G07: I&S Forces of Nature: Volcano Investigation

Mount Vesuvius is an active volcano in southern Italy. Rising above the Bay of Naples, the volcano is situated on the plain of Campania, about 7 miles (11 kilometers) from the city of Naples.

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Mount Vesuvius, on the west coast of Italy, is the only active volcano on mainland Europe. It is best known because of the eruption in A.D. 79 that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but Vesuvius has erupted more than 50 times.

The volcano Krakatoa (also spelled Krakatau) is located on Rakata, an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, Indonesia. Its eruption in 1883 was one of the most catastrophic ever witnessed in recorded history.

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The largest volcanic explosion in recorded history was that of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, in 1815. The volcano is located on the northern coast of Sumbawa island. Before the 1815 eruption, Tambora was about 14,000 feet (4,300 meters) high. However, it lost much of its top during the 1815 eruption. It now stands 9,348 feet (2,850 meters) high. A caldera, or bowl-shaped pit, sits where the top used to be. This massive pit is 4 miles (6 kilometers) across and 4,101 feet (1,250 meters) deep.

ndonesia’s Tambora eruption brought on a deadly spate of cooling—presaging the costs that come with sudden changes to climate.

The eruption of Mount Tambora killed thousands, plunged much of the world into a frightful chill and offers lessons for today

On this day in 1815, Mount Tambora, seen here on April 10, 2020,by the Himawari-8 satellite produced the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded. Mount Tambora, located on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, is an active stratovolcano that was one of the tallest mountains in all of Indonesia before its eruption.

A volcanic peak in the Cascade Range, Mount St. Helens is situated in southwestern Washington, U.S. Dormant since 1857, it erupted on May 18, 1980, in one of the most violent volcanic eruptions ever recorded in North America.

A report from Portland, Oregon, describes alarming volcanic activity on Mount St. Helens in Washington's Cascade Range. Starting on March 20, 1980, a series of intensifying earthquakes blasted a 300-foot crater near the top of the peak, putting the nearby population on alert. On May 18, 1980, the volcano erupted.

If scientists armed with today's monitoring tools and knowledge could step back in time to the two months before May 18, 1980, they would have been able to better forecast the forthcoming devastating eruption.

A boiling plume of ash rising 15 miles high.
The top 1,300 feet of the mountain gone.
The north slope blown out with an avalanche of mud, rock and ice burying valleys and racing downstream.

On Nov. 13, 1985, at a little after 9 p.m. local time, Nevado del Ruiz, a volcano about 130 kilometers from Colombia’s capital city of Bogotá, erupted, spewing a violent mix of hot ash and lava into the atmosphere. Less than three hours later, the earth rumbled as mudflows towering nearly 30 meters high swept through the countryside, several villages and eventually the town of Armero, where it killed 70 percent of the town’s residents.

The Colombian volcano Nevado del Ruiz is an active stratovolcano with a history of generating deadly volcanic mudflows (lahars) from relatively small-volume eruptions.

Before the disastrous volcanic eruption of 1985, Armero was a picturesque and prosperous cotton and rice farming center which owed its rich soil to previous eruptions of the nearby volcano