SOLAR VOLCANOES

LARGEST VOLCANO IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

• Olympus Mons is a shield volcano that towers to an amazing 26 km. That makes it 3 times the height of Mt. Everest. Unlike Everest, Olympus Mons has a very gentle slope. It is up to 550 km at its base. The edge of the volcano’s base is marked by a basal cliff that is 6 km high in some places, but has been eradicated by the overflow of lava in the Martian past.

MOST ACTIVE VOLCANIC PLANETS

• Extraterrestrial Volcanoes - Exoplanets, Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, Mars, Io, Saturn. Volcanism has played a major part in shaping not only planet Earth, but other places in our universe. Though other planets show signs of volcanic eruptions, most seemed to have erupted in the distant past and are inactive now.

SUPER VOLCANOES

HOW DO THEY FORM

• Supervolcanoes can occur when magma in the mantle rises into the crust from a hotspot but is unable to break through the crust, and pressure builds in a large and growing magma pool until the crust is unable to contain the pressure (this is the case for the Yellowstone Caldera).

WHAT ARE THEY

• A supervolcano is any volcano capable of producing a volcanic eruption with an ejecta volume greater than 1,000 km³. This is thousands of times larger than normal volcanic eruptions.

EFFECTS OF A SUPER VOLCANO

• Within 3-4 days, a fine dusting of ash could fall across Europe, according to a UK Met Office computer forecast commissioned by the BBC. The computer model predicts how ash would spread following a nine-day June eruption of 1000 cubic km of ash and gas from Yellowstone. The model shows that the fallout from a Yellowstone super-eruption could affect three quarters of the US. The greatest danger would be within 1,000 km of the blast where 90 per cent of people could be killed. Large numbers of people would die across the country – inhaled ash forms a cement-like mixture in human lungs. Even the US East Coast could be paralysed by 1cm of ash.

EARTH QUAKES

WHAT IS AN EARYHQUAKE

• Earthquakes are the vibrations caused by rocks breaking under stress. The underground surface along which the rock breaks and moves is called a fault plane. Earthquakes in Australia are usually caused by movements along faults as a result of compression in the Earth’s crust.

HOW ARE EARTHQUAKES MEASURED

• The size or magnitude of earthquakes is determined by measuring the amplitude of the seismic waves recorded on a seismograph and the distance of the seismograph from the earthquake. These are put into a formula which converts them to a magnitude, which is a measure of the energy released by the earthquake. For every unit increase in magnitude, there is roughly a thirty-fold increase in the energy released.

TYPES OF EARTHQUAKES

TECTONIC

VOLCANIC

COLLAPSE

EXPLOSION

FOLDS+faults

3 TYPES OF FAULTS

FOLDS

• A geological fold occurs when one or a stack of originally flat and planar surfaces, such as sedimentary strata, are bent or curved as a result of permanent deformation. Synsedimentary folds are those due to slumping of sedimentary material before it is lithified. Folds in rocks vary in size from microscopic crinkles to mountain-sized folds. They occur singly as isolated folds and in extensive fold trains of different sizes, on a variety of scales.

FAULTS

• In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock, across which there has been significant displacement along the fractures as a result of rock mass movement. Large faults within the Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic forces, with the largest forming the boundaries between the plates, such as subduction zones or transform faults. Energy release associated with rapid movement on active faults is the cause of most earthquakes.

RING OF FIRE

WHERE IS IT SITUATED

• The Ring of Fire is a string of volcanoes and sites of seismic activity, or earthquakes, around the edges of the Pacific Ocean. Roughly 90% of all earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire, and the ring is dotted with 75% of all active volcanoes on Earth.

WORLDS LARGEST ACTIVE VOLCANO

EARTH SCIENCE