Posts tagged volcanoes
Background This planet, located somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, orbits a M5V star about 0.682764 AU away from its star. The planet is volcanically active due to the gravitational field of the ...
Picture this, a highly volcanic island sitting in the middle of a temperate or sub-arctic sea, the heat generated by the magma beneath the island and the volcano heats the air enough to generate a ...
So there is an Antarctic like continent in my setting; and just like Antarctica it is the largest and most inhospitable desert in the planet due to how absolutely cold it is. But what if there wa...
Could people with Iron Age technology possibly dig large holes in volcanic rock on the edges of a lave tube system. Would this be an effective way to run a trade business or to live in an undergro...
Context: In a near-future version of our solar system, humans have established multiple underwater colonies on Jupiter's moon Europa. Many of these outposts are situated next to hydrothermal vents ...
I want to use the an active large ignious province (LIP) as a "biome" on a continent in my world. This video about the Siberian Traps inspired me. A LIP modeled after the Siberian Traps gives you a...
Some islands can survive for very long. Madagascar, for example, has been around for 80-100 million years and is likely to remain isolated for hundreds of millions of years more. Volcanic islands,...
With the potential for an impact event to trigger volcanic activity on the opposite side of the planet, what is the largest plateau of flood basalt physically capable of forming on Earth, post-impa...
There's an important aspect of my headworld involving volcanoes which I planned many years ago. Recently I revisited this concept to refine it further, only to run into a few questions that I've b...
I have an Earth analog that is nearly completely covered in ice and glaciers. I want to have oases of warmth scattered across the planet. These oases aren't tropical by any means, having just enoug...
On May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens made American history with an eruption that took 57 human lives and killed thousands of animals. It has released only a quarter of a cubic mile of ash, but it i...
This is the third in a series of 5 (at this point) questions. It's not relevant to this question, but for anyone who's curious this was the first, this the second. Conditions for this question are...
This question basically boils down to this: What would be the places on a given continent where one would find mountains? I have seen maps from games, movies, board games, books etc. where it would...
As the title says, is it possible to have a volcano that is perpetually erupting, and how would it be achieved? To be considered a "Perpetual Eruption", the volcano must emit moderate quantities o...
In my world, there is a chain of offshore volcanoes which are the result of a smaller plate hitting a larger one. There are two to three active volcanoes. My question is: two of these volcanoes a...
So, vaguely, I remember from earth science that when submarine volcanoes erupt they eventually form archipelagos. My question actually has several parts; Starting with the first eruption to bre...
My islands (in the world I'm building) were formed from a volcanic hotspot. I want to build realistic islands, so I was wondering how tall volcanic islands are generally in relation to their area. ...
On Earth, there are only two different ways to create major volcanoes. One way is subduction. It occurs when older/heavier rock sinks beneath younger/lighter rock. As the rock descends, it lique...
A caldera is usually the remnant of a volcanic eruption powerful enough to collapse the structure surrounding the magma chamber. Many of our examples, like Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Toba and even ...
Here is a map I just produced of the plate tectonics of a world I'm working on. Does anyone familiar with the subject see anything wrong with it? If you can differentiate between the penciled and...
A volcanic eruption is measured in two constants--gas and viscosity. For clearance, low viscosity is like squirting water off a nozzle, whereas high viscosity is like squirting caramel off a nozzl...
If I were to use handwavium to raise a volcano in the middle of the sea, would it contain metals or ores large enough to be extracted by normal means, like mining with a pickaxe? Everything apart ...
I have been told that the high proportion of O2 and CH4 in my atmosphere are unsustainable unless constantly refreshed by an active process. I would like to sustain the following atmospheric compo...
I thought that a large, close moon might help generate enough heat and stress to raise the average temperature on my world and stave off a Snowball Earth scenario. According to this article and thi...
I'm building a very small homeworld (0.602 M$_e$) with a very large moon (0.0711 M$_e$) that orbit each other at a barycenter about 7.12 planetary radii (1 R = 0.870 R$_e$) from the primary's cente...
I'm very interested in a post-eruption setting in the continental United States. Unfortunately, it looks quite unlikely that a serious caldera-forming eruption is in our near future. However, we'r...
This question is inspired by Green's Volcanoes in Orbit! The premise is that there is a 50-mile-high shield volcano (again, let's ignore the height implausibility) with a slope of about 2-3 degrees...
Building on this question about space exploration on the slopes of a 50 mile high volcano, I'm curious what would happen when the volcano erupts. The volcano is: 50 miles high, just on the edge ...
Background Information: 252 million years ago, Siberia erupted, releasing enough lava to fill in a volume anywhere between one and four million cubic kilometers. Any time someone thinks "large ig...
For the world I am creating I am trying to have an event like a super volcano explosion in its past. Generations of oral storytelling have resulted in the Norse mythology of Ragnarok making its way...
What would be the geographical and ecological implications for an Earth-like planet that experienced intense volcanic and supervolcanic activity on a scale that, while decreasing over time, was far...
Premise; A magma/lava planet tidally locked around its sun. The side facing the sun is always erupting lava, the dark side is a cooled shell, which sinks into the magma beneath in a global whirlpo...
How big of a volcano would be needed for a large (Alaska-sized) area on an Earth-Like planet to be covered in a thick shell of igneous rock? Would that volcano also destroy the world or make it un...
Since the geological history of the world's largest nation is as big as the nation itself, and since I don't have a master familiarity with Russia's formation over hundreds of millions of years, I'...
My Kepler Bb planet has 4 moons and is habitable. So that is good. But all 4 of these moons are major moons which while indeed possible, could be a problem. You see, these moons are in resonance s...
A key part of the plot in a story I'm working on revolves around the main region being on top of volcano that is set to erupt. The trouble is that the region in question in my setting is roughly th...
North America's largest and perhaps most popular volcano is the plume of mantle situated right beneath the surface of what we arbitrarily call Yellowstone National Park. This image shows the two...
A volcanic island can obviously come into existence quite easily and swiftly by natural causes, as evidenced for instance by the appearance of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland. However, people have...
Everybody, even those who are complete beginners in the field of Astronomy, know Io, the cryovolcanic moon of Jupiter that looks like a burned pizza with skin cancer. Volcanoes constantly spit out ...
Suppose we have a rocky planet (somewhere between Earth- and Super-Earth- sized) orbiting a star far enough away that it would be around Pluto's temperature if sunlight was the only heat source. If...
I have a few questions related to a crazy setting I'm working for my novel. Let's say we have a planet with a thin atmosphere and low gravity. It's volcanic activity is so intense that the planet ...
I would like to create a civilisation that develops near active volcanos. In ancient times, they would make good use of volcanoes like: Use lava as heat resource. Use lava as material to make bri...
The setup: A thick mountain chain is permanently covered in smoke. The smoke comes from several active volcanoes within the mountains, and is kept from dispersing by magic (the magic plays virtuall...
I am working on a survival suspense story, where a sizeable group of surivors is trapped in a tropical island (somewhere in the Ring of Fire) by a volcanic eruption. They find shelter from the erpu...
One of the theories behind the extinction of the dinosaurs is the eruption of one or a series of volcanoes. Supposedly the ash expelled by these eruptions blocked out the sun, killing plants and th...
What would happen a volcano the size of Australia were to erupt? How high on the extinction-list would it rank? Would it be above the asteroid that hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs? Which known...