Volcanoes and Super Volcanoes
A volcano in the Philippines is set to go bang... very soon.
Authorities have moved 50,000 people to safety as Mount Mayon shows signs of erupting.
This image taken by NASA shows the volcano is certainly smoking, while there have been reports of small earthquakes and lava at the summit.
All these point to an imminent major eruption.
So while a mountain blowing its top is bad news, at least it has the good manners to issue a warning before it belches.
On the volcano riff, the fantastic Armeggedon Online has come with a list of the top super volcanoes on Earth.
Famously, there's a real nasty surprise waiting underneath Yellowstone park in the USA. But it's not the only one.
Here's a few more to worry about...
LAKE TOBA, SUMATRA, INDONESIA SUPER VOLCANO
The 1,080-square-mile Toba caldera is the only supervolcano in existence that can be described as Yellowstone's "big" sister.
About 74,000 years ago, Toba erupted and ejected almost three times as much volcanic ash as the most recent major Yellowstone eruption (Lava Creek, 630,000 years ago) and about 12 per cent more than Yellowstone's largest eruption (Huckleberry Ridge, 1.8 million years ago).
That comes to several thousand times more material than erupted from Mount St. Helens in 1980.
LONG VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
Second only to Yellowstone in North America is the Long Valley caldera, in east-central California.
The 200-square-mile caldera is just south of Mono Lake, near the Nevada state line. The biggest eruption from Long Valley was 760,000 years ago, which unleashed 2,000 to 3,000 times as much lava and ash as Mount St. Helens, after which the caldera floor dropped about a mile, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Some of the ash reached as far east as Nebraska.
Long Valley's most recent eruption was in Mono Lake just 250 years ago, but it was very small. More worrisome is a swarm of strong earthquakes in 1980 and the 10-inch rise of about 100 square miles of caldera floor.
Those developments have geologists concerned that Long Valley is gearing up for another eruption of some sort. Gulp!
LAKE TAUPO, NEW ZEALAND SUPER VOLCANO
New Zealand's Taupo caldera has been filled by water, creating what many describe as one of the world's most beautiful landscapes.
Lake Taupo itself was created by a massive eruption 26,500 years ago. The caldera - the collapsed and subsided basin left after the huge eruption - became today's lake.
But Taupo did not die. The 485-square-mile caldera let loose again in the year 181, with estimates of ash and magma reaching as high as 22 cubic miles.
VALLES CALDERA, NEW MEXICO SUPER VOLCANO
There is a sleeping monster in the heart of New Mexico.
The 175-square-mile Valles caldera forms a large pock in the middle of northern New Mexico, west of Santa Fe. It last exploded 1.2 million and 1.6 million years ago, piling up 150 cubic miles of rock and blasting ash as far away as Iowa. That's equivalent to roughly 2,000 Mount St. Helens eruptions.
AIRA, JAPAN SUPER VOLCANO
One of the most recently troubling calderas in the world is the 150-square-mile Aira caldera in southern Japan, on the edge of which sits the city of Kagoshima.
After a century of peace, the Sakura-jima volcano, which forms part of the Aira caldera, awoke on Jan. 10, 1914, and gave local residents two days' notice of its intentions by letting loose hundreds of earthquakes.
On January 12, after 23,000 people and their farm animals living on its flanks were evacuated, Sakura-jima erupted with ash, steam and lava. It was not really a super eruption, but it taught people a lot about how volcanoes erupt.
SIBERIAN TRAPS
While a worst-case-scenario supervolcano eruption sometime in the future would be catastrophic for large parts of the world, that destruction would be minor compared with what scientists believe could be the largest lava flow in Earth's history: the Siberian Traps of 251 million years ago.
The gigantic lava flow in Siberia lasted upward of a million years and flooded an area about the size of the lower 48 United States with layer upon layer of dark basalt lava -- thousands of feet thick.
Some geologists suspect the eruption was caused by an extra-large plume of hot material welling up from the edge of the Earth's core. But what makes it especially important is that the Siberian Traps is the prime suspect in wiping out 90 percent of all living species 251 million years ago -- the most severe extinction event in Earth's history.
For even more info on these supervolcanoes, plus some more farther afield, click here.
Weird Science Factoid: Unlike some other mammals, humans cannot taste water. They taste the chemicals and impurities in the water instead.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
whats the dead animal in the piccy?
Not 100 per cent sure, although it does look like a T-Rex skull.