Tungurahua Volcano

Ecuador’s Tungurahua volcano (satellite map)—seen here from the town of Cotalo—shot truck-size boulders nearly a mile (1.6 kilometers) away Friday, prompting the evacuation of at least 300 people, according to the Associated Press.

Tungurahua—”throat of fire” in the indigenous Quechua language—sits high in the Andes mountains, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Quito, Ecuador’s densely populated capital.

Eruptions are nothing new for the 16,500-foot (5,000-meter) volcano, which roared back to life in 1999 after nearly 80 years of dormancy.

AMECAMECA, Mexico — Glaciers that crown a Mexican volcano could disappear by 2015 with scientists pointing to global warming as a chief cause of their demise.

Until recently, the glacial field on Iztaccihuatl, a dormant volcano and one of two white-capped peaks that can be seen from Mexico City, was expected to be gone within a few decades.

But studies show rising world temperatures are melting the glaciers faster than previously thought, said Hugo Delgado, a glaciologist at Mexico City’s UNAM university who thinks the massive blocks of ice will be gone within four years.

“What we’ve seen at Iztaccihuatl is an intense period of glacial retreat in the last few years, which has changed the picture,” Delgado said.

Japan’s Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, or GOSAT, captured an image of the Kirishima plume on Wednesday, before the increase in activity that prompted the call for evacuations.

Built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the GOSAT spacecraft measures concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane, two major greenhouse gases. The false-color picture shows the volcano’s plume spreading southeast.

Catastrophic volcanic eruptions in Europe may have culled Neanderthals to the point where they couldn’t bounce back, according to a controversial new theory.

About 40,000 years ago in what we now call Italy and the Caucasus Mountains, which straddle Europe and Asia, several volcanoes erupted in quick succession, according to a new study to be published in the October issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

It’s likely the eruptions reduced or wiped out local bands of Neanderthals and indirectly affected farther-flung populations, the team concluded after analyzing pollen and ash from the affected area.

A volcano is a landform (usually a mountain) where molten rock erupts through the surface of the planet. In simple terms a volcano is a mountain that opens downward to a pool of molten rock (magma) below the surface of the earth. It is a hole in the Earth from which molten rock and gas erupt.

The name “volcano” has its origin from the name of Vulcan, a god of fire in Roman mythology. As pressure in the molten rock builds up it needs to escape somewhere. So it forces its way up “fissures” which are narrow cracks in the earths crust. Once the magma erupts through the earth’s surface it’s called lava.

More facts about volcanoes you can find here Everything to know about Volcano

A volcano is an opening, or rupture, in a planet’s surface or crust, which allows hot magma, ash and gases to escape from below the surface.

The word volcano is derived from the name of Vulcano, a volcanic island in the Aeolian Islands of Italy whose name in turn originates from Vulcan, the name of a god of fire in Roman mythology. The study of volcanoes is called volcanology, sometimes spelled vulcanology.

Volcanoes are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging. A mid-oceanic ridge, for example the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has examples of volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates pulling apart; the Pacific Ring of Fire has examples of volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates coming together.