's narration from Japanese to English, say. "If Mt. Fuji erupted, volcanic ash may fall on Tokyo and impact us in a wide variety of ways."

In the video, a woman receives an alert on her phone warning of an eruption at Mount Fuji, which is located 60 miles (100 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo's city center. The clip then takes the viewer on an AI-generated tour of the potential impacts of volcanic ash on Tokyo's transport links, power lines, water supplies, residential buildings and inhabitants.

"It only takes a minimal accumulation of ash on runways and rails to render planes and trains unusable," the subtitles in the section of the video about transport infrastructure say. "A small amount of ash on roads may impact the operation of 2WD [two-wheel drive] vehicles, as the ash fall limits visibility and increases the risk of slippage, creating hazardous driving conditions."

Large amounts of ash may block Tokyo's sewers, contaminate freshwater supplies, crush power lines and collapse wooden roofs, according to the video. The city could also be plunged into darkness as ash particles block the sun, and access to food and other essentials may be temporarily suspended. Additionally, people might suffer adverse health effects from inhaling the particles, with pre-exiting respiratory conditions worsening with exposure.

Related: Supervolcanic 'hell' caldera in Japan is home to 17 different volcanoes — Earth from space

Mount Fuji is Japan's highest peak, measuring 12,389 feet (3,776 meters) tall. The last time the volcano erupted was in 1707, and the subsequent ashfall lasted for two weeks, according to the video. While Mount Fuji used to erupt about every 30 years, it has now been dormant for 318 years, but some experts think that it could blow at any moment.

However, the timing of the video is unrelated to any signs of an eruption, and there is no suggestion that Mount Fuji is close to exploding, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said in a statement seen by CNN. "The simulation is designed to equip residents with accurate knowledge and preparedness measures they can take in case of an emergency," government officials wrote in the statement.

Preparedness measures include stocking up on food and first aid supplies. In the video, parents show their child a pantry filled with canned food, water and medicines ready in case of an emergency.

The video was released for Volcanic Disaster Preparedness Day 2025, but this isn't the first time Tokyo's government has warned of the risk from Mount Fuji, according to CNN. In March, officials published guidelines recommending that people stock two weeks' worth of essential supplies in their homes at all times.

The Japanese government has been modeling earthquake and volcanic eruption scenarios for years, yet these investigations don’t coincide with specific risks from Mount Fuji or other geological features, Naoya Sekiya, a professor and risk communication expert at the University of Tokyo, told NBC News.

"There's no particular significance to the timing," Sekiya confirmed.

Japan is home to 111 active volcanoes — about one-tenth of the world's total — due to its position on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped belt of volcanoes around the Pacific Ocean. The country is located on the border between four tectonic plates that grind against each other and often collide, triggering swarms of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Perhaps the best known natural disaster to strike Japan was the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The magnitude 9 earthquake was the strongest in Japan's recorded history, with warnings going out to Tokyo residents just one minute before the shaking began.

This stunning astronaut photo shows the natural beauty of Japan's Aso Caldera — a giant crater-like bowl containing 17 different volcanoes, leftover from major eruptions spanning over 200,000 years.

Aso Caldera, also known as Mount Aso or Asosan, sits in the heart of Kyushu, the third largest of Japan's four major islands. The imposing structure measures up to 15 miles (24 kilometers) across and is surrounded by a ring-like ridge that reaches up to roughly 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) tall.

The caldera is home to 17 different volcanoes, ranging from small vents nestled within the landscape to sizable mountains that tower above their surroundings. The area's five largest cones — Takadake, Nekodake, Nakadake, Kishimadake and Eboshidake — are grouped near the caldera's center and are collectively known as "Aso Gogaku." Each one of these lofty peaks is taller than the caldera's outer rim.

Nakadake is one of the most active volcanoes in Japan and most recently erupted in October 2021, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. Two of the other central volcanoes, Kishimadake and Eboshidake, are also active but have not erupted for hundreds or thousands of years.

A 2018 study revealed that all three of these active peaks are fed by a large magma chamber located around 4 miles (6 km) below the surface.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Collectively, Aso Caldera is considered to be one of Earth's nine "supervolcanoes" because its network of volcanoes is technically capable of erupting in one massive explosion. However, similar to other superstructures, such as Yellowstone, the odds of this happening in the near or distant future are extremely small.

Today, the land between the central volcanoes and outer ridge is largely covered with urban areas and agricultural buildings, which gives it its speckled gray and white appearance, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. But in the past, most of the caldera's floor would have been covered by a trio of ancient lakes that have since dried up.

Ancient rivers that once drained these lakes also carved an opening in the caldera's western wall (at the bottom of this image), which is now home to the only major road in and out of the caldera.

Several hotsprings are also dotted throughout the caldera, including Jigoku, which translates to "hell" in Japanese.

Explosive history

Aso was carved out by four major pyroclastic eruptions that occurred between 300,000 and 90,000 years ago, according to Earth Observatory. Most of Kyushu was covered by volcanic rock, known as tephra, as a result of these eruptions.

Thick ash deposits from the fourth and largest eruption have also been found on Hokkaido Island, around 900 miles (1,450 km) to the north of the caldera. Experts now believe that this outburst reached level 8 on the volcanic explosivity index, the highest possible level of any eruption, which is largely why Aso is still considered a supervolcano.

Kyushu and the rest of Japan are located along the Pacific Ring of Fire — a roughly 25,000-mile-long (40,000 km) arc encircling large parts of the Pacific Ocean basin, where tectonic plates intersect one another. This region contains roughly three-quarters of the world's terrestrial volcanoes and is the site of around 90% of all earthquakes.

Aso is located directly above two intersecting fault lines where the Okinawa Plate and Amur Plate collide and the larger Pacific Plate is subducting beneath them both, which likely contributed to its explosive past.

Six volcanoes in far eastern Russia are now erupting following the 8.8 magnitude earthquake and aftershocks that shook the region last week.

Klyuchevskaya erupted first, on July 30. It had already shown signs of unrest before the earthquake, and experts deduced that the quake likely intensified the eruption but didn't trigger it. However, it's difficult to know the exact effect of the earthquake on the volcano. Eruptions of nearby volcanoes Shiveluch, Bezymianny, Karymsky, Avachinsky and Krasheninnikov soon followed and continue through today.

All of the volcanoes sit on the Ring of Fire, a geological feature notorious for volcanic and seismic activity.

The area around this parade of erupting volcanoes, called the Kamchatka Peninsula, is sparsely populated, so there doesn't seem to be an active threat to local communities. However, the eruptions could pose a risk to planes if they were to fly through ash plumes, Harold Tobin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, told Live Science in an email.

Despite the recent spate of eruptions, experts say this kind of volcanic activity is not out of the ordinary. "About 40 to 50 volcanoes are actively erupting around the world at any given time. Right now is no different," Tobin said. "Kamchatka is a very volcanically active region."

Were the eruptions caused by the earthquake?

There is no clear or singular way an earthquake can cause volcanic eruptions, but these two events can co-occur at subduction zones, areas where one tectonic plate dives beneath another.

Related: Russian volcano grows 'devil horns' and spits out 1,000-mile-long river of smoke — Earth from space

"It is not unprecedented for a large subduction zone earthquake to trigger volcanic eruptions," Paul Segall, a geophysicist at Stanford University, told Live Science in an email.

The largest earthquake ever recorded — a magnitude 9.5 quake that struck Valdivia, Chile, in 1960 — was followed by several volcanic eruptions. "The earthquake changed the stress in [Earth's] crust, which may have made it easier for magma to rise to the surface," Segall said. The shaking of the ground by the earthquake also may have contributed to the eruptions by changing the movement of magma beneath Earth's surface.

Both these mechanisms could have played a role in the Chilean eruptions, but it's still too soon to characterize the recent Russian events, Segall said.

Klyuchevskoy was already showing signs of activity prior to the earthquake, but "it did likely increase in the vigor of the eruption, including some ash emission," a U.S. Geological Survey representative told Live Science on July 30.

The most notable aspect of this chain of events was the eruption of Krasheninnikov for the first time in about 500 years. "The timing is either a very strong coincidence or its magma system was perturbed by strong seismic waves and triggered the eruption," Tobin explained. "It's very hard to determine which is true for a single given eruption."

Additionally, the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Russia for the Kamchatka Territory reported increased thermal activity of a seventh nearby volcano, Mutnovsky. Satellite images revealed a thermal anomaly at the volcano, which has yet to erupt, but scientists say they can't predict if or when it might blow.

US volcano quiz: How many can you name in 10 minutes?

A long-dormant volcano has erupted on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula just days after a magnitude 8.8 megaquake rocked the region on July 30. It is the second volcano to blow its top in the region in the last five days, following the eruption of Klyuchevskoy within hours of last week's quake.

The roughly 6,000-foot-tall (1,800 meters) Krasheninnikov volcano erupted overnight into Sunday (Aug. 3), for the first time in about 500 years. The eruption blew a plume of ash 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) into the sky but posed no threat to populated areas, Russia's Ministry for Emergency Situations for the Kamchatka Territory wrote in Telegram posts.

A magnitude 7.0 earthquake also hit the region on Sunday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Tsunami Warning System registered the latest earthquake at 6:37 a.m. local time in the Kuril Islands, a volcanic archipelago that stretches from the southern end of the Kamchatka Peninsula to the northeastern tip of Japan.

Following the earthquake, Russia issued a tsunami warning for the peninsula, but officials later cancelled this alert, Reuters reported.

This latest eruption and earthquake could be linked to the megaquake that hit the peninsula on July 30, which is also thought to have intensified the eruption of Klyuchevskoy volcano.

Related: 400-mile-long chain of fossilized volcanoes discovered beneath China

Last week, Russian scientists warned that strong aftershocks could occur in the peninsula region for several weeks, Reuters reported.

