UK floods

There will be an update comming soon!!!

Setting the World on Fire!

whilst reading Yahoo news today i saw an article on a "fire Tornado"
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/setting-the-world-on-fire-stunning-pictures-of-rare-devil-tornado-emerge.html

So i thought i would explain what a fire tornado is and why hey are so rare. !!!!

A fire whirl, colloquially fire devil or fire tornado, is a phenomenon—rarely captured on camera—in which a fire, under certain conditions (depending on air temperature and currents), acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like vertically oriented rotating column of air. Fire whirls may be whirlwinds separated from the flames, either within the burn area or outside it, or a vortex of flame, itself.

An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo. Another example is the numerous large fire whirls (some tornadic) that developed after lightning struck an oil storage facility near San Luis Obispo, California on April 7, 1926, several of which produced significant structural damage well away from the fire, killing two. Thousands of whirlwinds were produced by the four-day-long firestorm coincident with conditions that produced severe thunderstorms, in which the larger fire whirls carried debris 5 kilometers away.

Most of the largest fire tornados are spawned from wildfires. They form when a warm updraft and convergence from the wildfire are present. They are usually 10-50 meters tall, a few meters wide, and last only a few minutes. However, some can be more than a kilometer tall, contain winds over 160 km/h, and persist for more than 20 minutes.

Fire whirls can uproot trees up to 15 metres (49 ft) tall. These can also aid the 'spotting' ability of wildfires to propagate and start new fires.

Visually impressive fire whirls may be encountered during dry wind gusts at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, late on Saturday or Sunday evening during the burning of The Man or Temple, respectively.

The San Andreas Fault

Well... i assume that those of you who are reading this blog... at least some of you will be awere of the number of small earthquakes in northern calefornia and also ofshore.

(  as much as i would like to say that these little quakes are the predecessors of the so called and much freaked out about "BIG ONE" at the risk of getting into trouble about it im not going to!!!!) so therefore im crossing this out.

these have therefore made me think of the best known fault in the world. The San Andreas fault on the east coast. this fault has been used anything from bond films (A View to a Kill) to the actuall reason for the richnes of the land that lies along it.

the san andreas fault has provided the majority of the west coast's wealth... from the fertile soil that grows the famous calafornian wines to the oil that bubbles up out of the ground. all of these things including the scenery are what bring in billions of dollars each year.... and the reason that people have chosen to settle here. It has been estimated that when the "Big One" hits... the estimated damage of around 100,000,000 dollars worth of damage could be paid for in under 2 years. proof that the advantages outweigh the downfalls.

Any way....

The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that runs a length of roughly 810 miles (1,300 km) through California in the United States. The fault's motion is right-lateral strike-slip (horizontal motion). It forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.

The fault was first identified in Northern California by UC Berkeley geology professor Andrew Lawson in 1895 and named by him after a small lake which lies in a linear valley formed by the fault just south of San Francisco, the Laguna de San Andreas. After the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, Lawson also discovered that the San Andreas Fault stretched southward into southern California. Large-scale (hundreds of miles) lateral movement along the fault was first proposed in a 1953 paper by geologists Mason Hill and Thomas Dibblee.

The San Andreas Fault can be divided into three segments.

Southern segment

The southern segment (known as the Mojave segment) begins near Bombay Beach, California. Box Canyon, near the Salton Sea, contains upturned strata resulting from that section of the fault.[2] The fault then runs along the southern base of the San Bernardino Mountains, crosses through the Cajon Pass and continues to run northwest along the northern base of the San Gabriel Mountains. These mountains are a result of movement along the San Andreas Fault and are commonly called the Transverse Range. In Palmdale, a portion of the fault is easily examined as a roadcut for the Antelope Valley Freeway runs directly through it.

