I’m currently touring around beautiful eastern Taiwan with my family.
It’s absolutely wonderful scenery, thanks to the fantastic geology.
This is Taipingshan, up in the central mountains.
Today we went south through the East Taiwan ‘Rift’. You can see the big valley in these GoogleEarth views.
It’s not really a rift. It’s a thrust fault bound valley formed by arc-continent collision that separates the continental central mountains from arc volcanic coastal range.
An absolutely stunning view of the unusual agricultural fields on Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off western Africa. These round features in the dark volcanic earth are an ingenious and visually stunning combination of geology and agriculture.
I have often admired the Canary Islands on Google Earth. Whilst I love mud volcanoes, it is impossible not to be impressed by the striking beauty of landscapes produced by 'normal' volcanoes.
When I first looked at Lanzarote on Google Earth I immediately wondered about the thousands of pits orderly arranged through the black volcanic ground.
You often hear how volcanoes make good soils, and Lanzarote exemplifies this. So, a thread on these is long overdue!
Okay, so right off, let's note that there's still uncertainty on this. The state oil and gas agency SOCAR first reported it as a mud volcano eruption. But many reports doubt this and say it may be a fire from a rig or platform, possibly an old one.
Both are possible, as there are lots of both mud volcanoes and offshore oil wells and platforms off Azerbaijan. So, at this stage, we need more confirmation.
But lets focus on the mud volcano idea, as I see there are lots of people on twitter saying that can't be possible...
No, not that huge mountain – that’s the volcano Etna.
Paternò is the grey area marked by a red pin, which sits right at the base of Etna. However, there are suggestions of a possible link between the two….
The Paternò mud volcano is located right on the NW edge of the large town of Paternò in eastern Sicily, and ~21km south of the summit of Etna. goo.gl/maps/gF3qJsw2d…
The MV is on a small hill, right next to a velodrome named for this ‘Salinelle’
The Paternò mud volcano sits on a small hilltop and covers and area ~350m wide. It has a central main vent area, with lots of large visible vents, and two smaller vent areas, one to the west and one coming out of a small slope to the south.