It's unclear precisely what time the Krasheninnikov volcano began erupting. Nikolai Solovyov, head of the security service of Russia's Federal State Budgetary Institution "Kronotsky State Nature Reserve," reported receiving a message about the beginning of the eruption at 6 a.m. local time on Sunday, according to a translated statement released by the Kronotsky State Nature Reserve, where the volcano is located.

Krasheninnikov volcano has been dormant for hundreds of years. Olga Girina, head of the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team, told Russia's RIA state news agency that this was the first historically confirmed eruption in 600 years, Reuters reported. On the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology Telegram channel, Girina also said that the last lava effusion, or outpouring of lava, occurred within 40 years of 1463, Reuters reported. However, the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program states that the last known eruption was later, in 1550.

Researchers still have a lot to learn about last week's megaquake and the more recent activity on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Large earthquakes (magnitude 6.0 or higher) can be linked to subsequent eruptions or volcanic unrest. However, the volcanoes must already be poised to erupt for this to be the case, with enough "eruptible" magma and significant pressure where the magma is stored, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) website

"If those conditions exist, it's possible that large tectonic earthquakes might cause dissolved gases to come out of the magma (like a shaken soda bottle), increasing the pressure and possibly leading to an eruption," USGS representatives wrote on the website.

Klyuchevskoy volcano in eastern Russia began erupting shortly after a powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake and several aftershocks shook the same area.

"A descent of hot lava is observed on the western slope," the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a translated post on the messaging app Telegram Wednesday (July 30).

The Kamchatka branch of the academy captured the eruption on cameras observing the volcano. In the Telegram post, they reported seeing "explosions" as a "powerful glow above the volcano."

The ash plume from the eruption extended at least 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) above and 36 miles (58 km) east of the volcano, the Kamchatkan Volcanic Eruption Response Team said on Telegram. The group warned that explosions of ash up to 5 miles (8 km) high could occur at any time.

Details about the full extent of the eruption and damages are unknown at this time.

In the weeks leading up to the earthquake, "the volcano was showing signs of unrest," a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) representative told Live Science in an email. On July 21, a team of Russian scientists found a lava lake at the summit of the volcano, signaling that the volcano was primed for eruption.

Related: Russian volcano grows 'devil horns' and spits out 1,000-mile-long river of smoke — Earth from space

"While yesterday's large earthquake did not cause the eruption to begin, it did likely increase in the vigor of the eruption including some ash emission," the USGS representative said.

Klyuchevskoy, which rises 15,597 feet (4,754 meters) above sea level, is the tallest active volcano in Asia and Europe, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. The volcano sits on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, a hotspot for geologic activity due to its position on the Pacific Ring of Fire.

The eruption came hours after an 8.8 magnitude earthquake — tied for the sixth-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded — struck on the same peninsula Wednesday at 11:24 a.m. local time. The earthquake could generate tsunami waves higher than 10 feet (3 m) above the tide on the coasts of Hawaii, Ecuador and Russia, the U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center warned after the earthquake struck.

The volcano is about 280 miles (450 km) north of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the regional capital city. It last erupted in late 2023, when it spewed a 1,000-mile-long (1,600 km) river of dust and ash that reached up to 7.5 miles (12 km) above Earth's surface.

This eruption is "typical activity at this very active volcano," the USGS representative said. "The volcano is in a remote area and this eruption is consistent with other recent past eruptions."

Researchers have discovered a 400-mile-long chain of extinct, fossilized volcanoes buried deep below South China. The volcanoes formed when two tectonic plates collided during the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia hundreds of millions of years ago, the scientists reported in a new study. The ancient volcanoes extend the region of past volcanism in this area by several hundred miles and may have affected Earth's climate.

About 800 million years ago, during the early Neoproterozoic era, South China sat at the northwestern margin of Rodinia. Shifting plate tectonics caused this area to break off into what is now the Yangtze Block plate, pushing it toward the China Ocean plate. As the two plates collided, the denser oceanic crust sank beneath the more buoyant continental crust and slid deep into Earth — a process known as subduction.

As oceanic crust subducts, it heats up and releases water, which generates magma. The magma rises to the surface, creating a long, narrow chain of volcanoes that follow a curved line above the subduction zone. This is known as a volcanic arc.

Volcanism and mountain building in arc systems create new crust and modify the existing crust. Therefore, researchers study ancient volcanic arcs to understand how crust formed on early Earth.

Geologists previously discovered remnants of an extinct volcanic arc along the edge of the Yangtze Block dating back to the early Neoproterozoic. In the new study, published June 30 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Zhidong Gu, a senior engineer at PetroChina, Junyong Li, a researcher at Nanjing University, and colleagues tested whether these arc volcanoes extended further inland.

Fossil mountains can be difficult to find because they're gradually worn down by wind and water and buried beneath layers of sediment. Today, several kilometers of sedimentary rocks blanket the interior of the Yangtze Block, forming the Sichuan Basin.

Gu and Li's team used an airborne magnetic sensor to "see" the crust beneath these sedimentary rocks. Different rock types contain different magnetic minerals, so geophysicists use magnetic signals to map underground rock formations.

They found a strip of iron-rich rock with a stronger-than-average magnetic field located about 4 miles (6 kilometers) beneath the surface. It formed an approximately 430-mile-long (700 km), 30-mile-wide (50 km) belt stretching from the northeast to the southwest of the Yangtze Block and reaching as far as 550 miles (900 km) inland. Iron-rich rocks like these are generated above subducting oceanic crust.

The team also analyzed rocks from seven deep boreholes drilled into the uppermost crust below the Sichuan Basin. They verified that these rocks came from magma and were chemically similar to new crust formed by arc volcanoes. They dated the magmatic rocks to between 770 million and 820 million years ago, confirming that the rocks had formed during the early Neoproterozoic.

The researchers concluded that plate subduction during the breakup of Rodinia formed a ring of volcanoes extending hundreds of miles into the Yangtze Block's interior.

This finding is surprising, the team said, because most volcanic arcs form narrower belts along the continental margin. For example, the Cascades form a single mountain chain above the Juan de Fuca Plate as it subducts beneath the coast of North America.

Gu and Li attributed the wide Yangtze arc to a different style of tectonics, called flat-slab subduction. In flat-slab subduction, the oceanic plate moves horizontally beneath the continental plate at a shallow angle for hundreds of miles before sinking into the Earth. This process produces two distinct volcanic ridges — one near the boundary where the oceanic plate first slips under the continent, and one farther inland, where it finally sinks. Similar shallow subduction of the Nazca Plate beneath the west coast of South America forms the parallel mountain ranges of the Andes today.

Peter Cawood, an Earth scientist at Monash University in Australia who was not involved in the study, agreed this was one way the inland volcanoes could have formed. However, he proposed an alternative explanation. "It could be that the two belts are not part of one broad arc system and flat slab, but represent two independent but time-equivalent systems that were sutured together," he told Live Science.

Regardless, Cawood said the work presents an "exciting new set of data in a region that has been difficult to study." He added that it "shows that the volume of magmatic activity along this boundary may be considerably greater than previously realized," and its impact on Earth's past climate should be evaluated.

Scientists think the global carbon cycle underwent a major shift during this time interval, based on geochemical records from 720 million to 1 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks. Volcanoes release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but chemical weathering of mountains consumes it. Both processes work to regulate Earth's carbon cycle and climate over millions of years. It remains unclear how the rings of fire in South China could have contributed to this perturbation and any resulting climate instability.

A striking series of satellite photos shows the brief lifespan of a "ghost island" that emerged and quickly disappeared in the Caspian Sea after an underwater mud volcano blew its top.

The fleeting landmass emerged at the end of January 2023 above Kumani Bank, an underwater volcano about 15 miles (24 kilometers) off the east coast of Azerbaijan. By the time it was fully formed, on Feb. 4, the island measured around 1,300 feet (400 meters) across, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

However, the island was unstable, and by the time the last photo was taken in December 2024, it had "nearly eroded away, retreating from view like an apparition," Earth Observatory representatives wrote. By now, the island has likely vanished.

Kumani Bank has erupted eight times since it was first discovered in 1861. Each outburst lasted just a few days, yet all of these events resulted in at least some form of temporary island. The strongest recorded eruption, which occurred in 1950, resulted in a 2,300-foot-wide (700 m) landmass that stood 20 feet (6 m) above sea level.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Kumani Bank is a mud volcano, meaning it spews a superheated slurry of mud and water instead of lava and ash.

Azerbaijan has one of the highest concentrations of mud volcanoes anywhere on Earth, with more than 300 muddy vents on the mainland or offshore. This is due to the country's position above a "convergence zone" where the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates collide, leading to increased geothermal activity.

Mud volcanoes are not as violent or destructive as other volcanoes. However, they do contain high levels of pressurized natural gas. This gas can be ignited by sparks from colliding rocks, leading to sporadic fiery outbursts.

An underwater mud volcano near Kumani Bank is believed to have triggered a towering inferno, several hundred feet tall, that exploded above the Caspian Sea in 2021.

Other volcanic "ghosts"

Normal, non-mud volcanoes can also create temporary islands when they erupt beneath the waves.

In 2015, a 0.7-square-mile (1.9 square kilometers) island emerged in the southern Pacific Ocean above the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano in Tonga. However, it was wiped out by the same volcano in January 2022, when the underwater mountain unleashed one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions ever recorded.

Researchers later revealed that the colossal explosion likely killed never-before-seen microbe species that evolved on the isolated landmass.

In October 2023, a violent eruption off the coast of Japan's Iwo Jima island also created a temporary landmass, dubbed Niijima, or "New Island." It grew to be around 330 feet (100 m) wide and 66 feet (20 m) tall, and was clearly visible from space.

But in March 2024, drone footage revealed that the island had started to quickly sink into the sea, despite continued signs of volcanic activity, according to Newsweek.

The Ring of Fire is an enormous belt of active and dormant volcanoes that surrounds most of the Pacific Ocean. It runs from southern Chile, up the west coast of the Americas, through the islands off Alaska and down Japan to the Philippines. Some geologists also include an Indonesian chain of volcanoes in the ring.

