James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6d ago
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
This ring is home to 75% of the planet's volcanoes and 90% of its earthquakes.
Think of the tectonic plates here as pieces of a cracked shell resting on the hot molten rock of the Earth's mantle very slowly, but still moving.
In what are known as subduction zones, one plate is subducted, basically shoved under another, releasing magma.
And magma means volcanoes.
In any volcanic eruption, that magma, the molten rock beneath our feet, is forced up to the surface.
Now on land, the power of a volcano is obvious.
We can literally see it explode.
But underwater, you see where I'm going with this, things work a little differently as it faces the crushing pressure of thousands of tons of seawater.
In 2009, an expedition filmed the West Mata volcano erupting an incredible 1200 meters beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean in an area between Samoa, Fiji and Ponga.
Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute used a remotely operated underwater vehicle or ROV to capture footage of the explosion and the active formation of what's known as pillow lava, so-called because of their shape.
Lava runs hot around 700 to 1200 degrees Celsius.
And when it hits seawater, it experiences a dramatic temperature change.
The inner rock stays hot while the outside cools into a chain of not so fluffy, but pillows.
This was the first time a deep sea eruption spewing molten lava had ever been filmed.
So was this just an isolated incident?
No, check this out.
This blew my mind.
It's estimated that approximately three quarters of all volcanic activity on Earth occurs as deep underwater eruptions.
These eruptions can cause devastating and deadly tsunamis, violent steam explosions, clouds of ash and toxic gases.
They release basaltic balloons, essentially gas-filled bubbles of lava, and they create pumice rafts like this one from a 2019 underwater eruption near Tonga.
Showing 3401–3420 of 4,486 · page 171 of 225
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