Tamsyn Mather

It's only subsequently that we've really learned this.

Yeah.

So really, the eruption that people really became aware of was in 1883, which is the Krakatau eruption again in Indonesia.

And this did not have such a profound effect on global climate.

But because we had the undersea telegraph cables in place, news could travel around our planet much more quickly.

So people were aware of this eruption within hours of it happening and started looking for phenomenon, looking for changes.

So looking for amazing sunsets, which they saw, and evidence of the pressure wave traveling around the planet in terms of barometers and things like that.

So actually it was the communications technology of the time really changed the way that we experience and understand volcanoes.

so some volcanoes the tectonic plates have rearranged themselves as they've been moved away from the source of the the source of their magma other volcanoes do seem to have gone gone dead just because they haven't erupted for a very long time and often we can't exactly work out why it's just that the the focus of the the way that the magma finds its way to the surface seems to have shifted

So we can definitely make, again, a very good forecast, a very good prediction that that volcano is unlikely to erupt again.

But these are unpredictable mountains, so they often have the last words, and sometimes they still can take people by surprise.

Oh, there's plenty of examples of new volcanoes.

So in some ways, the activity that's going on in Iceland at the moment on the Reykjanes Peninsula, these are new fissures that are opening up all the time.

We don't really have a central volcano there.

These are more like fissures that open up and spew forth lava flows.

But another famous example is the Parakutin volcano, which was basically sprung up.

one otherwise normal day in a farmer's field in Mexico.

Generally, they come up in places that we expect volcanism.

So in areas that have had other volcanoes going off in the past or other similar types of fissure eruptions in the past, they don't normally come up in completely unexpected zones away from other volcanic activity.

So the basaltic lavas that come out of volcanoes like Kilauea in Hawaii or the volcanism on Iceland are getting on for about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.