These volcanoes arise because of subduction — the movement of a tectonic plate under a neighboring plate — which lowers the melting point of rock in the mantle. The rock turns to magma, rises to the surface and erupts as a volcano.

But the Ring of Fire does this subduction on a massive scale. "What's special about the Ring of Fire is that multiple oceanic plates in the Pacific have subduction boundaries there," Loÿc Vanderkluysen, a volcanologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, told Live Science. About 90% of the 34,000 miles (55,000 kilometers) of subduction plate boundaries on Earth are found in the Pacific, Vanderkluysen explained.

This tectonic movement also causes earthquakes. When one plate is forced underneath another, "there's lots of kicking and screaming as the plates grind against one another," Jeffrey Karson, a professor emeritus of tectonics at Syracuse University in New York, told Live Science. "And so that's where the biggest earthquakes on our planet take place."

The Ring of Fire contains about 75% of Earth's active volcanoes and is where 90% of measured earthquakes occur.

What's in a name?

The name Ring of Fire is hotly contested among researchers. "Many scientists hate the term," Vanderkluysen said. For one, it's not actually a complete ring. The volcanoes follow the edges of tectonic plates, which only subduct on the north, east and west of the Pacific.

Also, some areas of the ring have no volcanism at all, such as Peru and central Chile.

In addition, the Ring of Fire includes more than 450 volcanoes in distinct regions. And they all differ in their magma production, storage and the positioning of their subducting plate, Vanderkluysen said.

"Each [volcano] has its own individual history and flavor that, from a research perspective, is more effective to study individually rather than trying to link all the Ring of Fire volcanoes together that are otherwise not geologically linked," he said.

Related: Sleeping subduction zone could awaken and form a new 'Ring of Fire' that swallows the Atlantic Ocean

Some experts believe that the term has taken on a false meaning in popular culture, with the implication that it's one big structure, Erik Klemetti, a volcanologist at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, told Live Science. "It works nicely as a way to describe the fact that there are an awful lot of volcanoes along the edge of the Pacific," he said, but the ring is just "a geographic coincidence of our current moment on Earth."

One big misconception is "the catastrophist notion that all volcanoes in the Ring of Fire are interconnected and that an eruption or earthquake in one location can trigger the whole region with dramatic consequences," Vanderkluysen said. While it's clear to scientists that an eruption in Japan will not trigger an eruption in Chile, for example, the term is sometimes used to suggest that it's possible, he said.

"An immense natural laboratory for volcanism"

Research into the Ring of Fire spreads across many fields. About two-thirds of the volcanoes that have erupted on Earth since 1960 were in the ring, so "just due to sheer numbers, the Pacific region is an immense natural laboratory for volcanism, and explosive volcanism in particular," Vanderkluysen said.

Volcanologists can use data from the ring to learn about the various eruptions that happen there. "Some are steady and erupt without massive build-ups, and others erupt sporadically but catastrophically," Robert Butler, who studies plate tectonics at the University of Aberdeen, told Live Science in an email.

The different kinds of plate interactions in the Pacific serve as "test beds" for learning what leads to different types of eruptions, Klemetti explained.

Klemetti hopes Ring of Fire research will eventually reveal the inner workings of volcanoes that take place miles below sea level. In the next 10 or 20 years, he thinks scientists can learn about where and how magma is stored between eruptions, how long it takes for magma to heat up and understand more about the transition from dormancy to eruption.

Seismologists also study the Ring of Fire, as more than 80% of earthquakes with a magnitude of 8.0 or higher have occurred there. Researchers can investigate quakes in the Ring of Fire to learn more about how the stress builds up in subduction zones before powerful earthquakes, Butler said.

The vast amount of data helps scientists differentiate between types of extreme events and their causes. "It's a general problem we need to sort in geology, the differences between frequent, not too serious events, and those that occur infrequently but are super-devastating," Butler said.

Analyzing volcanoes and earthquakes in the Ring of Fire can help scientists to improve extreme hazard prediction for volcanic eruptions. Scientists estimate that 800 million people — about 10% of the world's population — live within 62 miles (100 kilometers) of an active volcano. "In the future, there will be large volcanic eruptions that might happen close to population centers and might have impacts at the global scale," Marc-Antoine Longpré, a volcanologist at CUNY Graduate Center, told Live Science.

Earthquakes in the ring, and resulting tsunamis, are also of great concern. Researchers could use earthquake data from the Ring of Fire to develop early warning systems or forecasting tools, Vanderkluysen said.

US volcano quiz: How many can you name in 10 minutes?

Volcanic eruptions at Earth's surface have significant consequences. Smaller ones can scare tourists on Mount Etna or disrupt air traffic.

Giant, large-scale eruptions can have more serious impacts. One such event contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Giant volcanoes also triggered events that led to the largest mass dying on Earth, the Permian—Triassic extinction 252 million years ago).

But what fuels a giant eruption, and how does it make its way to the surface from deep within the planet?

In a new study published in Communications Earth and Environment, we show that columns of hot rock, which rise some 3,000 kilometres through Earth's mantle and cause giant eruptions, are connected to continent-sized source regions we call BLOBS.

Hidden blobs within Earth

BLOBS are hot regions at the bottom of Earth's mantle (between about 2,000km and 3,000km in depth) which might be composed of different material compared with the surrounding mantle rocks.

Scientists have long known about these two hot regions under the Pacific Ocean and Africa. Geologist David Evans from Yale University suggested the acronym BLOBS, which stands for Big LOwer-mantle Basal Structures.

These BLOBS have possibly existed for hundreds of millions of years. It is unclear whether they're stationary or if they move around as part of mantle motion (called convection).

Related: Mysterious 'blobs' in Earth's mantle are not what we thought, study claims

Mantle plumes were the implicit link in previous studies relating BLOBS to giant volcanic eruptions. Their shape is a bit like a lollipop: the "stick" is the plume tail and the "candy" is the plume head.

Mantle plumes rise very slowly through the mantle because they transport hot solid rock, not melt or lava. At lower pressures in the uppermost 200km of Earth's mantle, the solid rock melts, leading to eruptions.

A long-sought relationship

In our new study, we simulated mantle convection from 1 billion years ago and found that mantle plumes rise from moving BLOBS and can sometimes be gently tilted.

Giant volcanic eruptions can be identified by the volume of volcanic rocks preserved at Earth's surface. The ocean floor preserves detailed fingerprints of mantle plumes for the past 120 million years or so (there is not much seafloor older than that).

Oceanic plateaus, such as the Ontong Java-Manihiki-Hikurangi plateau currently in the southwest Pacific Ocean, are linked to plume heads. In contrast, series of volcanoes such as the Hawaii-Emperor seamount chain and the Lord Howe seamount chain are linked to plume tails.

We used statistics to show that the locations of past giant volcanic eruptions are significantly related to the mantle plumes predicted by our models. This is encouraging, as it suggests that the simulations predict mantle plumes in places and at times generally consistent with the geologic record.

Are BLOBS fixed or mobile?

We showed that the considered eruption locations fall either onto or close to the moving BLOBS predicted by our models. Eruption locations slightly outside moving BLOBS could be explained by plume tilting.

We represented fixed BLOBS with 3D images of Earth's interior, created using seismic waves from distant earthquakes (a technique called seismic tomography). One out of the four seismic tomographic models that we considered matched the locations of past giant volcanic eruptions, implying that the fixed BLOBS scenario cannot be ruled out for geologically recent times — the past 300 million years.

One of the next steps for this research is to explore the chemical nature of BLOBS and plume conduits. We can do so with simulations that track the evolution of their composition.

Our results suggest the deep Earth is dynamic. BLOBS, which are some 2,000km below Earth's surface, move hundreds of kilometres over time, and are connected to Earth's surface by mantle plumes that create giant eruptions.

To take a step back and keep things in perspective: while deep Earth motions are significant over tens of millions of years, they are generally in the order of 1 centimetre per year. This means BLOBS shift in a year at roughly the rate at which human hair grows each month.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A volcanic eruption has sent lava spewing out of a giant fissure on the Sundhnúkur crater row in Iceland.

The fissure opened up on Wednesday (July 16) following a swarm of earthquakes, according to a statement released by the Icelandic Met Office (IMO).

Iceland's Civil Protection Department shared stunning aerial photos of the eruption on Facebook, showing lava blasting from the fissure like a wall of fire and flooding the landscape.

The "intense earthquake" swarm began in the early hours of Wednesday morning, with the eruption starting at 3.56 a.m. local time, according to the IMO statement. The eruption is ongoing.

The latest observations, reported at midday local time, have revealed that the eruption has spread to a second fissure. The larger fissure is estimated to be around 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) long, while the smaller fissure is about 1,600 feet (500 m) long.

Unlike previous eruptions that have hit the area over the last few years, this eruption took place before magma had reached their peak. "Before the eruption began, the amount of magma that had accumulated under Svartsengi was about 2/3 of the amount that erupted from there in the last eruption," IMO representatives wrote.

Related: Melting glaciers could trigger volcanic eruptions around the globe, study finds

The lava isn't approaching any infrastructure. However, winds have carried gas pollution from the volcano to some populated areas. Authorities have reported high levels of gas pollution in the municipality of Reykjanesbær, although these are now decreasing, according to the IMO statement. Volcanic eruptions emit sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and other matter that can be harmful when inhaled.

The IMO also reports the formation of "witches' hairs" that are being carried by the wind. "These are tiny glass fibers that form when lava flows cool rapidly and expand," representatives wrote. "They are light and can travel long distances. Witches' hairs can cause discomfort to the skin and eyes, and people are therefore urged to be careful outdoors near the eruption sites."

Located between Stóra-Skógfell and Sýlingarfell on Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula, the current activity is close in proximity to where magma flows occurred during previous eruptions, according to Iceland's Civil Protection Department.

This part of southwest Iceland is well known for volcanic activity and has seen a string of similar eruptions in recent years. The latest lava-spewing fissure is dramatic, but they can be much larger. For example, a 2.5-mile-long (4 kilometers) fissure opened up in 2023, spewing enough lava to fill an Olympic swimming pool in 20 seconds.

