Friday Flotsam: Another rumbling Russian and tossing nuclear waste into volcanoes

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Long week, quick news:

Tiatia in Russia erupting in an undated photo.

The latest USGS/Smithsonian Institution

_blank”>Weekly Volcano Activity Report

is up. One interesting bit in the report is a thermal anomaly at

_blank”>Tiatia

in Russia (just north of Japan in the Kuril Islands) – a volcano for which I am unfamiliar. However, it sounds great according to the

_blank”>GVP

: “Tiatia volcano, one of the most impressive of the Kuril Islands, consists of a beautifully symmetrical cone that rises above the broad rim of an erosionally furrowed, 2.1 x 2.4 km wide caldera. The volcano last erupted in 1981-82.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, but Popular Science has an article talking about the

_blank”>prospect of disposing of nuclear waste

… by throwing it into a volcano. Lets see, putting nuclear waste in system that could potentially explode and send ash (now potentially radioactive) around the world or flow down the volcano as doubly hot lava? Sounds like a great plan to me!

Hawai`i 24/7’s Volcano Watch series talks about

_blank”>the use of paleomagnetism

(the remnant alignment of magnetic minerals in rocks, based on the polarity and position of the Earth’s magnetic field relative to the site) in studying volcanoes.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people