Observations of interspecies interactions during volcanic activity provide important opportunities to study how organisms respond to environmental devastation. Japanese camellia (Camellia japonica L.) and its main avian pollinator, the Japanese White-eye (Zosterops japonica), offer an excellent example of such an interaction as key members of the biotic community on Miyake-jima, which erupted i...

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...

In the spirit of collaborative research, Glicken and Ford embarked on the problem of identifying the source of volcanic ash used as temper in prehistoric Maya ceramics. Verification of the presence of glass shards and associated volcanic mineralogy in thin sections of Maya ceramics was straightforward and pointed to the Guatemala Highland volcanic chain. Considering seasonal wind rose patterns,...

15 During the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull on Iceland in April/May 2010, air traffic over Europe 16 was repeatedly interrupted because of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. This completely 17 unusual situation in Europe leads to the demand of improved crisis management, e.g. 18 European wide regulations of volcanic ash thresholds and improved forecasts of theses 19 thresholds. However, the quality...

[1] Water is the dominant component of volcanic gas emissions, and water phase transformations, including the formation of ice, can be significant in the dynamics of volcanic clouds. The effectiveness of volcanic ash particles as ice-forming nuclei (IN) is poorly understood and the sparse data that exist for volcanic ash IN have been interpreted in the context of meteorological, rather than vol...

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...