This eerie satellite photo shows a "devilish" Russian volcano spewing out a 1,000-mile-long river of smoke into Earth's atmosphere. It is a striking reminder of the volcanic power trapped within the Pacific "Ring of Fire."

The volcano, known as Klyuchevskoy (or sometimes Klyuchevskaya Sopka), is an active stratovolcano in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, which is home to more than 300 volcanoes. Klyuchevskoy's peak stands at 15,597 feet (4,754 meters) above sea level, making it taller than any other volcano in Asia or Europe, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

The satellite image was snapped by NASA's Aqua satellite during a particularly active point of an eruptive phase, which lasted between June 22 and Dec. 31, 2023. The sudden flurry of activity released twin lava flows, shaped like a pair of horns, and a giant plume of smoke, ash and toxic gases that temporarily halted air traffic in the area.

The eruption plume reached a maximum height of 7.5 miles (12 km) above Earth's surface and stretched more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The satellite snap featured above is a false color image. The lava flows have been enhanced using infrared radiation to help make them visible, while the clouds surrounding the volcano have been given a blueish hue to help distinguish them from the eruption plume.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Klyuchevskoy is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kamchatka Peninsula. It has experienced at least 18 different eruptive phases since the turn of the 21st century and blown its top more than 60 times in the past 100 years, according to the Global Volcanism Program.

The lofty mountain's most recent eruptive phase began in April 2025 and is still ongoing, although volcanic activity had diminished by May.

Klyuchevskoy is closely flanked by Bezymianny, a smaller volcano standing at around 9,900 feet (3,000 m) tall. The nearby mountain is less active than Klyuchevskoy and was previously assumed to be extinct until an eruption in 1955. It has since erupted multiple times.

Four other volcanoes — Ushkovsky, Tolbachik, Zimina and Udina — are located within a 20-mile (32 km) radius of Klyuchevskoy. All of these mountains, including Klyuchevskoy and Bezymianny, are believed to have formed within the last 10,000 years, which is relatively young for volcanoes.

The Kamchatka Peninsula is a hotspot for volcanoes due to its position along the Ring of Fire — a roughly 25,000-mile-long (40,000 km) arc encircling large parts of the Pacific Ocean basin, where tectonic plates intersect one another. This giant ring, which also runs beneath Indonesia, Japan and Tonga, contains around two-thirds of the world's terrestrial volcanoes and is the site of around 90% of all earthquakes.

Melting glaciers could make volcanic eruptions more explosive and frequent, worsening climate change in the process, scientists have warned.

Hundreds of volcanoes in Antarctica, Russia, New Zealand, and North America rest beneath glaciers. But as the planet warms and these ice sheets melt and retreat, these volcanoes are likely to become more active, according to the authors of a new study analyzing the activity of six volcanoes in southern Chile during the last ice age.

The researchers will present their findings Wednesday (July 8) at the 2025 Goldschmidt Conference in Prague.

"Glaciers tend to suppress the volume of eruptions from the volcanoes beneath them. But as glaciers retreat due to climate change, our findings suggest these volcanoes go on to erupt more frequently and more explosively," study lead-author Pablo Moreno Yaeger, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement.

Scientists first theorized that melting ice could impact volcanoes in the 1970s. The underlying process is a simple one — the weight of glaciers exerts a downward force on Earth's crust and mantle, so when the ice retreats, subterranean gases and magma expand, leading to pressure buildups that fuel explosive eruptions.

Related: 'Cryptic carbon' may leak from volcanoes millions of years after eruptions end

This process is already known to have fundamentally reshaped Iceland, which is located above the diverging North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. In 2002, scientists calculated changes to Iceland's volcanic activity as its glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, roughly 10,000 years ago. The island's volcanoes responded with a surge of eruptions, blowing at a rate 30 to 50 times greater than they had before or since.

Yet the danger that could be lurking inside continental volcanic systems remains understudied. To investigate it, the geoscientists looked at six volcanoes located in southern Chile, including the now dormant Mocho-Choshuenco volcano, and how they responded to the melting of the Patagonian Ice Sheet thousands of years ago.

By using the radioactive decay of argon released by the region's erupting volcanoes as an isotopic clock, and by studying crystals that began forming inside magmatic rocks spewed when the volcanoes erupted, the researchers were able to track the region’s volcanic activity and its relationship to its vanishing ice.

They found that between 26,000 to 18,000 years ago, during the peak of the last ice age, ice cover tamped down the volume of eruptions, causing a giant reservoir of magma to accumulate beneath the region's surface. When the ice sheet melted, pressure grew inside this reservoir and was eventually released to form the Mocho-Choshuenco volcano.

This threat is planetary in scope: 245 of the world's potentially active volcanoes lie underneath or within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of ice, according to a 2020 study.

"The key requirement for increased explosivity is initially having a very thick glacial coverage over a magma chamber, and the trigger point is when these glaciers start to retreat, releasing pressure — which is currently happening in places like Antarctica," Moreno Yaeger said.

He added that other regions of concern include North America, New Zealand and Russia, saying these areas "warrant closer scientific attention."

Over short time periods, eruptions typically release sulfate aerosols that reflect sunlight back into space. This has led to cooling events following past eruptions, some of which have triggered major famines. Yet over the long term, the greenhouse gases from these volcanoes will likely cause climate change to accelerate, the researchers said.

"Over time the cumulative effect of multiple eruptions can contribute to long-term global warming because of a buildup of greenhouse gases," Moreno Yaeger said. "This creates a positive feedback loop, where melting glaciers trigger eruptions, and the eruptions in turn could contribute to further warming and melting."

A mud volcano has roared to life in front of a temple in Taiwan, with mesmerizing videos capturing the moments mud shot out of the ground beneath a crown of fire.

The Wandan mud volcano, located in the Wandan Township of southern Taiwan, spat bubbling mud out of four separate vents on Thursday (June 26) as ejected material reached a height of 6.6 feet (2 meters), Formosa Television (FTV) News reported.

Footage from the roughly 10-hour-long eruption shows flames igniting above the bubbling mud. However, while mud volcanoes can ignite naturally, the Wandan flames were deliberately set by local people to burn off ejected methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change, according to Reddit posts by Mark Tingay, an adjunct associate professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

"Local folks ignite these vents by throwing burning rags into them," Tingay wrote in response to one Reddit user asking about the flames. "They do it mostly to flare off the gases, but partly because it looks awesome!"

Related: Underwater robot in Siberia's Lake Baikal reveals hidden mud volcanoes — and an active fault

Mud volcanoes usually don't have anything to do with regular volcanoes, which eject molten rock and hot gases. Some mud volcanoes are linked to hot geothermal activity, like those in Yellowstone National Park. However, Wandan's mud volcano is the more common type of this geological feature.

"These mud volcanoes in Taiwan are driven by high fluid pressures that can form deep underground, rather than by magmatic influence," Tingay wrote in another Reddit comment.

Tingay studies mud volcanoes and regularly shares information about eruptions on social media. In his latest posts, he described the Wandan event alongside a video taken by 張寶惠, the mud volcano temple's caretaker. 張寶惠 also shared videos on Facebook, showing the mud volcano violently erupting from different angles.

The latest eruption began at around 5 a.m. local time and continued until around 3.40 p.m. This is the 10th time the Wandan mud volcano has erupted within the last three years, according to Tingay's posts.

Wandan's mud volcano isn't in a single fixed location, but can erupt over a 0.6-mile-wide (1 kilometer) area, according to Tingay. In previous years, the volcano has erupted underneath the temple, with mud shooting up the outside wall and flowing inside, covering the floor.

Mud volcanoes vary in size and shape, and in some cases, form massive cone-like structures very similar in appearance to regular volcanoes. They can naturally produce flames when erupting rocks strike against each other, creating a spark that ignites ejected flammable gases. Researchers believe this is what produced a towering inferno above a mud volcano in the Caspian Sea in 2021, Live Science previously reported.

A volcano in Indonesia sent gigantic ash plumes into the sky during two eruptions on Tuesday (June 17) and Wednesday (June 18).

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki first erupted at 5:35 p.m. local time (5:35 a.m. ET) on Tuesday, unleashing a mushroom-shaped ash cloud measuring more than 6 miles (10 kilometers) high, Indonesia's Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources said in a translated statement.

The cloud was visible up to 95 miles (150 km) from the volcano and showered nearby villages with debris, according to the statement. The eruption was accompanied by rumbling, lightning and thunder, which is typical of explosive eruptions that spew enormous amounts of material, officials said.

A second eruption shook Lewotobi Laki-laki on Wednesday, shooting more ash 3 miles (5 km) into the sky, the Associated Press reported.

No casualties have been reported from these eruptions.

Related: Watch mesmerizing 1,000-foot-tall lava fountains: Kilauea volcano erupting in ways not seen for 40 years

Lewotobi Laki-laki is one of two volcanic peaks on the Lewotobi edifice in Flores, an island in eastern Indonesia with about 2 million inhabitants. The other peak, Lewotobi Perempuan, is located less than 1.2 miles (2 km) away from Lewotobi Laki-laki and is currently less active. "Laki-laki" means "man" in Indonesian, while "perempuan" is a word for "woman" with somewhat derogatory connotations.

Warning signs at Lewoboti Laki-laki prompted officials to raise the eruption alert to the highest level on Tuesday, according to the statement.

Muhammad Wafid, the head of Indonesia's Geological Survey at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, ordered evacuations within a radius of about 4 miles (7 km) from the eruption center and in an area where there is a risk of lava flows due to heavy rain.

"We immediately deployed an Emergency Response Team to immediately be at the affected location to provide technical assistance," Wafid said in the statement.

Dozens of flights were canceled or delayed as a result of the eruptions.

An eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki in November 2024 killed at least 10 people. The volcano also erupted in March 2025.

