U.S. Geological Survey volcano alert level — an indication of ground-based status of volcanic activity — and aviation color code — indicating the severity of airborne volcanic hazards — can communicate relatively quickly what is happening at Kīlauea volcano on the Big Island.

The Kikai Caldera. (Seama Nobukazu/CC BY 4.0) About 7,300 years ago, a volcano off Japan's Kyushu island unleashed what remains the largest known eruption of the Holocene, our current geological epoch.

“It was like a shotgun blast directly into the sky,” said one marine geologist. A New Zealand-led team of marine geologists investigating an underwater volcano that erupted on Jan. 15 in the Tongan archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean have found that ...

No other puʻus exist on the caldera rim, but geologic deposits of tephra fall mapped in Kīlauea’s summit region indicate that high lava fountains erupted within Kaluapele around the years 1500, 1650, and in the first two decades of the 1800s.

How big can volcanic eruptions get on Jupiter’s moon, Io? This is what a recent study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated new data that could rewrite the textbooks ...

The magma reservoir of the largest volcanic eruption of the Holocene is refilling. This Kobe University insight on the Kikai caldera in Japan allows us to understand giant caldera volcanoes like Yellowstone or Toba more generally and gets us closer to predicting their behavior,

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. (Left) Io as seen by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on 3 July 1999 (Right) A massive ...