After crossing through Frazier Park, the fault begins to bend northward. This area is referred to as the "Big Bend" and is thought to be where the fault locks up in Southern California as the plates try to move past each other. This section of the fault has an earthquake-recurrence interval of roughly 140–160 years. Northwest of Frazier Park, the fault runs through the Carrizo Plain, a long, treeless plain within which much of the fault is plainly visible. The Elkhorn Scarp defines the fault trace along much of its length within the plain.

Research has shown that the Southern segment, which stretches from Parkfield in Monterey County, California all the way down to the Salton Sea, is capable of a Richter scale 8.1 earthquake. An earthquake of that size on the Southern segment (which, at its closest, is 40 miles away from Los Angeles) would kill thousands of people in Los Angeles, San Bernandino, Riverside, and other areas, and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in property and economic damage.

Central segment

The central segment of the San Andreas fault runs in a northwestern direction from Parkfield to Hollister. While the southern section of the fault and the parts through Parkfield experience earthquakes, the rest of the central section of the fault exhibits a phenomenon called aseismic creep, where the fault slips continuously without causing earthquakes.

Map showing the San Andreas (reds and orange) and major "sister" faults in the San Francisco Bay Area

Northern segment

The northern segment of the fault runs from Hollister, through the Santa Cruz Mountains, epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, then on up the San Francisco Peninsula, where it was first identified by Professor Lawson in 1895, then offshore at Daly City near Mussel Rock. This is the approximate location of the epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The fault returns onshore at Bolinas Lagoon just north of Stinson Beach in Marin County. It returns underwater through the linear trough of Tomales Bay which separates the Point Reyes Peninsula from the mainland, runs just east of the Bodega Heads through Bodega Bay and back underwater, returning onshore at Fort Ross. (In this region around the San Francisco Bay Area several significant "sister faults" run more-or-less parallel, and each of these can create significantly destructive earthquakes.) From Fort Ross the northern segment continues overland, forming in part a linear valley through which the Gualala River flows. It goes back offshore at Point Arena. After that, it runs underwater along the coast until it nears Cape Mendocino, where it begins to bend to the west, terminating at the Mendocino Triple Junction.



The evolution of the San Andreas dates back to the mid Cenozoic, to about 30 Mya (million years ago). At this time, a spreading center between the Pacific Plate and the Farallon Plate (which is now mostly subducted, with remnants including the Juan de Fuca Plate, Rivera Plate, Cocos Plate, and the Nazca Plate) was beginning to interact with the subduction zone off the western coast of North America. The relative motion between the Pacific and North American Plates was different from the relative motion between the Farallon and North American Plates, so when the spreading ridge was 'subducted', a new relative motion caused a new style of deformation. This style is chiefly the San Andreas Fault, but also includes a possible driver for the deformation of the Basin and Range, separation of Baja California, and rotation of the Transverse Range.

The San Andreas Fault proper, at least the Southern Segment, has only existed for about 5 million years. The first known incarnation of the southern part of the fault was Clemens Well-Fenner-San Francisquito fault zone around 22–13 Ma. This system added the San Gabriel Fault as a primary focus of movement between 10–5 Ma. Currently, it is believed that the modern San Andreas will eventually transfer its motion toward a fault within the Eastern California Shear Zone. This complicated evolution, especially along the southern segment, is mostly caused by either the "Big Bend" and/or a difference in the motion vector between the plates and the trend of the fault(s).

Plate movement

All land west of the fault on the Pacific Plate is moving slowly to the northwest while all land east of the fault is moving southwest (relatively southeast as measured at the fault) under the influence of plate tectonics. The rate of slippage averages approximately 33 to 37 millimetres (1.3 to 1.5 in) annually across California.

The westward component of the motion of the North American Plate creates compressional forces which are expressed as uplift in the Coast Ranges. Likewise, the northwest motion of the Pacific Plate creates significant compressional forces where the North American Plate stands in its way, creating the Transverse Ranges in Southern California, and to a lesser, but still significant, extent the Santa Cruz Mountains, site of the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989.