What's better than the sight of clouds on Mars? The view of a volcano rising above them! This stunning panorama shows the ancient Martian volcano Arsia Mons peeking through clouds on the Red Planet. The image was captured by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter just before the first rays of sunlight illuminated the planet on May 2.

The Mars Odyssey mission was launched in 2001 to map the chemical elements and minerals on the Martian surface. Although it completed its primary mission in 2004, it has continued mapping the Red Planet's surface rocks, studying its clouds and fog, and monitoring its seasons ever since.

In 2023, Odyssey started taking high-altitude images of the edge of Mars' horizon, or "limb," like the one shown here. Because the orbiter's cameras are built to capture and study the Martian surface, it can be tricky to snap images of the planet's clouds.

To do so, Odyssey rotates 90 degrees in its orbit so the camera can capture the cloudy layers and see the dust and water ice inside them. Scientists study the Martian atmosphere to learn about the variations in seasons that hint at how the atmosphere evolves. This knowledge can help them anticipate intense winds and dust storms, which are important factors for planning the entry, descent and landing of future missions.

Related: 28 gorgeous nebula photos that capture the beauty of the universe

In the new panorama photo, the Martian atmosphere appears as a greenish haze as Arsia Mons, one of the largest volcanoes on Mars, rises out. Appearing as a dark blob, it peeks above the morning cloud tops, marking the first time a volcano has been imaged on the Red Planet's horizon. Although Arsia Mons is not the tallest volcano on Mars (that honor goes to Olympus Mons), it stands 12 miles (20 km) high, which is more than twice the height of Earth’s highest mountain, Mount Everest.

Arsia Mons is a shield volcano, named for its resemblance to a shield, located in the Tharsis Montes volcanic region on Mars, which includes two other shield volcanoes: Pavonis Mons and Ascraeus Mons. This volcanic region is frequently surrounded by clouds of water ice, with Arsia Mons being the cloudiest of the three, particularly in the early morning. By contrast, carbon dioxide clouds are more prevalent on Mars.

The thick canopy of early-morning clouds is particularly prominent when Mars is at its farthest point from the sun, known as aphelion. During this time, the clouds that form around the equator are known as the aphelion cloud belt. These early-morning clouds are seen parading around Arsia Mons in the image.

The new panorama that marks the fourth "limb" observation was captured by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera on the 24-year-old orbiter. THEMIS, which takes pictures in visible and infrared light, helps scientists map the subsurface areas that contain water ice. Identifying such areas could be helpful for deciding the landing sites for the first astronauts on Mars.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Satellite photos have captured a glowing "river of fire" flowing down the flanks of Mount Etna during an explosive outburst that also unleashed a giant plume of ash, smoke and volcanic gases high above the Italian island of Sicily.

On June 2, at around 11:20 a.m. local time, a giant, superhot avalanche of ash, known as a pyroclastic flow, suddenly exploded from near Mount Etna's summit and raced down its western flank. Experts think the fast-moving ejecta was unleashed when a section of the volcano's caldera wall collapsed. The surprise outburst forced tourists to scramble for safety, but nobody was injured or killed.

During the eruption, a volcanic plume was also unleashed that towered up to 4 miles (6.5 kilometers) above Europe's largest active volcano. The plume was made of sulfur dioxide, which is toxic and can be deadly in high concentrations. However, the eruption ceased within six hours, meaning that the plume and its effects on the environment were short-lived.

One of the European Union's Copernicus satellites was passing above Sicily during the eruption and captured a stunning shot of a lava flow winding down the mountain in the opposite direction to the pyroclastic flow. The fiery river had gone largely unnoticed as people's focus was drawn to the towering plume. But the molten rock did not reach any populated areas.

In the image, the glowing lava is surrounded by dark patches of ground stretching toward the Mediterranean coast, which could be mistaken for a giant shadow being cast by the 11,013-foot-tall (3,357 meters) mountain. This dark patch is actually made up of fossilized magma left behind from previous eruptions.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Chris Hadfield, a retired astronaut and former commander of the International Space Station (ISS), shared the satellite image on the social platform X on June 3. "It's wild to see a volcano erupting from space," Hadfield wrote. "I saw several during my six months [on the ISS], but Mt Etna's violence yesterday was crazy."

The sight of the lava flowing from the volcano's summit is a reminder that "we live on a thin bit of cooled crust over a liquid rock inferno," he added.

Explosive outbursts

Mount Etna has been erupting intermittently since November 2022, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. But for the majority of this time, the mountain has been relatively quiet, occasionally rumbling, spitting up small amounts of lava or coughing out giant, perfectly circular rings of smoke.

But this recent eruption was the volcano's most explosive outburst since 2021, during the volcano's previous eruptive phase, which lasted between September 2013 and June 2022. During that previous phase, the volcano grew more than 100 feet (30 m) in six months after experiencing 50 back-to-back outbursts between March and August 2021.

Some outlets initially reported that the most recent outburst was the largest since 2014. However, this was later shown to be incorrect.

Mount Etna has had more than 30 different eruptive phases over the last century, totalling around 76.5 years between them. The volcano's unusually high level of activity is due to its position on the boundary between the African and Eurasian tectonic plates, as well as a high level of volcanic gases that accumulate within its magma chamber.

Its outbursts are frequently captured from space: In March 2021, Landsat satellites captured a striking picture of lava flowing down the mountain's flanks; and in February 2022, astronauts on board the ISS snapped a photo of a volcanic plume rising above Sicily.

A weak layer of crust deep below the floor of Italy's Campi Flegrei causes the caldera to undergo periods of earth-trembling unrest, new research has found.

According to the new study, published April 5 in the journal AGU Advances, this layer sits between 1.8 and 2.5 miles (3 to 4 kilometers) deep. It is made of a rock called tuff, which has been weakened by multiple magma intrusions over tens of thousands of years.

This tuff, a light rock made of compressed volcanic ash, acts like a sponge for volcanic gases rising from the magma chamber that sits at least 7.5 miles (12 km) below the surface. When these gases begin to saturate the pores in the tuff, they cause the rock to deform and even break, creating earthquakes. This finding could explain the source of Campi Flegrei's regular restless periods, said study leader Lucia Pappalardo, senior researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy (INGV).

"Other calderas in the world are characterized by this phenomenon," Pappalardo told Live Science, "[so] we think our model can be extended to other calderas worldwide."

The research is part of a larger project with the aim of better forecasting eruptions at Campi Flegrei, which is also known as the Phlegraean Fields and sits west of Naples. Roughly 500,000 people live in an area that would be swamped by boiling pyroclastic flows of hot ash and gas in the event of a caldera eruption, according to Italy's Civil Protection Department.

Campi Flegrei has been erupting for at least 47,000 years and last erupted in 1538. But it undergoes periods of significant unrest, one of which has been ongoing since 2005. During these restless periods, the region shakes with frequent, mostly small, earthquakes. One of these minor quakes caused a wall to collapse at the historic site of Pompeii on Thursday (June 5), according to news reports.

Pappalardo and her team wanted to understand how the structure and strength of the rocks under the caldera contribute to the volcanic activity. They used rocks drilled decades ago from deep below the caldera's center , subjecting them to a bevy of scientific analysis.

They characterized the minerals and elements in the samples and also subjected them to a process called "4D computed X-ray microtomography," which allowed them to observe the structure of the rock samples while they were being compressed until they cracked. This provided information about the rocks' strength and mechanics, study co-author and INGV researcher Gianmarco Buono told Live Science.

As the researchers conducted these tests on samples from different layers of rocks, they discovered the weak tuff layer. "This was unexpected," Pappalardo said. Using computer modeling, the researchers discovered that this layer has likely trapped numerous magma intrusions, or dykes, over the millennia. These intrusions heated and deformed the rock, weakening it.

The researchers are now working to understand the ways that material from the caldera's deep magma chamber can rise to the surface, causing an eruption. But despite the caldera's frequent shuddering, there is no indication that a major eruption is imminent, Pappalardo said.

"At the moment, our monitoring system is not registering any parameters that can suggest magma movement," she said. "So the eruption cannot be in a short time."

Mount Etna erupted on Monday (June 2), sending a flow of hot material racing down the volcano as a massive dark cloud of ash rose high into the sky above Sicily. Live Science has rounded up some of the best photographs and videos of this eruption.

News reports initially indicated this was the biggest eruption at Etna since 2014, but INVG representatives have since said this is not the case and that it was "a medium-sized eruption."

The Italian volcano, which is the largest active volcano in Europe, has been erupting on and off for centuries, according to the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program. The current interval of eruptive activity began on Nov. 27, 2022.

An avalanche of ejected hot lava blocks, ash, gas and other volcanic material, known as a pyroclastic flow, began to race down the side of the volcano at around 11:20 a.m. local time.

Related: WATCH Mount Etna erupt: Europe's largest volcano blows as tourists scramble to safety

Mount Etna's latest eruption likely started after a collapse of material in the southeast crater. The resulting explosive activity then spawned three main lava flows that are now cooling, according to an update from the Etnean Observatory, run by Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

Footage of the pyroclastic flow makes it look as if the volcano is splitting open from the top down as the ejected material races along the side of the volcano. People visiting Etna at the time captured the eruption on video as they fled.

Volcano visitors filmed a massive cloud of ash and other volcanic material rising up above them as they fled. Some people stopped to take photos and videos while others scrambled away as fast as they could. There are no reports of injuries.

An ash cloud generated by the eruption rose up to around 21,300 feet (6,500 meters into the sky, according to an update from the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in France at 12:00 p.m. local time. Mount Etna is around 11,000 feet (3,350 m) tall, so the ash cloud was almost twice as high as the volcano itself.

The eruption pumped large amounts of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) into the atmosphere, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre. When released from a volcano, sulfur dioxide can mix with other gases and particles to form a haze called volcanic smog (vog). Inhaling enough vog can cause respiratory problems and other health issues such as eye and skin irritation, according to the United States Geological Survey.

