This is pretty magnificent - just about 2 years after flow stopped on the Lower East Rift Zone of Kilauea, walking across tephra and lava layers out to the Fissure 8 mound, pulling out an infrared thermometer, and checking the temperature of the gas vents still on the site. That's heat originally delivered during the eruption, still slowly leaking its way out. Make sure you watch the end where he gets a view from the summit of fissure 8, into its heart, down the other cones left by the various fissures, and out to the ocean.

Lava entering the ocean

Steam vents at Vesuvius crater

Snapping an Earth Story style photo Hawaiian photographer Kawika Singson was snapped while taking the sort of photo that we like to share on TES. A big thumbs up to all the magnificent image takers who enrich our pages. Loz Image credit: Christopher Hirata.

Strombolian eruption!

Lava and waves of the Pacific Ocean coming together...after dark.

Boiling Mud Volcano, Yellowstone

Sulfur coated fumarole, Iceland

If you are going to use a volcano as a firestarter I recommend consulting a trained professional first.

Travelers attempting to roast marshmallows at a steam vent (fumarole) on the edge of Pacaya volcano

Let’s Go to the Beach! (of the Oligocene)

Hot enough for trip to the beach? With this photo we can visit a beach of an entirely different geologic epoch. These beach sands, once along the coast of a much older Europe, show the marks of passing waves in the Oligocene.

The Oligocene is a geologic epoch that spanned a time period between ~34 to 23 million years ago, short as epochs go but not without importance. It began with an extinction event that decimated oceanic life, thought to be caused by global cooling. Ice that had begun to frost Antarctica in the Eocene grew to an icecap.

The Oligocene is on the cusp of time half-way between us and the dinosaurs. Many mammals of the epoch resemble dinosaurs in size and lifestyle more than they do our modern mammals (http://tinyurl.com/qguu78j).

The rocks of this time period are dominated by successions of sediments, like the sandstone of this photo. Mountains were building such as the Rockies, supplying eroded material into the seas.

If you were transported back to the Oligocene you could see the emergence of grass over the landscape, small horses, and the first elephants with trunks. And like today, you could wade in sands along the coast of Greece and consider the ripple marks left by the waves of the Oligocene sea.

“Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time…” Tennyson

Annie R

Photo: mine, from field work last week in Pindos Mountains.

For Oligocene fans: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/tertiary/oligocene.php http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/history_of_the_earth/Oligocene http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v407/n6806/abs/407887a0.html

Drone flight up to the summit of, and down into the crater of, Ambrym volcano - Vanuatu - where there is an active lava lake. The drone did not melt.

Ocean lava entry off the coast of Hawaii, slowly starting to rebuild a lava delta.