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an illustration of a planet covered in active volcanoes Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Chris Smith / KRBwyle Astronomers have discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet they suspect is covered in volcanoes — making it a promising lead in the hunt for extraterrestrial life. Volcano planet: An international team of astronomers spotted the exoplanet, dubbed “LP 791-18 d,” using data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and ground-based observatories. Based on their analysis, it has a radius 1.03 times that of Earth’s and a mass .9 times that of our home planet. It’s now...

A large fossilized tree 20-million-years-old, preserved intact with its branches and roots, was found on the Greek island of Lesvos.It is considered an extremely rare find, as it is the first time since 1995 when excavations began in the area of Western Lesvos by the Museum of Natural History of the Petrified Forest of Lesvos, where a fossilized tree with its branches has been located.The tree is about 19 meters long, and is said to have been preserved due to the thick layer of volcanic ash that covered it after it fell.“It is a unique find,” Professor Nikos Zouros said,...

The Tel Aviv municipality on Saturday informed dozens of residents of two apartment buildings in the center of the city that they may return to their homes, days after they were evacuated when the ground suddenly began heating up and emitted steam. Experts who were called in did not detect any dangerous substances at the site or any risk to the buildings’ stability, and the source of the heat was said by the municipality to be "trapped energy" from an unknown source. . . . On Thursday, residents of an apartment building on the northern end of Ibn Gabirol Street...

Enlarge ImageGreen gold. A complex geological process produced this sample of nickel sulfide. Credit: Marco Fiorentini, Science Those spare nickels in your pocket might not be there without the help of ancient volcanoes that blasted sulfur dioxide into the sky billions of years ago. The discovery solves a mystery that has dogged researchers for decades, says geochemist Edward Ripley of Indiana University, Bloomington, who was not affiliated with the study. The nickel in ore deposits is actually nickel sulfide, a compound that is rich in sulfur. The sulfur is "critically important," says geochemist Douglas Rumble of the Carnegie Institution...

A series of Earth-shattering volcanic eruptions in Iceland during the Middle Ages may have spurred the people living there to turn away from their pagan gods and convert to Christianity, a new study finds. The discovery came about thanks to precise dating of the volcanic eruptions, which spewed lava about two generations before the Icelandic people changed religions. But why would volcanic eruptions turn people toward monotheism? The answer has to do with the "Voluspa," a prominent medieval poem that predicted a fiery eruption would help lead to the downfall of the pagan gods, the researchers said. Historians have long...

The Italian name for the caldera — Campi Flegrei, or “burning fields”— is apt. The 7.5-mile-wide cauldron is the collapsed top of an ancient volcano, formed when the magma within finally blew. Though half of it is obscured beneath the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean, the other half is studded with cinder cones and calderas from smaller eruptions. And the whole area seethes with hydrothermal activity: Sulfuric acid spews from active fumaroles; geysers spout water and steam and the ground froths with boiling mud; and earthquake swarms shudder through the region, 125 miles south of Rome. And things seem...

Scientists probing a vast crater off Mexico's Yucatan peninsula questioned a popular theory about dinosaurs on Monday, saying the collision that formed the crater happened too far back in time to have caused their extinction by itself. Much evidence points to the idea that an asteroid or comet gouged the Earth around 65 million years ago, triggering volcanic and climate changes that eventually wiped out the dinosaurs. When the huge, mostly underwater crater was found off Yucatan, it seemed the perfect candidate. "Since the early 1990s the Chicxulub crater on Yucatan, Mexico, has been hailed as the smoking gun that...

Volcanic activity worldwide 1 Jun 2016: Colima volcano, Bromo, Semeru, Dukono, Turrialba, Nyiragongo...

Eruptions continue at the volcano after yesterday's major explosion. Dense ash plumes rising from the summit crater can be seen on this morning's satellite images, and a MODIS hot spot is visible on the latest satellite data, suggesting fresh magma continues to arrive at the volcano's summit crater. In the meanwhile, the ash and SO2 plume has drifted and spread over more than 3000 km to the E and SE, covering a vast area that includes parts of northern and eastern Australia.

A moderate earthquake shook northwest Alaska on Monday, the fifth temblor of the same magnitude since April in an area with otherwise little activity, seismologists said. The magnitude-5.7 quake struck at 4:01 a.m. Monday northeast of the village of Noatak, the Alaska Earthquake Center reported. As with other temblors in the earthquake swarm, the quake was felt in Noatak, an Inupiat Eskimo community of 560 people. […] The series of earthquakes has scientists puzzled about activity that is considered very unusual in the area. “At this point, we don’t really understand the nature of these earthquakes,” (earthquake center seismologist Natasha)...

Tamu Massif: The Most Massive Volcano Most of the world's largest features are so clearly visible that they have been known and recognized for hundreds of years. One exception is Tamu Massif. It is now recognized to be a single volcano - instead of a volcano complex with multiple vents. Tamu Massif has a footprint that covers more area than any other volcano - about 120,000 square miles (310,800 square kilometers) - an area about the size of New Mexico. It also has a larger mass than any other known single volcano on Earth. How could this enormous volcano have...