Mount Etna towers above the nearby metropolitan city of Catania, which is home to a population of more than 1 million people. Catania residents and visitors saw the eruption from the city's streets as the ash cloud obscured what was a clear blue sky.

The eruption had stopped by 4:56 p.m. local time, when the Etnean Observatory published an update on Mount Etna's activity. The Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre noted that there was no ash cloud being produced at 4.22 p.m., and by 5:22 p.m., the ash cloud was dissipating.

Editor's note: This story was updated on Wednesday, June 4 at 5:34 a.m. ET as it previously incorrectly stated the eruption was the biggest since 2014. After publication, INVG representatives told Live Science that it was "a medium-sized eruption."

Mount Etna erupted on Monday (June 2) with a ginormous cloud of ash and triggered an avalanche of volcanic material that has ripped down the side of Europe's largest active volcano.

The massive eruption on the Italian island of Sicily sent visitors scrambling for safety as black smoke rose high above Catania, a metropolitan city with a population of more than 1 million people located near the base of the volcano.

An avalanche of hot lava blocks, ash, gas and other volcanic material called a pyroclastic flow began at around 11:20 AM local time. Footage from the eruption makes it look as if the volcano is splitting open from the top down as the ejected material races down the side of the volcano.

Scientists observing the volcano said that the latest eruptive activity likely started after a collapse of material in Mount Etna's South-East Crater, where the "explosive activity" has since become a lava fountain, according to an update at 12:00 PM local time from the Etnean Observatory, run by Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

There were no reports of injuries at the time of publication, though some social media videos show tourists fleeing the volcano on foot.

"I spoke to the INGV (Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology), everything is normal and under control," Enrico Tarantino, the mayor of Sicily's Catania municipality, said in a statement, via the Independent. "There is no criticality, it is a phenomenon that repeats itself and, in light of the monitoring of the volcano, was already expected."

Related: Watch mesmerizing 1,000-foot-tall lava fountains: Kilauea volcano erupting in ways not seen for 40 years

Mount Enta has been erupting since Nov. 27, 2022, according to the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program. At over 11,000 feet (3,350 meters) tall, Mount Etna is the tallest volcano in Europe.

The ash cloud from the latest eruption had risen up to around 21,300 feet (6,500 m), or 4 miles (6.5 kilometers) into the sky, according to an update from the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in France at 12:00 PM local time. That rise meant the ash cloud was almost twice as high as the volcano itself.

The rest of the cloud is mostly composed of sulfur dioxide (SO₂). This gas, when released from a volcano, can mix with other gases and particles in the atmosphere to form a haze called volcanic smog (vog). Inhaling enough vog can cause respiratory problems and other health issues such as eye and skin irritation, according to USGS. However, officials in Italy haven't warned of any threats to the local population at the time of publication.

The eruption has stopped, according to an update at 4:56 PM local time from the Etnean Observatory.

Scientists can tell whether a volcano is about to erupt from the greenness of the trees around it, with more vibrant leaves indicating a potentially imminent blast.

Until now, these subtle color changes could be observed only from the ground — but researchers have recently found a way to monitor them from space.

A new collaboration between NASA and the Smithsonian Institution could "change the game" when it comes to detecting the first signs of a volcanic eruption, volcanologists said in a statement published by NASA earlier this month. These signs can help to protect communities against the worst effects of volcanic blasts, including lava flows, ejected rocks, ashfalls, mudslides and toxic gas clouds.

"Volcano early warning systems exist," Florian Schwandner, a volcanologist and chief of the Earth Science Division at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, said in the statement. "The aim here is to make them better and make them earlier."

Current indicators of an imminent volcanic eruption include seismic activity, changes in ground height and sulfur dioxide emissions, which are visible from space. Scientists also look out for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions linked to magma near Earth's surface, but these are harder to pinpoint with satellites than sulfur dioxide due to the ubiquity of CO2 in the atmosphere.

"A volcano emitting the modest amounts of carbon dioxide that might presage an eruption isn't going to show up in satellite imagery," Robert Bogue, a doctoral student in volcanology at McGill University, Canada, said in the statement.

Related: Watch mesmerizing 1,000-foot-tall lava fountains: Kilauea volcano erupting in ways not seen for 40 years

But researchers are particularly interested in detecting these emissions because CO2 is one of the very first signs of a coming eruption — preceding even sulfur dioxide, according to the statement.

To that end, scientists have been developing methods to monitor carbon dioxide based on the color of trees around volcanoes. Clouds of CO2 wafting from volcanoes that are about to blow boost the health of surrounding trees and plants, making their leaves greener and more lush.

"The whole idea is to find something that we could measure instead of carbon dioxide directly," Bogue said in the statement.

Until recently, scientists had to trek to volcanoes if they wanted to measure their CO2 levels. By using the color of tree leaves as an indicator of volcanic gas concentrations, researchers can save themselves the trouble of accessing remote and potentially dangerous locations — instead relying on satellites to do the hard work.

A 2024 study published in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment revealed a strong correlation between the carbon dioxide and trees around Mount Etna in Italy. Using pictures taken by Landsat 8 and other Earth-observing satellites between 2011 and 2018, the study’s authors showed 16 clear spikes in both the amount of CO2 and vegetation’s greenness, which coincided with upward migrations of magma from the volcano.

"There are plenty of satellites we can use to do this kind of analysis," study lead author Nicole Guinn, a doctoral student in volcanology at the University of Houston in Texas, said in the statement.

Measuring the greenness of trees from space won't be useful in all volcanic settings, however. Many volcanoes don't host trees – or at least not enough trees to measure with satellites, according to the statement. Some trees and forests may respond unexpectedly to changing carbon dioxide levels — for example, if they have been affected by fires, diseases or abnormal weather conditions.

"Tracking the effects of volcanic carbon dioxide on trees will not be a silver bullet," Schwandner said. "But it is something that could change the game."

To expand on the potential of the new method, researchers from NASA, the Smithsonian Institution and other organizations recently launched the Airborne Validation Unified Experiment: Land to Ocean (AVUELO), which will compare satellite images of trees around volcanoes with ground observations. The aim is to ensure the data match, so that scientists can calibrate space-borne instruments and take the research forward.

Scientists may have finally cracked the recipe behind Venus' giant pancakes.

Venus is famous for its "pancake domes" — steep-sided volcanoes that rise from the planet's surface like circular welts. A study now suggests that these unusual dome-shaped structures are at least partly sculpted by the planet's upper crust, which seems more flexible in certain regions.

Volcanoes are common across Venus, with more than 1,600 large volcanoes or volcanic features discovered so far. One of the more intriguing types are the so-called pancake domes, disk-shaped structures that stretch over tens of miles but are only half a mile in height, like a flattened version of Hawaii's Mauna Loa.

Exactly how these volcanoes form — and what they're made of — is still a mystery. One idea is that they develop from super-sticky, slow-flowing lava that moves under the force of its own weight (the technical term for this phenomenon is a viscous gravity current). Eventually, the lava stops moving and solidifies, forming the pancake domes.

But does the domes' formation depend only on the type of lava? Probably not, Madison Borrelli, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and first author of the new study, told Live Science by email. One factor that many previous studies hadn't considered was the bendiness', or the flexure, of Venus' upper crust.

It turns out that Venus' surface — and Earth's — behaves, in certain areas, like an orange's skin: under a sufficiently heavy load, the surfaces dimple. If such dimpling accompanied the pancake domes' formation, it would leave certain tell-tale signs, like a bulge surrounding the dome, where the crust buckled upwards. Indeed, a 2021 study found such flexural signatures surrounding one-fifth of a sample of Venusian pancake domes.

Related: Venus may be geologically 'alive' after all, reanalysis of 30-year-old NASA data reveals

To determine how a bendy crust could affect the formation of a pancake dome, Borrelli and her colleagues at universities in France and the U.S. focused on the only dome for which they had high resolution data: the Narina Tholus, an 88.5-mile-wide (55 kilometers) dome located on the circumference of the Aramaiti Corona, one of the many giant oval structures that pockmark Venus' surface.

The new study, published May 10 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, used topographical data collected by NASA's radar-wielding Magellan mission in the 1990s, the researchers created a virtual model of the Narina Tholus dome. They then simulated viscous gravity currents of lavas of different densities atop both a flexible upper crust and a rigid lithosphere, and compared the results to the virtual dome.

The study's results showed that domes created on a bendy crust looked far more like the virtual pancake dome than those that formed on the rigid lithosphere. In particular, the flexible crust's domes had flat tops and very steep sides, characteristic of the pancake domes. This stems from the fact that the bulge around the dome prevents the lava from flowing further, causing it to accumulate, the researchers said. The bendy lithosphere's domes also had flexural signatures similar to that of Narina Tholus.

However, the dimpling of the lithosphere couldn't alone explain the domes' features — the lava's density mattered too. Although low-density lavas produced domes with the right sort of shape, they created smaller crustal bulges than those found near the real-life pancake dome. Only lavas denser than 0.0867 lbs per cubic inch (2,400 kg/m3) — or over twice the density of room temperature water — produced both the correct dome shapes and flexural signatures. These high-density lavas were more than a trillion times as viscous as ketchup at room temperature and settled down to form the domes over hundreds of thousands of Earth-years.

Nonetheless, the study's main drawback is that it used data from just the Narina Tholus dome. Borrelli hopes that upcoming missions to Venus — like NASA's VERITAS program — will provide higher resolution topography of the planet's surface, allowing the researchers to test their model with more data.

The new data could also help determine the exact type of lava that forms the pancake domes, a question the researchers were unable to answer. While most Venusian volcanoes appear to spew Mauna Loa-like basaltic lava, the researchers couldn't rule out rhyolitic and andesitic lavas, similar to those that spout from Mount St. Helens.

Borelli said that finding diverse lava types on Venus would be interesting. "This can tell us about the planet's tectonic history, magmatic processes, and even the potential past presence of water."

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano has been erupting with gigantic fountains of lava, the likes of which haven't been seen in around 40 years.

