Marketers often capitalize on the names of valuable gemstones to market there much more common products by adding an adjective that makes them sound special. Here are ten flagrant examples.
Kaena Volcano is an extinct submerged volcano once connected to the west of Oahu, far from the active volcanoes on Hawaii. Yet in 1955 and 1956 if belched sulfurous gas and pumice which were discovered at the surface of the ocean.
Mammoth Mountain is the lava dome of an active volcano. While eruptions are rare it releases large amounts of carbon dioxide that has killed large amounts of vegetation and caused the occasional suffocation of campers.
One theory of the formation of Devils Tower is it the eroded remnant of a lake of lava. the lava cooled from the top down forming hexagonal columns that resisted erosion better than the surrounds leaving the butte.
Papakolea beach on the island of Hawaii is one of four green sand beaches in the world. The sand is comprised of peridot crystals brought up from the Earth's Mantle by Mauna Loa volcano.
Indications of a pyroclastic eruption on Mars in the past quarter million years are evident at Cerberus Fossae volcano. The cause of the eruption has yet (2022) to be confirmed but on possibility is the meteor impact that formed the nearby Zunil Crater.
Approximatly 600 million years ago a 9 kilometer wide asteroid stuck what is now Idaho, then attached to Antarctica. Its impact through debris up to two thousand kilometers away leaving a crater 60 km wide and 12 km deep. This fifth largest known impact may have contributed to the End-Ediacaran extinction which preceded the Cambrian explosion.
The asteroid Vesta's storied past includes and ancient collision that broke of debris that reformed into a smaller asteroid destined for earth. It's impact just over two million years ago started the current ice age.
In 6150 B.C. the massive submarine Storrega slide inundated island and coastlines along the North Sea. It was caused by the collapse of loose moraine deposits from glaciers in the prior ice age. Geologists have evidence this is a common event in the area following ice ages.
New Zealand's Banks Peninsula is a rugged volcanic region formed when the Zealandia tectonic plate separated form Australia and further deformed by a geologic fault through its center.
In the middle of the Sahara desert in Libya is an unusual oasis. It is the caldera of Waw an Namus the bottom of which lies below the water table. How it formed is still uncertain but here are some possibilities.
The asteroid that formed the Chicxulub crater and lead to a mass extinction may have been a binary asteroid with the second object falling in the ocean off the west coast of Africa creating the submarine Nadir crater.
The island of Oahu was formed from the eruptions of two volcano. A bit over a million years ago once side of the northeastern volcano, Koolau, collapsed into the ocean in a huge landslide and associated tsunami.
Dukono is a continuously erupting volcano on the Indonesian island of Halmahera. It is prone to large lava flows that have, in one case, destroyed the city of Tolo. In 1550 an eruption produced sufficient lava to fill a bay joining Halmahera with an adjacent island.
As magma rises it puts pressure on the crust above. Until the magma finds an outlet it can cause cracks in the crust that can get fairly large. A good place to see them is on the slopes of Hawaii's Kiluea volcano.
The extinct volcano Kohala is the oldest on the big island of Hawaii. It has a storied history which includes forming the oldest portion of the island still above sea level.
The crescent shaped island of molokini bears witness to the volcanic eruption at the site roughly half a million years ago. It is a Tuff cone formed form ash rather than lava.
75 thousand year ago Mount Toba on Sumatra exploded in what seems to require the addition of a level 9 to the Volcano Explosivity Index. The ashfall likely covered not just SouthEast Asia but the Indian subcontinent and northern Indian Ocean.
The Neenach Volcano formed on the San Andreas fault in California. As the fault continued to move over millions of years it split the volcano until now the two halves are nearly 200 miles apart.
Australia's Glass House Mountains are magma plumes from a hotspot under a moving tectonic plate. the surrounds have eroded down leaving monoliths of the extinct volcanoes.
Scatter around Australasia are tektites from a major asteroid impact 780 thousand years ago. It's impact crater was finally found filled with lava in the Bolaven Volcanic Field of Laos.
The Hawaiian Islands are one of several island chains in the Pacific Ocean that were formed by volcanoes associated with hot spots as the Pacific Tectonic Plate moved. But there are noticeable bends in the island chains' dating to about 45 million years ago. Geologists have several hypotheses about why this happened.
The author posits that a massive asteroid impact that created the hypothesized Wilkes Land Crater under the Antarctic ice may have caused the formation of the Siberian traps that lead to the mass extinction know as the Great Dying, An asteroid impact on the planet Mercury caused a similar effect antipodal to the impact location.
During the Crygenian Period the earth was largely covered with thick ice. Geologists suspect that the ice sheets caused so much erosion that they swept over a billion years worth of deposited rock into the oceans. The result is the Great Unconformity where 520 million year old sandstone appears directly over 1.7 billion year old rock in places like the Grand Canyon.
The Slate Islands in Lake Superior are the remains of the central peak of one of the massive meteor impacts during the Ordovician Meteor Event ultimately caused by the destructive collision of two asteroids sending debris throughout the inner solar system.
Mount Agung on Bali erupts roughly every century. It's most powerful eruptions tend to occur in sequence so a repeat of the VI5 eruption in 1963 is deemed likely in this populated area within the next hundred years.
Despite what you learned in school uranium is not the heaviest element in Earth's crust. Natural Uranium undergoes nuclear reactions that produce rather long lasting isotopes of heavier Neptunium and Plutonium.
Timithoy believes the is an unidentified volcano that erupted in 1898 near the community of Atlin, British Columbia and is looking for viewers who may be able to help locate it.
