America came late. Humanity had come from Africa, and spread out over Eurasia. This happened mainly during the ice age, when lower sea levels allowed walking migration where previously a ...

The double-booked land is also known as the Afar Triangle, a low-lying region wedged into the Ethiopian Plateau. The region is not for the intrepid. The name is synonymous with remoteness. It is also ...

The current Decade Volcano Program First of all, let me make one thing abundantly clear. This is a list put forth by us as suggestion for a new Decade Volcano program. But, in the end it is the ...

Europe has few volcanoes. It lacks the volcanic magnificence of Indonesia, the grandeur of the Andes, the destructiveness of a St Helens or the beauty of a Fuji. But it can hold its own. This small ...

Life in paradise can be hard. Paradise is a Greek word of Persian origin made famous by the Jewish bible: it comes from a mix of very different cultures. The word means a walled garden. The garden ...

The last time I wrote an article for Volcanocafe it was a guest post about the Galapagos Islands, but now I’m a new member of the Volcanocafe writing team (a little bit more about me later). Deep in ...

Mid-oceanic rifts should be in the middle of the ocean they formed. And often they are, but there are exceptions. The Reykjanes Rift, south of Iceland, is one of these. It is well known for its ...

It has been wet in the UK. Nothing unusual there, it may seem, although compared to the tropics, the rain is mostly mild. Temperatures are moderate and therefore the air does not contain as much ...

After our ‘quantum Katla’ post, it is now time to return to the real Katla. For in the real world, Katla has been showing unusually strong shaking. It turned out that Henrik had already done much of ...

Heimaey is famous. It is the only place in Iceland known to have first been settled by non-Vikings: the first inhabitants were escaped Irish slaves, before 900 AD, who didn’t last long. Much later it ...

In the previous post, we read about the birth of Surtsey. It was a famous eruption, which taught us how quickly and unexpectedly new land can form. We have since seen similar eruptions elsewhere as ...

For a brief period this was the nation’s capital. During the war of independence (called a ‘police action’ by the Dutch, in an older echo of some current events), Yogyakarta served as the seat of the ...