On Sunday (May 25), some of these lava fountains shot up more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) into the sky. Scientists estimated that while this was going on, the volcano was also emitting up to around 83,000 tons (75,000 metric tons) of toxic sulphur dioxide per day, according to an update on the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) website.

The ongoing eruption in the Halema'uma'u crater has been on pause since the dramatic scenes on Sunday, though magma remains close to the surface and the volcano continues to emit sulfur dioxide. The latest fountain activity marked the 23rd episode of Halema'uma'u crater's eruption cycle that began on Dec. 23, 2024.

Kilauea has been producing fountains of lava in waves that last anywhere from a few hours to over a week since the start of this eruption. In a volcano update on Tuesday (May 27), USGS representatives compared the ongoing activity to that of the historical Pu'u'ō'ō eruption on the eastern rift zone of Kilauea. The Pu'u'ō'ō eruption began in 1983 and didn't stop until 2018, but the early years were marked by high lava fountains, similar to those currently produced in the Halema'uma'u crater.

"The current eruption has been characterized by episodic fountaining not seen in any eruptions since the 1983-86 episodic fountains at the beginning of the Pu'u'ō'ō eruption," USGS representatives wrote.

Related: Heavy dusting of 'pineapple powder' paints Hawaii's volcanoes white after near-record snowfall — Earth from space

Kilauea volcano is one of the world's most active volcanoes and has erupted almost continuously on Hawaii's Big Island for more than 30 years. The volcano makes up about 14% of the island's land area and rises 4,190 feet (1,227 m) above sea level. Halema'uma'u crater is at the summit of the volcano and is said to be the home of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes.

The Halema'uma'u eruption is taking place in a closed part of Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park. However, while the eruption itself is confined to the park, the gases it emits can travel beyond the park's limits.

"High levels of volcanic gas—primarily water vapor (H₂O), carbon dioxide (CO₂), and sulfur dioxide (SO₂)—are the primary hazard of concern, as this hazard can have far-reaching effects downwind," USGS representatives wrote.

The sulfur dioxide released from the volcano can mix with other gases and particles in the atmosphere to create a haze called volcanic smog (vog). Inhaling vog at high concentrations may cause respiratory problems and other health issues such as eye and skin irritation, according to USGS.

There are a variety of other hazards associated with the ongoing volcanic activity, including strands of windblown volcanic glass. These hair-like strands, named Pele's hair after the Hawaiian goddess, form when gas bubbles within lava burst at the surface, and their skin stretches into long threads. These strands are currently spread across the Kilauea summit. The extent to which they move depends on lava fountaining and wind conditions, but the USGS warned that they pose a threat to human health.

"Residents and visitors should minimize exposure to Pele's hair and other volcanic fragments, which can cause skin and eye irritation," USGS representatives wrote.

USGS offers views of the Kilauea summit through live webcams. These video feeds capture recordings of places that are off limits to the general public because they're unsafe to visit.

US volcano quiz: How many can you name in 10 minutes?

This eye-catching satellite photo shows Simushir, a little-known Russian island and former Soviet naval base, featuring four end-to-end volcanoes that are evenly spaced and in a surprisingly straight line. One of the four peaks was the site of one of the largest eruptions in recorded history, which significantly altered Earth's climate around 200 years ago.

Simushir is one of the Kuril Islands — a Russian-controlled archipelago of more than 50 volcanic islands in the North Pacific Ocean. Like the rest of the Kuril Islands, the sovereignty of Simushir has been passed back and forth between two nearby countries, Russia and Japan, several times over the last 400 years. It was most recently used as a secret Soviet nuclear submarine base until 1994, but is now uninhabited.

The 5-mile-long (8 kilometer) landmass is home to four major volcanoes that can be seen from space. These towering structures are, from southeast to northwest (left to right): Milna, Zavaritski, Prevo and Uratman.

Milna is the tallest of the four at 5,050 feet (1,540 meters) tall and last erupted in 1914. Next to it lies Zavaritzki, also known as Zavaritskogo, which stands around 2,047 feet (624 m) above sea level, and last blew its top in 1957, leaving behind a largely hollowed-out crater.

Prevo, which is 4,460 feet (1,360 m) tall, last erupted in 1825. Meanwhile Uratman, which stands at 2,224 feet (678 m), shows no signs of having erupted for at least 12,000 years. A deep lagoon, known as Brouton Bay, can also be seen surrounding Uratman. This was where the Soviets stored some of their nuclear submarines.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

There's a smaller fifth volcano on the island, named Goriaschaia Sopka, which is located on the northeast flank of Milna, but it’s indiscernible from the larger volcanoes in satellite photos. Despite being classed as individual volcanoes, Goriaschaia Sopka and Milna are closely linked to one another.

Simushir and the other Kuril Islands are hotspots for volcanic activity because they're located within what experts call the "Ring of Fire" — a 25,000-mile-long (40,000 km) arc located above tectonic plate boundaries surrounding the outer edge of the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. This region contains around two-thirds of the world's terrestrial volcanoes and is the site of around 90% of all earthquakes.

The big one

In 1831, the Northern Hemisphere's climate cooled by an average of about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius), coinciding with reports of gloomy, bleak weather and the sun turning different colors.

Scientists knew a massive eruption caused this strange event, but the volcano responsible has remained a mystery.

But in December 2024, a new study revealed that Zavaritzki was the culprit after matching ash deposits in polar ice cores to the volcano.

This finding was a surprise to the researchers because there had been no prior evidence of any eruption on Simushir in 1831, likely due to its remote location and the lack of any potential witnesses on surrounding islands.

"We had no idea this volcano was responsible [for the dramatic eruption]," study lead author William Hutchison, a volcanologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, previously told Live Science. "It was completely off the radar."

This striking satellite photo shows red-hot lava winding into the sea during a volcanic eruption on La Palma in the Canary Islands. The "river of fire" completely wiped out a small town and unleashed plumes of toxic gases, which have plagued the Spanish island for years, locals and experts told Live Science.

On Sept. 19, 2021, after a swarm of more than 22,000 earthquakes in less than a week, a large fissure suddenly opened up above the town of Todoque on the western flank of Cumbre Vieja — a volcanic ridge that runs through the southern half of La Palma — shooting lava fountains hundreds of feet in the air. The effusive eruption, which was the first volcanic outburst on the island since 1971, persisted for 85 days until Dec. 13, according to the Global Volcanism Program at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

During this time, around 7.1 billion cubic feet (200 million cubic meters) of molten rock poured out from a 660-feet-tall (200 meters) cone-shaped vent, named Tajogaite, which grew around the fissure. The fiery rock, which reached temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius), flowed down toward the coast and into the Atlantic Ocean, creating around 4.6 million square feet (430,000 square meters) of new land in the process.

The lava flows, which stretched up to 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) long, were clearly visible from space and ended up covering a total area of around over 2,500 acres (1,000 hectares), including Todoque, which was essentially wiped off the map. Around 3,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed, along with large swathes of surrounding banana farms. The estimated damage exceeded 700 million euros (US$ 780 million), according to Spanish newspaper El Pais.

One person was killed by the eruption: an elderly man who is believed to have died from inhaling toxic volcanic gases while ignoring official advice and prematurely returning to his home in the exclusion zone, according to AFP. Thousands of wild and agricultural animals are also believed to have been killed by the lava flow and resulting gases.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The damage was "truly terrible," Marie Edmonds, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science at the recent STARMUS Festival, an annual science festival that was held in the neighboring town of Puerto Naos from April 25 to April 29. "Most shocking to me is the closeness of the vent to the communities," she added when describing what it was like to visit the area during the festival. "It must have been absolutely terrifying to see the eruption so close."

Local resident David, who used to live in Todoque and now resides in the neighboring town of Los Llanos de Aridane, was one of 7,000 people evacuated from their homes during the eruption. The shopkeeper told Live Science that he watched the lava flows burn across the landscape like a "river of fire," as his house was destroyed by the molten rock.

Toxic lava flows

The eruption was particularly noteworthy due to high levels of volcanic gases that were released into the air. This was the result of unusually high levels of sodium and potassium in the lava, which made it highly alkaline and increased the amount of gases, such as sulfur dioxide, that were emitted, Edmonds told Live Science.

Where lava reached the coastline — and dripped into the ocean via giant lava falls — other gases, such as hydrogen chloride, were also released, she added.

Throughout the eruption, an exclusion zone was put in place around lava flows to protect people from the gases. However, some locals ignored official advice and snuck back into the area to visit their properties.

Taxi driver Ramón was one of those who went home after the eruption had ceased, but before people were given the green light to return. After just a few minutes, he began to get lightheaded and started struggling to breathe before passing out. He later awoke in the hospital and spent several days being treated for toxic gas inhalation.

"I thought that I was going to die," Ramón told Live Science as he drove past Tajogaite. More than three years later, he still struggles with shortness of breath.

While the worst volcanic gases have now dissipated, the problem is not totally gone. Large pockets of carbon dioxide still lie in lava tubes and other natural depressions in the area and could be harmful to people if they unknowingly walk through them, Edmonds said. "It is unknown how long this hazard will persist," she added.

Locals also claim that they can still smell the eggy fumes of sulfur dioxide whenever it rains.

Widespread disruption

The initial explosive phase of the eruption triggered large plumes of ash and smoke into the atmosphere that could be clearly seen from Tenerife, around 90 miles (145 km) away, and caused several brief airport closures throughout the Canary Islands.

The plumes also caused a temporary disruption to the astronomical work being done by researchers at the various telescopes located at Las Palmas' Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM), which is situated at an altitude of around 7,900 feet (2,400 m).

"The disruption only lasted for around a week," Alba Fernandez-Barral, an astronomer and chief communications officer at the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory at ORM, told Live Science. "But for several telescopes, this was the first time they had stopped collecting data for decades."

The atmospheric disturbances soon dissipated, but the continuing lava flows put a halt to most day-to-day activities in the area surrounding Tajogaite. Locals became so concerned that one Canarian politician even suggested detonating bombs within the erupting cone to stem the flow of lava, although this idea was never seriously considered.

