VOLCANOES UP CLOSE

TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE ABOUT VOLCANOES

KAHOOT VOLCANOS

TOP 10 VOCANIC ERUPTIONS

WHAT IS A VOLCANO?

See this video about Mt Vesuvius and Pompeii, Italy

MT VESUVIUS ERUPTION

Mount Vesuvius, a volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy, is hundreds of thousands of years old and has erupted more than 50 times. Its most famous eruption took place in the year 79 A.D., when the volcano buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick carpet of volcanic ash. The dust “poured across the land” like a flood, one witness wrote, and shrouded the city in “a darkness…like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.” Two thousand people died, and the city was abandoned for almost as many years. When a group of explorers rediscovered the site in 1748, they were surprised to find that–underneath a thick layer of dust and debris–Pompeii was mostly intact. The buildings, artifacts and skeletons left behind in the buried city have taught us a great deal about everyday life in the ancient world.

LAVA UP CLOSE

What is lava made of?
Lava is mostly made of two elements — Si (the symbol for silicon) and O (the symbol for oxygen). Together, they make a very strong bond and then get together with other elements, like Fe (iron), Mg (magnesium), K (potassium), Ca (calcium), and more. They make crystals of minerals like olivine, which are beautiful yellow-green crystals that people call peridot. When you see a lava rock, it is usually kind of dark gray and there are no crystals easy to see. The volcano erupted it before the elements could become crystals.

How hot is lava?
Lava is extremely hot. Lava can reach temperatures of about 1,250° Celsius. The lava of the Hawaiian volcanoes reach these temperatures. Normal lava temperatures reach 750° Celsius. That is still much hotter than your oven is capable of reaching.

How fast does lava move?
Lava is not fast; you can outrun it. It is pretty common that people are most afraid of lava when it is really in the last and slowest steps of an eruption, after the gases have been given off by the volcano and the magma is cooling off. The hot Hawaiian lava moves at about a few meters per minute. The cool lavas move only a few meters in a day.

Fun Trivia Volcanoes