Studies of the relative motions of the Pacific and North American plates have shown that only about 75 percent of the motion can be accounted for in the movements of the San Andreas and its various branch faults. The rest of the motion has been found in an area east of the Sierra Nevada mountains called the Walker Lane or Eastern California Shear Zone. The reason for this is not as yet clear, although several hypotheses have been offered and research is ongoing. One hypothesis which gained some currency following the Landers Earthquake in 1992 is that the plate boundary may be shifting eastward, away from the San Andreas to the Walker Lane.

Assuming the plate boundary does not change as hypothesized, projected motion indicates that the landmass west of the San Andreas Fault, including Los Angeles, will eventually slide past San Francisco, then continue northwestward toward the Aleutian Trench, over a period of perhaps twenty million years.

A study completed by Yuri Fialko in 2006 has demonstrated that the San Andreas fault has been stressed to a level sufficient for the next "big one," as it is commonly called; that is, an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or greater. The study also concluded that the risk of a large earthquake may be increasing more rapidly than researchers had previously believed. Fialko also emphasized in his study that, while the San Andreas Fault had experienced massive earthquakes in 1857 at its central section and in 1906 at its northern segment (the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), the southern section of the fault has not seen a similar rupture in at least 300 years.

If such an earthquake were to occur, Fialko's study stated, it would result in substantial damage to Palm Springs and a number of other cities in San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties in California, and Mexicali municipality in Baja California. Such an event would be felt throughout much of Southern California, including densely populated areas of metropolitan San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, Ensenada and Tijuana, Baja California, San Luis Rio Colorado in Sonora and Yuma, Arizona.

"The information available suggests that the fault is ready for the next big earthquake but exactly when the triggering will happen and when the earthquake will occur we cannot tell," Fialko said. "It could be tomorrow or it could be 10 years or more from now," he concluded in September 2005.

Cascadia connection

Recent studies of past earthquake traces on both the northern San Andreas Fault and the southern Cascadia subduction zone indicate a correlation in time which may be evidence that quakes on the Cascadia subduction zone may have triggered most of the major quakes on the northern San Andreas during at least the past 3,000 years or so. The evidence also shows the rupture direction going from north to south in each of these time-correlated events. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake seems to have been a major exception to this correlation, however, as it was not preceded by a major Cascadia quake, and the rupture moved mostly from south to north

so... there you go... The San Andreas Fault.

The Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon!

The Grand Canyon is a huge fissure in the Colorado Plateau that exposes uplifted Proterozoic and Paleozoic strata, and is also one of the 19 distinct physiographic sections of the Colorado Plateau province. It is not the deepest canyon in the world (Kali Gandaki Gorge in Nepal is far deeper), nor the widest (Capertee Valley in Australia is about 0.6 mi/1 km wider and longer than Grand Canyon); however, the Grand Canyon is known for its visually overwhelming size and its intricate and colorful landscape. Geologically it is significant because of the thick sequence of ancient rocks that are beautifully preserved and exposed in the walls of the canyon. These rock layers record much of the early geologic history of the North American continent.

Uplift associated with mountain formation later moved these sediments thousands of feet upward and created the Colorado Plateau. The higher elevation has also resulted in greater precipitation in the Colorado River drainage area, but not enough to change the Grand Canyon area from being semi-arid. The uplift of the Colorado Plateau is uneven, and the Kaibab Plateau that Grand Canyon bisects is over a thousand feet higher at the North Rim (about 1,000 ft/300 m) than at the South Rim. Almost all runoff from the North Rim (which also gets more rain and snow) flows toward the Grand Canyon, while much of the runoff on the plateau behind the South Rim flows away from the canyon (following the general tilt). The result is deeper and longer tributary washes and canyons on the north side and shorter and steeper side canyons on the south side.