However, for locals, the issues persisted long after the lava eventually ceased flowing.

The biggest problem was that the only road between Los Llanos de Aridane and Puerto Naos was destroyed, meaning that the only way to get from one to the other was to drive all the way around Cumbre Vieja, which means driving half of the island's coastline. Ramon told Live Science that the journey that once took 10 minutes could now take up to an hour and a half.

Construction on a new road began almost as soon as the eruption ceased, while some of the lava was still at several hundred degrees F. The road was fully constructed within two years and can be seen from space winding through the lava flats, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Although the area is now fully accessible, tourists and some islanders have continued to avoid the area due to fears over the toxic gases. One local official at STARMUS, who did not want to be named, told Live Science that attending the festival marked the first time they have been back to the area since the eruption.

Back to normality

The eruption of Tajogaite has left long-lasting scars — both on the landscape and within the local community. But there are signs that these wounds are beginning to heal.

"The loss of entire neighbourhoods affected the society here very badly," Edmonds told Live Science. "But I think that the people have bounced back incredibly well. Resilience is clearly very strong here."

For many locals, the recent STARMUS Festival marked something of a return to normality as tourists flocked to La Palma in significant numbers for the first time since early 2021.

Eruptions like this only happen on La Palma once every 50 years, Edmonds added, so it should be a while before anything like this happens again.

Striking satellite photos snapped in 2021 show the volcanic peaks of Hawaii's Big Island covered with a thick dusting of snow, also known by locals as "pineapple powder," following one of the island's most extreme snowfalls in recent history.

The first image (see above) shows the most extensive snow coverage on Mauna Loa, a 13,681-foot-tall (4,170 meters) volcano near the center of the Big Island. The second image (below) shows a slightly smaller white patch on Mauna Kea, a 13,796-foot-tall (4,205 m) peak located around 25 miles (40 kilometers) further north. Both images were taken on the same day.

Mauna Loa is still active and most recently erupted between November and December 2022, according to the Global Volcanism Program. Mauna Kea, meanwhile, is dormant and has not erupted for at least 4,600 years.

Hawaiian snow is more common than most people realize, and both Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea often receive at least a light dusting every year. However, 2021 was an extreme case.

When the photo was taken, the combined snow covering both peaks reached the second-highest amount for this time of the year since records began in 2001, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. At the peak of the preceding snowstorm, up to 2 feet (0.6 m) fell at the summit of both volcanoes in a single day.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Local reports revealed that several islanders traded in their surfboards for snowboards and skis, and braved the trip up Mauna Kea to partake in some rare snow sports as soon as the roads were cleared.

Pineapple powder

Hawaiian snow is often linked to a weather phenomenon referred to as Kona low, according to the Earth Observatory. This is where winds shift from the typical northeast direction and start blowing from the southwest, or "Kona" side, drawing moisture from the tropical Pacific, which turns into rain and snow as it rises up the mountains' slopes.

Snow is most likely to occur between October and April, and both Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea experience an average of 20 days of snow cover every year, according to the Lyman Museum, based in the Big Island town of Hilo. On rare occasions, snow has also fallen on the volcanoes as late as June, according to The Weather Channel. However, the pineapple powder may not be as common in the future.

Recent research revealed that human-caused climate change will likely make snow much less likely in Hawaii as rising sea surface temperatures make Kona low less likely to occur, according to the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM).

"Unfortunately, the projections suggest that future average winter snowfall will be 10 times less than present day amounts, virtually erasing all snow cover," Chunxi Zhang, an atmospheric modeling specialist at the International Pacific Research Center in Hawaii, said in a UHM statement.

In Hawaiian mythology, Mauna Kea is home to the snow goddess Poli'ahu, who had a fierce rivalry with Pele — the goddess of fire and volcanoes, for which the rare glass-like structures that form at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano are named. In one story, Poli'ahu defeated Pele in a sledding race, which caused the latter to unleash a series of major volcanic eruptions in anger, according to the University of Hawai'i at Hilo.

A "zombie" volcano in Bolivia has been rumbling in its sleep — despite being dormant for hundreds of thousands of years — and scientists now think they know why.

Uturuncu, located in the Andes in southwestern Bolivia, last erupted around 250,000 years ago. For several decades, it has been showing signs of unrest, releasing plumes of gas, shaking with earthquakes, and causing the surrounding ground to deform, leading to concerns it could be about to erupt.

However, according to a new study published Monday (April 28) in the journal PNAS, the unusual activity is down to the movement of liquid and gas beneath the mountain.

This "not only explains why a '"zombie'" volcano remains active but also offers insights into its eruption potential, establishing a technique that could be applied to help evaluate eruption hazards at other active volcanoes," the researchers wrote in the paper.

Uturuncu is a large, dormant volcano that stands at a height of 19,711 feet (6,008 meters) above sea level. It is a stratovolcano, which are large, steep, and cone-shaped volcanoes built up by many layers (strata) of hardened lava, volcanic ash, and rocks. Stratovolcano eruptions are often explosive because the lava is thick, meaning it traps gas easily. Mount St. Helens and Mount Vesuvius are both stratovolcanoes.

Related: Huge steam plume rises from Alaska's Mount Spurr as volcano edges closer to eruption

Uturuncu is known as a "zombie" volcano because of its ongoing, but noneruptive activity, the researchers wrote in the paper.

Since the 1990s, satellite radar and GPS measurements have shown that the ground around Uturuncu is deforming in a "sombrero" pattern, with a central region of rising ground surrounded by subsidence, or sinking. The central rising land has been uplifting for at least 50 years, at a varying rate of up to 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per year.

This deformation, along with the frequent earthquakes recorded in the region and plumes of volcanic gases, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), being released from the volcano, led some scientists to theorize that there might be a huge magma body building underneath Uturuncu.

Uturuncu sits above an enormous and extremely deep underground reservoir of magma named the Altiplano-Puna Magma Body (APMB), which stretches beneath southern Bolivia, northern Chile, and northern Argentina. Magma from the APMB can be pushed upward and accumulate near the surface.

The presence of a body of magma beneath the volcano could indicate that Uturuncu may be gearing up to erupt.

In the new study, researchers analyzed signals from over 1,700 earthquakes to visualize what was occurring beneath the volcano, and also examined the properties of the rocks on and around the volcano to determine how seismic signals might interact with the ground.

Rather than an accumulation of magma, they found that the APMB is sending hot fluids and gases upwards towards the surface via a narrow chimney-like pipe. This causes gases like steam and CO2 to get trapped under the summit, and briny water to spread sideways into cracks around the volcano.

The observed ground deformation and earthquakes around Uturuncu can be explained by these fluids and gases moving around below the surface, rather than magma rising quickly from below, meaning that the volcano is not primed to erupt as previously feared.

This discovery could also help researchers determine if other volcanoes around the world are primed to erupt.

"The methods in this paper could be applied to the more than 1,400 potentially active volcanoes and to the dozens of volcanoes like Uturuncu that aren't considered active but that show signs of life — other potential zombie volcanoes," co-author Matthew Pritchard, a professor of geophysics at Cornell University, said in a statement.

This striking, false-color satellite image shows the intense heat coming from a pair of lava lakes that emerged on simultaneously erupting volcanoes in Congo. The neighboring peaks are among Africa's most active — and deadly — volcanoes.

Mount Nyamuragira (top of image) and Mount Nyiragongo (bottom of image) are roughly 6 miles (10 kilometers) apart and are located just north of the city of Goma, which is home to more than 1 million people.

Nyamuragira is a dome-shaped shield volcano that stands up to 10,033 feet (3,058 meters) tall, while Nyiragongo is a stratovolcano, with a steep cone that towers up to 11,385 feet (3,470 m) above ground level.

The satellite photo was taken a few weeks after Nyamuragira began erupting for the first time since March 2012. This eruption ceased in May 2016, but the volcano has since had two more eruptions: from November 2016 to May 2017, and again in April 2018, which is still ongoing. Meanwhile, Nyiragongo has been continuously erupting since May 2002.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Sizeable lava lakes were spotted at the summits of both volcanoes during the simultaneous eruptions. The lava lake at Nyiragongo is particularly interesting because stratovolcanoes do not normally support these features. At various points over the last two decades, this fiery pool has been the biggest lava lake on Earth, according to a 2021 study.

The image was captured in infrared, which makes the lava lakes appear to glow red and gives the surrounding vegetation a bright green coloration, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Double trouble

Nyamuragira and Nyiragongo both formed around 12,000 years ago during a period of increased activity along the Kameronze fault line, which lies directly between the two volcanoes, according to the 2021 study. As a result, their activity is partially linked, despite being separate entities.

The volcanoes are highly active and have jointly erupted around 60 times since 1900. Together, the pair is believed to be responsible for around 40% of Africa's recorded volcanic eruptions. And some of their most recent outbursts have been particularly intense.

Nyamuragira is the more active of the two volcanoes and has frequently spawned smaller, temporary volcanoes on its flank. The most recent was "Murara," a cinder cone that emerged between 1976 and 1977. The mountain is also surrounded by old lava flows that spilled down its slopes (and are visible in the satellite photo).

In November 2011, a 1,300-foot-tall (400 m) fountain of lava shot out of the erupting volcano, according to local reports. This is believed to have been the largest single outburst there for at least a century.

However, Nyiragongo is the closest to Goma and, therefore, the more dangerous of the pair. When lava flows spill down the volcano's steep slopes, they can reach high speeds, giving locals little warning.

In January 1977, the volcano unleashed the fastest lava flow in recorded history, reaching speeds of up to 62 mph (100 km/h), which killed around 2,000 people in Goma and the surrounding areas, according to Guinness World Records.

In January 2002, a similar eruption killed around 250 people and caused extensive damage to homes, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless and triggering a refugee crisis, according to Britannica. The most recent incident occurred in May 2021, when at least 31 people died, according to CNN. However, in this case, several deaths resulted from traffic collisions as people attempted to evacuate the area.