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The vast expanse of Lake Taupō's sky blue waters, crowned by hazy, mountainous horizons, invokes an extreme sense of tranquility. And yet, deep in the ground below, geological unrest is brewing, according to a new paper in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics. Lake Taupō is the largest freshwater lake in Australasia, located at the center of New Zealand's north island. And while it appears peaceful today, the lake has a violent origin story. The lake's waters sit within a prehistoric caldera – a word based on the Spanish for 'cauldron' or 'boiling pot' – formed during Earth's...

Scientists studying ice cores packing in some 60,000 years of history have found signs of thousands of volcanic eruptions across that time, stretching back to the last Ice Age – with 25 of the eruptions larger than anything Earth has seen in the last 2,500 years. Researchers excavated the cores near both poles: in Antarctica (where 737 eruptions were logged) and Greenland (where 1,113 eruptions were found). A total of 85 eruptions were large enough to leave evidence behind at both poles. That evidence takes the form of sulfuric acid deposits left behind by the eruptions. It gives researchers clues...

Some 30 kilometers south of Lake Taupo, in New Zealand, stands an enigmatic array of stone blocks. It "looks" like a wall; a human-built wall. It also "looks" old; perhaps 2,000 years old according to some... B. Brailsford, of Christchurch, has been the chief investigator of the Kaimanawa wall, aided by American D.H. Childress, and others. The stones that make up the wall are 4-ton blocks of ignimbrite, a soft volcanic rock that could have been easily dressed with stone tools. The wall is topped by a red beech tree 2.9 meters in circumference and over a meter of accumulated...