• Question: What kind of volcanoes have you seen before?

    Asked by anon-273582 on 9 Dec 2020.
    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 9 Dec 2020:

      I have been to Hawaii, New Zealand, Iceland, Italy, Spain, France, Scotland, Cyprus, and America looking at volcanos so I have seen the volcanoes that we get above both constructive (e.g. Iceland) and destructive (e.g. New Zealand) plate boundaries, as well as the kind we get in the middle of plates (e.g. Hawaii). I have seen active volcanoes and mapped lava (Hawaii) and explored deep in heart of ancient now cooled volcanoes (Scotland) so a little bit of everything.

    • Photo: Isabel Fletcher

      Isabel Fletcher answered on 9 Dec 2020: last edited 9 Dec 2020 10:02 am

      I have seen a few volcanoes! One of the more well known volcanoes closer to home is Mount Vesuvius, which is in Italy. This volcano is active – meaning it can erupt at any time! It last erupted in 1944 but is most famous for the huge eruption in AD 79 (around 2000 years ago) that buried the city of Pompeii. You can visit the site now, which contains plaster casts of the bodies of people who died in the disaster. Mount Vesuvius is a ‘stratovolcano’ and has the classic volcano shape with multiple layers of lava and rock.

      I have also visited another type of volcano in the Galapagos Islands, which are located in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. They are a fascinating set of islands that have been formed by the Earth’s crust (the first layer of our planet) moving over a hotspot. Molten rock is forced up from the Earth’s mantle (the second layer of our planet), this rock cools and forms a volcano. The Earth’s tectonic plates slowly move away from the hotspot and this forms a chain of islands! These volcanoes are called ‘shield volcanoes’ and usually do not explode like Mount Vesuvius, they also look very different and are generally wider and flatter in shape.

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