'Catastrophic' event at Campi Flegrei 39,000 years ago Volcanic eruption near Naples may have killed Neanderthals Some researchers are suggesting that Neanderthals were driven to extinction by a massive volcanic eruption near Naples. The suggestion is one of the topics under debate this week at a conference at London's British Museum examining what forces led to the destruction of the Neanderthals and what led to the triumph of the homo sapiens. One new theory holds that a gigantic eruption of the volcano in the Campi Flegrei area near Naples 39,000 years ago was catastrophic for the Neanderthals. That was the...

The Neanderthals were a hardy species that lived through multiple ice ages and would have been familiar with volcanoes and other natural calamities. But the eruptions 40,000 years ago were unlike anything Neanderthals had faced before, Cleghorn and company say. For one thing, all the volcanoes apparently erupted around the same time. And one of those blasts, the Campanian Ignimbrite, is thought to have been the most powerful eruption in Europe in the last 200,000 years... The researchers acknowledge that there are gaps in the volcanoes theory. For instance, the time line needs to be better defined -- did...

Researchers have securely dated a prehistoric human stone tool industry that is thought to have been used by early modern humans, or possibly late Neanderthals, around the time when early modern humans were beginning to emerge in Europe, arguably sometime between 40,000 to 50,000 years B.P... The Uluzzian, a prehistoric stone tool techno-tradition represented by lithic artifacts unearthed by archaeologists at cave locations primarily in Italy and Greece, has been a central contender as a possible "transitional" industry between the typical stone tool types (the Mousterian) used by late European Neanderthals and those (Aurignacian, Châtelperronian) of the earliest modern human...

During the Late Bronze Age, the Aegean volcanic island of Thera erupted violently, spreading pumice and ash across the eastern Mediterranean and triggering frosts as far away as what is now California. The Theran town of Akrotiri was completely buried. Tsunamis up to 12 meters high crashed onto the shores of Crete, 110 kilometers to the south, and the cataclysm may ultimately have sped the demise of Crete's famed Minoan civilization. For nearly 30 years, archaeologists have fought over when the eruption took place. Those who rely on dates from pottery styles and Egyptian inscriptions put the event at roughly...

An analysis of data from the March 2009 eruption of Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano reveals that harmonic tremors reached high “scream” frequencies before suddenly stopping at five eruptions, according a University of Washington (UW) press release. Lead author Alicia Hotovec-Ellis, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences, said that the extraordinarily high frequency of this tremor is not easily explained by many of the currently accepted theories. In fact, Redoubt’s volcanic wail reaches such a pitch it can be heard by human ears. “The pitch that Redoubt got up to was so much higher than any other volcano that...

Volcanoes have more impact on earth’s climate than previously thought, scientists at the University of Colorado have found. The researchers came across the finding as they looked for reasons our planet has not heated up as much as expected. The mainstream explanation was that the development in Asia (China and India, essentially) – where the industrial sulfur dioxide emissions increased 60 percent from 2000 to 2010, mainly driven by coal burning – was behind the cooling of Earth. According to the study by Ryan Neely which helped cement the mainstream view, small amounts of sulfur dioxide emissions from Earth's surface...

The ancient Minoan city of Akrotiri was destroyed by a massive eruption over 3,000 years ago. Will it happen again soon to the excavated remains and the modern town? Scientists uncover some possible signs..... Now, a new survey suggests that a chamber of molten rock beneath Santorini's volcano has expanded 10-20 million cubic metres – up to 15 times the size of London's Olympic Stadium – between January 2011 and April 2012. The growth of this 'balloon' of magma has seen the surface of the island rise 8-14 centimetres during this period, a team led by Oxford University scientists has...

MEXICO CITY - Popocatépetl, the nearly 18,000 foot volcano that hovers like a sentinel on the southeastern fringe of Mexico's capital, awakened again Sunday, punctuating an especially shaky seismic season. Popo, as the mountain is widely called, spewed at least seven exhalations overnight Saturday and through the day Sunday, sending vapor, smoke and gas billowing into the clear sky. The most serious occurred just after 9 a.m. Sunday, sending a vapor cloud a mile into the air. Mexico's National Disaster Prevention Center issued a precautionary warning to residents, advising them to stay alert for a worsening situation and to keep...

They come out from under their rocks every time we have a few tornados and never miss an opening when it comes to exploiting popular ignorance. An AP column last Friday titled Science panel: Get ready for extreme weather opened by asserting – “Think of the Texas drought, floods in Thailand and Russia's devastating heat waves as coming attractions in a warming world. That is the warning from top international climate scientists and disaster experts after meeting in Africa.” And of course their thesis is that this weather is the fault of mankind. They fail to mention that for the...