Global Warming, Global Cooling, And Mayhem (terrestrial And Intergalactic)

A view of Stromboli — We passed the volcanic island of Stromboli sometime just after midnight a few years back. I had seen it before, during the daytime, but it’s been more active since that first sighting. One of the geologists in our group got a good look at three spews of lava before losing sight of the island in the dark.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’ve sailed past the island of Stromboli, off the coast of Italy. Neighbors of ours sailed by it just last week. In Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth — I was a really, really devoted Jules Verne fan when I was a kid — it was via Stromboli that the heroes, having descended into a volcano in Iceland, finally managed to return to the surface of the Earth.

Anyway, here’s some fairly dramatic footage:

“Dramatic video of volcano eruption in Italy: A volcano on the island of Stromboli erupted, sending smoke more than a mile into the air.”

***

In very tenuously related news — Stromboli > Iceland > Greenland > Vikings! — here’s an item that I found interesting:

“Global Warming Is Conquering the Vikings: Ancient Arctic artifacts are disappearing as warming unfurls.”

***

And now we make the leap from disappearing Viking relics and global warming to those massive fires in the rainforests of the Amazon Basin. This article takes on a very commonly heard slogan about the Amazon rain forest (where, incidentally, my wife and I recently spent several extremely interesting days):

“The Amazon Is Not Earth’s Lungs: Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply.”

***

Truthfully, I can’t really think of any plausible leap from the Amazon rainforest to this next cluster of science links. They simply interested me. So let’s just make the jump:

“An asteroid larger than some of the world’s tallest buildings will zip by Earth next month”

“Erosion has erased most of Earth’s impact craters. Here are the survivors: A recent discovery in Greenland may bring the known list to 191”

“Giant exoplanet is ‘like a wrecking ball,’ astronomers say”

***

I can’t recall whether or not I noted this one when it first appeared:

“The first picture of a black hole opens a new era of astrophysics: The supermassive beast lies in a galaxy called M87 more than 50 million light-years away”

***

And, for those of you who are still looking for your path to wealth, there’s this one:

“This is what it looks like when an explosion creates gold in space”

***

We began with a volcano and then with global warming, so — rather chiastically — let’s close with an item about global cooling and a volcano:

“Colossal volcano behind ‘mystery’ global cooling finally found: The eruption devastated local Maya settlements and caused crop failures around the world.”