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We can't predict a volcanic eruption more than a few days or months in advance. But one of the most devastating eruptions in human history could give us a huge boost in predicting the next massive volcano. More »
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From 1550 to 1850, Earth mysteriously got colder. Communities from Greenland to the Alps were swallowed up by glaciers, and bodies of water like the Baltic Sea and Manhattan Harbor froze over. But what caused this Little Ice Age? More »
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Scenes from Miyakejima can look downright post-apocalyptic. Each resident on the tiny Japanese island is required to carry a gas mask, just in case they need to quickly pull it on. But why? More »
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The mountain beaver species of western North America possess some seriously weird teeth. Their teeth are thick and deep, providing the extra toughness necessary to eat hard, gritty plants. So why do they spend all their time eating soft plants? More »
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Supervolcano eruptions are the most devastating natural disasters on the planet, unleashing destruction that can level entire continents and kick off new ice ages. We've long struggled to understand what causes these unimaginable eruptions... but now, there might be an answer. More »
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Billions of years ago, Mercury was choked in unimaginable amounts of lava. About six percent of the entire planet was covered in the lava of a single volcanic maelstrom. Not bad considering we weren't even sure Mercury had volcanoes. More »
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The Axial Seamount is an undersea volcano located 250 miles off the Oregon coast. It's one of the most active underwater volcanoes in the world, and it's just started erupting. For the first time ever, scientists saw that eruption coming. More »
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In the good old days — before the epic scale of Roland Emmerich's 2012 and everything Michael Bay is responsible for in the past decade — we had simpler, more contained disaster movies. Apocalypse, schmocalypse: 1997's Volcano focuses solely on a volcano destroying Los Angeles. More »
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The moon Io is home to over 400 active volcanoes, making it the most geologically active place in the solar system. And in this image created from the Galileo probe, you can see two huge volcanoes erupting from the surface. More »
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In 2006 the ground near Sidoarjo, Indonesia started spitting up mud. The mud volcano, Lusi, has been continuously erupting ever since, displacing 40,000 people and killing fifteen. How long it keeps going depends on the cause, which remains unknown. Some scientists believe Lusi will keep erupting for at least another twenty years. Others believe the volcano may just scratch out an entire century before it stops. What's the truth? More »
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About 250 million years ago, the world suffered through an extinction event that makes the death of the dinosaurs look like a minor hiccup by comparison. And now we have our best understanding yet of what caused the Great Dying. More »
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Roland Emmerich's 2012 has the worst science in a science fiction film, according to NASA's experts — followed by Armageddon, Volcano, The Sixth Day and Chain Reaction. So what were the films with the best science, according to NASA? More »
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We've seen what would happen if the Moon disappeared. Now see an image of what a 1936 issue of Science and Mechanics says will happen if the Moon drops out of orbit into the Earth. [Via Modern Mechanix.] More »
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Survival isn't just a matter of stockpiling food and water purification tablets. This guide is for situations more extreme than that. Find out how to defuse a nuclear bomb, survive a 3500 foot plunge, and surf down a lava wave. More »
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Every great disaster movie has some moments of pure, epic destruction, where everything collapses, burns or blows up real good. Bonus points for destroyed landmarks and victim cameos. Here are 30 amazing money shots from the greatest disaster porn flicks. More »
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Some of the world's most terrifying disasters are also breathtaking to behold. In this gallery are awe-inducing photographs of some of the worst disasters of the last hundred years. More »
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A major challenge holding back the accurate prediction of volcanic eruptions is we don't really have the ability to put sophisticated monitoring equipment right in the heart of the hot magma. Now there's technology that thrives in such extreme heat. More »
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The gigantic black hole at the center of the huge M87 galaxy is doing its best impression of an Icelandic volcano, ejecting waves of particles that are disrupting star-creating gas just like bursts of volcanic gas can affect atmospheric ash. More »
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Before the twentieth century, astronomers believed volcanoes formed the Moon's craters instead of meteorite impacts. Now we know better, but those earlier astronomers might not have been completely wrong - at least when it comes to craters like this one. More »
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The forbidding slopes of Klyuchevskaya are covered in snow and barren rock. And at its peak, a volcanic eruption continues to spew ash and rock into the atmosphere. More »
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What a difference giant volcanic ash makes. Watch the skies change completely in this time-lapse video, showing air traffic returning to normal after being grounded due to the volcano. It gets pretty busy up there. More »