Temperatures on the North Rim are generally lower than the South Rim because of the greater elevation (averaging 8,000 ft/2,438 m above sea level). Heavy rains are common on both rims during the summer months. Access to the North Rim via the primary route leading to the canyon (State Route 67) is limited during the winter season due to road closures. Views from the North Rim tend to give a better impression of the expanse of the canyon than those from the South Rim.


The Colorado River basin (of which the Grand Canyon is a part) has developed in the past 40 million years. A recent study places the origins of the canyon beginning some 17 million years ago. Previous estimates had placed the age of the canyon at 5 to 6 million years. The study, which was published in the journal Science in 2008, used uranium-lead dating to analyze calcite deposits found on the walls of nine caves throughout the canyon. There is a substantial amount of controversy because this research suggests such a substantial departure from prior widely supported scientific consensus.


The result of all this erosion is one of the most complete geologic columns on the planet.


The major geologic exposures in the Grand Canyon range in age from the 2 billion year old Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the Inner Gorge to the 230 million year old Kaibab Limestone on the Rim. There is a gap of about one billion years between the stratum that is about 500 million years old and the lower level, which is about 1.5 billion years old. This large unconformity indicates a period of erosion between two periods of deposition.

Many of the formations were deposited in warm shallow seas, near-shore environments (such as beaches), and swamps as the seashore repeatedly advanced and retreated over the edge of a proto-North America. Major exceptions include the Permian Coconino Sandstone, which contains abundant geological evidence of aeolian sand dune deposition. Several parts of the Supai Group also were deposited in non–marine environments.

The great depth of the Grand Canyon and especially the height of its strata (most of which formed below sea level) can be attributed to 5,000 to 10,000 feet (1500 to 3000 m) of uplift of the Colorado Plateau, starting about 65 million years ago (during the Laramide Orogeny). This uplift has steepened the stream gradient of the Colorado River and its tributaries, which in turn has increased their speed and thus their ability to cut through rock (see the elevation summary of the Colorado River for present conditions).

Weather conditions during the ice ages also increased the amount of water in the Colorado River drainage system. The ancestral Colorado River responded by cutting its channel faster and deeper.

The base level and course of the Colorado River (or its ancestral equivalent) changed 5.3 million years ago when the Gulf of California opened and lowered the river's base level (its lowest point). This increased the rate of erosion and cut nearly all of the Grand Canyon's current depth by 1.2 million years ago. The terraced walls of the canyon were created by differential erosion.

Between three million and 100,000 years ago, volcanic activity deposited ash and lava over the area which at times completely obstructed the river. These volcanic rocks are the youngest in the canyon.

Nevado del Ruiz... Its Back

Volcano Name- Nevado del Ruiz

Volcano Type- strata volcano

location- colombia

• The Colombian volcano Nevado del Ruiz is an active  stratovolcano with a history of generating deadly volcanic mudflows lahars- from relatively small-volume eruptions.
• In 1595, a lahar swept down the valleys of the River Guali and the River Lagunillas, killing 636 people.
•  In 1845, an immense lahar flooded the upper valley of the River Lagunillas, killing over 1000 people.
• It continued for 70 kilometers downstream before spreading across a plain in the lower valley floor.
• The young village of Armero was built directly on top of the 1845 mudflow deposit.
•  Over the ensuing years, Armero grew into a vibrant town with over 27,000 residents.
• On November 13, 1985, history repeated itself for the third time in 400 years, with another eruption and another deadly lahar racing down the River Lagunillas.
•  This time, over 23,000 people were killed, including most of the residents of Armero. With proper planning, this tragedy could have been averted.
• over the last week the volcano has rumbeld back into life as can be seen on the web-Cams on the BBC page : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00tmqd6/features/webcams 
• what could this mean for the people who live below the volcano?.. it remains to be seen... however hopefully due to the increase in knowlage of the volcano and increased monitoring the effects will be mitigated and the damages decreased!

Volcano Fact File; Niriagongo

Volcano name- Niriagongo

Volcano type- Strato Volcano

volcano location- DRC

• Mount Nyiragongo is a stratovolcano in the Virunga Mountains associated with the Albertine Rift.

