Indian Ocean

Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker The Maldives, featured in a Wired gallery of islands shot from space. A place crucial to the story I told in Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong. It's also a singularly beautiful place, and particularly threatened by global warming.

A quick update from Reunion Island on this fairly slow week, volcanically speaking: "After permanent unrest with daily 30 to 100 seismic events, Piton de la Fournaise volcano erupted again on Thursday November 27, 2008 at 11h50. The eruption is situated on the west side within the Dolomieu crater at the same vent as the September 21 eruption and can probably be considered as a second phase of the later." This comes from the Observatoire Volcanologique du Piton de la Fournaise (OVPF - link in French). Piton de la Fournaise is a shield volcano on Reunion Island that sees frequent basaltic…

It seems that a new fissure eruption has begun at Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean*. In fact, the report goes onto say that a small lava lake has formed at the main crater of the eruption. This marks the first eruption at Piton de la Fournaise since March 2007. Piton de la Fournaise is a large shield volcano associated with the Reunion Island Hotspot. The volcano has frequent eruptions, mostly in the form of effusive lava flows of basalt, similar to the Hawaiian volcanoes. This could be an interesting new eruption because the initial eruptions suggest this is a…