Rifted continental margins are the product of stretching, thinning and ultimate break-up of a continental plate into smaller fragments, and the rocks lying beneath them store a record of this rifting process. Earth scientists can read this record by careful sampling and with remote geophysical techniques. These experimental studies have been complemented by theoretical analyses of continental e...

The village of Furnas, like other active volcanic areas in the world, exhibits high levels of hazardous gases. We aimed to investigate the existence of a possible association between chronic exposure to volcanic sulfur gases and chronic bronchitis. To investigate this, we used two populations, one exposed to active manifestations of volcanism (Furnas) and another from an area where no volcanic ...

Sulphur dioxide (SO2) fluxes of active degassing volcanoes are routinely measured with ground-based equipment to characterize and monitor volcanic activity. SO2 of unmonitored volcanoes or from explosive volcanic eruptions, can be measured with satellites. However, remote-sensing methods based on absorption spectroscopy generally provide integrated amounts of already dispersed plumes of SO2 and...

Long-term hazard assessment, one of the bastions of risk-mitigation programs, is required for land-use planning and for developing emergency plans. To ensure quality and representative results, long-term volcanic hazard assessment requires several sequential steps to be completed, which include the compilation of geological and volcanological information, the characterisation of past eruptions,...

Contained fluids heated from below spontaneously organize into convection cells when sufficiently far from conductive equilibrium. Fluids can also be organized by surface tension and other forces at the top. Plate tectonics was once regarded as passive motion of plates on top of mantle convection cells but it now appears that continents and plate tectonics organize the flow in the mantle. The f...

The Cenozoic volcanic activity of the Harrat Ash Sham volcanic field in south of Syria is a part of the extensive magmatism that took place in the auxiliary extension faults along the Dead Sea Fault Zone from upper Eocene to Holocene. Pliocene volcanic rocks form an important part of igneous succession in Syrian Part of Harrat as Sham. These rocks vary from basalts flows to scoria. Pliocene bas...

Starting on 21 April 2015, unusual activity on the summit of Kīlauea was detected. Rapid summit inflation and a rising lava lake in Halema‘uma‘u crater were interpreted as early signs of imminent magma intrusion. We explored the three-dimensional (3D) surface motion accompanying this volcanic event using the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) stacking method. Multi-temporal COSMO-...

Very little is known about fungal diversity in Antarctica as compared to other biomes and how these important organisms function in this unusual ecosystem. Perhaps one of the most unusual ecosystems is that of Deception Island; an active volcanic island part of the South Shetland Islands of the Antarctic Peninsula. Here we describe the fungal diversity associated with historic wood from structu...

This paper describes the development of a multi-parameter system for monitoring volcanic activity. The system permits the remote access and the connection of several modules in a network. An embedded ARM™ processor has been used, allowing a great flexibility in hardware configuration. The use of a complete Linux solution (Debian™) as Operating System permits a quick, easy application developmen...

Over the past 6 years we have conducted an extensive monitoring program of Io at near infrared wavelengths, in order to determine the location, frequency, and duration of the volcanic activity on this satellite of Jupiter. The observations were obtained at the Wyoming 2.3-m telescope using a near-infrared speckle interferometry system that provides standard photometry and in addition can locate...