• It is located inside Virunga National Park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 20 km north of the town of Goma and Lake Kivu and just west of the border with Rwanda.

• The main crater is about two km wide and usually contains a lava lake. The crater presently has two distinct cooled lava benches within the crater walls - one at about 3175m (10,400 ft) and a lower one at about 2975 m (9800 ft).

• Nyiragongo's lava lake has at times been the most voluminous known lava lake in recent history. The depth of the lava lake varies considerably.

• A maximum elevation of the lava lake was recorded at about 3250 m (10,700 ft) prior to the January 1977 eruption - a lake depth of about 600 m (2000 ft).

• A recent very low elevation of the lava lake was recorded at about 2700 m (8800 ft).

• Nyiragongo and nearby Nyamuragira are together responsible for 40% of Africa's historical eruptions

• Not much is known about how long the volcano has been erupting, but since 1882, it has erupted at least 34 times, including many periods where activity was continuous for years at a time, often in the form of a churning lava lake in the crater.

• The volcano partly overlaps with two older volcanoes, Baratu and Shaheru, and is also surrounded by hundreds of small volcanic cinder cones from flank eruptions.

• Volcanism at Nyiragongo is caused by the rifting of the Earth's crust where two parts of the African Plate are breaking apart. A hot spot is probably also partly responsible for the great activity at Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira.

• The lava emitted in eruptions at Nyiragongo is often unusually fluid. Nyiragongo's lavas are made of melilite nephelinite, an alkali-rich type of volcanic rock whose unusual chemical composition may be a factor in the unusual fluidity of the lavas there. Whereas most lava flows move rather slowly and rarely pose a danger to human life,

• Nyiragongo's lava flows may race downhill at up to 60 miles per hour (up to 100 km/h). This is because of the extremely low silica content (the lava is mafic).

• Hawaiian volcanic eruptions are also characterised by lavas with low silica content, but the Hawaiian volcanoes are broad, shallow-sloped shield volcanoes in contrast to the steep-sided cone of Nyiragongo, and the silica content is high enough to slow most Hawaiian flows to walking pace.

• The lava lake activity continued through 2010. At present, the lake is mostly confined within a broad, steep-sided cinder cone on the crater floor, roughly 60 feet high by 600 feet wide.

Volcano Fact file

Volcano Name- Kilauea

Volcano Type- shield volcano


Location- Hawaii


• located in a crater 3,646 ft (1,111 m) deep.


• Kilauea can be found on the Big Island of Hawaii, on the southeastern slope of Mauna Loa, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.


• Kilauea is one of largest active craters in the world, has a circumference of 8 mi (13 km) and is surrounded by a wall of volcanic rock 200 to 500 ft (61—152 m) high.

• Kilauea is also the youngest volcano in Hawaii. In its floor is Halemaumau, a fiery pit. The usual level of the lake of molten lava is c.740 ft (230 m) below the pit's rim. The oldest dated rock is about 23,000 years old and the oldest eruption of Kilauea was about 300,000-600,000 years ago.


• Kilauea was formed under a hot spot under the crust. So were the other volcanoes on the Big Island such as Kohala, Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Hualalai.


• There have been 34 eruptions since 1952 and 61 eruptions total. In early 1973, an earthquake occurred that caused Kilauea to stop erupting and instead erupt near the craters Pauahi and Hi'iaka.


• Current eruption began January 3, 1983 and is called Pu'u'O'o.

• Hawaii, nicknamed BIG ISLAND because of it's 8 major volcanoes, is currently 4038 square miles (approx. 6 500 square km ) and grows around 42 acres every year thanks to all of mount Kilauea's eruptions.


• Mount Kilauea is one of 5 active volcanoes in Hawaii, others are Loihi, Mauna Loa, Hualalai and Haleakala.


• Mount Kilauea Volcano is home of Fire Goddess, Pele.