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On May 8, 1902, Mt. Pelee in Martinique erupted, destroying the city of St. Pierre and instantaneously killing more than 30,000 people. The city's sole survivor was Ludger Sylbaris, a felonious drunk who was rotting in this cell. More »
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We're not quite back to the pre-plane era, but air travel over and around the north Atlantic might get a lot more disrupted in the coming years. More »
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The ongoing eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has filled the atmosphere with so much dust that airplanes throughout the world are grounded. These incredible photographs show the lightning-laced wrath of the volcano that won't stop. More »
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Hydrothermal vents - deep, volcanic cuts in the ocean floor - are among the most extreme environments where life exists. Now robots have explored the deepest vent and found a network of "ocean-bottom jets" that creatures use for swift transportation. More »
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When an undersea volcano erupted this past May near Samoa, researchers captured video of the blast. Now they've released the footage, giving the rest of the world its first look at the deepest underwater eruption ever caught on film. More »
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Sure, disaster movies are just empty calories of mass destruction — but even when you don't take them seriously, there are always some scenes that you just can't excuse. We've collected the most infuriating moments from the biggest disaster movies. More »
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Deep beneath the ocean near the Pacific island Tongatapu, a volcano erupted last month, spewing steam, ash, and smoke 100 meters into the air. We've got a gallery of this monstrous, watery explosion. More »
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Known for spewing liquid rock, ash clouds, and noxious gases into the atmosphere, volcanoes seem unlikely candidates for solving Global Warming. But the rocks the fiery mountains leave behind may be exactly that, according to scientists at Columbia University. They say that sequestering carbon dioxide in volcanic rocks beneath the ocean may be the best way yet to socking the CO2 away, out of the atmosphere, and making sure it never haunts us again. More »
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For a small planet, Mars sure knows how to go big. It's about half as large as Earth, but it's got the hugest volcano in the solar system in the Arizona-sized Olympus Mons and the grandest of all canyons in the 7 kilometer-deep Vallis Marineris. Now it can add its coolest, most-braggable title: the Biggest Impact Crater in the Solar System. In a new study out in Nature, scientists have shown that Mars was probably hit by an asteroid the size of the Moon sometime in its early history, which left a crater the size of the planet's entire northern hemisphere. More »
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Several days ago, a volcano that had been dormant for 9,000 years near the coast of Chile erupted spectacularly, hurling liquified metals and lightning many miles into the sky. The results, which you see here, are called a "dirty thunderstorm," and are quite rare. Nobody is certain what causes them, but according to National Geographic it's believed to be "the result of rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in the plume collid[ing] to produce static charges—just as ice particles collide to create charge in regular thunderstorms." Want to see a photo of the volcano plume from space? More »
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Tweaking Earth's climate to combat global warming seems like a great idea. Giant mirrors or shades in space, artificially enhanced cloud cover, and regular injections of reflective sulfate particles into the stratosphere could all help cool the planet enough for us to ignore all of the CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere. But a new study says one of the most popular ideas — the sulfate particles — would devastate the ozone layer, leaving us all to fry from exposure to ultraviolet radiation even as the planet cooled. More »
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If the 800-degree heat or crushing atmospheric pressure doesn't get you, you might want to watch out for spewing plumes of sulfur dioxide and liquid lava flows on your next visit to Venus. We've long known that our neighboring planet has lots of volcanoes, but no one is sure if any of them are currently active. It's impossible to see through Venus' dense CO2 atmosphere, but the European Space Agency's Venus Express orbiter has found evidence of drastic, sudden chemical changes at high altitudes. An active volcano might be the culprit. More »
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A crater on the ever-active Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii has started to spew a huge plume of ash. The recent explosion, which shut down roads in the area, may be a harbinger of even bigger explosions to come. Above, you can see what happened a few years ago when things got explodey on Kilauea. We've got pictures of the new ash plume, plus more Kilauea lava love below. More »
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At last, a decades-old mystery has been solved about the atmosphere on Jupiter's volcano-riffic moon Io. This moon, whose super-lavalicious geological situation has earned it the titles "pizza face" and "most volcanically active body in the solar system," is special to the heart of io9 because we love fire. Turns out that constant fire-spewage will get you an atmosphere. According to Space.com, new photographs from the New Horizon satellite revealed what Io's atmosphere is made of. More »
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