Mt. Cameroon is one of the most active volcanoes in Africa and poses a possible threat to about half a million people in the area, yet knowledge of the volcano's underlying magma supply system is sparse. To characterize Mt. Cameroon's magma plumbing system, we employed mineral-melt equilibrium thermobarometry on the products of the volcano's two most recent eruptions of 1999 and 2000. Our resul...

Classes of atmospheric aerosols and their main sources, distributions of tropospheric aerosol by size and mass, their physico-chemical composition and principal optical properties in various spectral bands are described. Stratospheric aerosols in “quiet” and “disturbed” periods after the major volcanic eruptions, their interactions with clouds and of underlying surface radiative properties affe...

Volcanic eruptions demonstrate that our planet is alive and evolving. Take photos of volcanoes around the Earth and you will see that they all look different, but also share important features. Some volcanoes come in perfect conical shapes, while others are much flatter and harder to spot. This is just like humans, some are tall and others are short, or some have dark hair while others have lig...

The polarization lidar photometer networking (POLIPHON) method introduced to separate coarse-mode and fine-mode particle properties of Eyjafjallajökull volcanic aerosols in 2010 is extended to cover Saharan dust events as well. Furthermore, new volcanic dust observations performed after the Grimsvötn volcanic eruptions in 2011 are presented. The retrieval of particle mass concentrations require...

Volcanic ash is fragments of magma, and consists of minerals and volcanic glass. These materials in the ash can provide important information on the nature of the magma, because chemical compositions of magma usually show distinct features in each volcano, and because assemblages and compositions of minerals reflect their host melt. Using assemblages and chemical compositions of minerals and gl...

[1] A new monthly volcanic forcing dataset is included in a coupled GCM for a more physically consistent treatment of the stratospheric sulfate aerosol history from explosive volcanism. The volcanic forcing is different from previous versions in that there is an individual evolution of the aerosol for each event. Thus the seasonal and latitudinal dependence of the volcanic aerosol can affect gl...

[1] We present measurements of the phase function and degree of linear polarization for unpolarized incident light as a function of the scattering angle for El Chichón and Pinatubo volcanic ashes at 633 nm. The results are combined and compared with those for Pinatubo at 442 nm and Lokon volcanic ash at 442 and 633 nm [Volten et al., 2001]. The three samples of volcanic ashes consist of micron ...

Shallow-water coral reef ecosystems, particularly those already impaired by anthropogenic pressures, may be highly sensitive to disturbances from natural catastrophic events, such as volcanic eruptions. Explosive volcanic eruptions expel large quantities of silicate ash particles into the atmosphere, which can disperse across millions of square kilometres and deposit into coral reef ecosystems....

Risk management stakeholders in high-populated volcanic islands should be provided with the latest high-quality volcanic information. We present here the first volcanic susceptibility map of Lanzarote and Chinijo Islands and their submarine flanks based on updated chronostratigraphical and volcano structural data, as well as on the geomorphological analysis of the bathymetric data of the submar...

Industrial chlorofluorocarbons that cause ozone depletion have been phased out under the Montreal Protocol. A chemically driven increase in polar ozone (or "healing") is expected in response to this historic agreement. Observations and model calculations together indicate that healing of the Antarctic ozone layer has now begun to occur during the month of September. Fingerprints of September he...