Geoscience

Thar she blows?

Mauna Loa,? Hawaii's biggest and potentially most destructive volcano,? is showing signs of life again nearly two decades after its last eruption. Recent geophysical data collected on the surface of the 13,500-foot volcano revealed that Mauna Loa's summit caldera has begun to swell and stretch at a rate of 2 to 2.5 inches a year, according to scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and Stanford University. Surface inflation can be a precursor of a volcanic eruption, the scientists warn.

Congo town gets volcano double-whammy

Goma, a town in eastern Congo, has been hit with a volcano spurting molten rock 100 meters in the air, just a few months after a separate volcano devastated the area. "It was something like an explosion of the sun," Dario Tedesco, a volcano consultant to the United Nations, told Reuters. "It was really spectacular, it was glowing everywhere, the sky was red, you could see the lava coming up from the fissure." In January another volcano razed much of Goma, and researchers say they're worried that hothead could blow again. According to the wire service, the winter eruption forced tens of thousands of people to flee into neighboring Rwanda -- something few rational people would do by choice. Vulcanologists say the pool of molten rock bubbling in a 1.2-km wide crater at the top of the January volcano had risen rapidly in the last two weeks, but that it is devilishly hard to judge how much risk it poses.

Incidentally, the Granular Volcano Group runs a Web site that explains the physics behind much of a volcano's activity. It's a little math-heavy, but you can watch some neato supercomputer simulations of different kinds of gas clouds and debris flows.