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Oldoinyo Lengai
Earth’s strangest volcano. Oldoinyo Lengai is part of a series of volcanoes located along the East African Rift System in Tanzania, and is considered to be the one of the most unusual volcanoes on Earth. The name means "Mountain of God” in the local Maasai language. Oldoinyo Lengai uniquely erupts sodium, potassium, and calcium carbonate lava, forming very alkaline rocks called natrocarbonatites. The lava is much cooler than the silicic lava of other volcanoes, at around 600°C, and has a unique black…
Ngorongoro
Ngorongoro Crater, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tanzania, is said to contain one of the world’s greatest concentrations of large game animals. This crater can also be called a caldera, due to its large size and creation by the collapse of a volcano. Named by the Maasai after the sound produced by the cowbell (ngoro ngoro) the large volcanic caldera is evidence of a major eruption that ejected many cubic kilometers of magma out of the magma chamber underlying the volcano. This created a large cavity…
Punta Grohmann section
The iconic Punta Grohmann section, in the Dolomites of Italy, showcases Triassic (Ladinian to Carnian) basinal deposits visible in the grassy slopes at the center of the photo, overlain by the towering dolomitized limestone of the Cassian Dolomite Formation. The basinal deposits accumulated in troughs between carbonate platforms and preserve evidence of catastrophic processes, including volcanism, turbidity currents, and toe-of-slope deposits containing large limestone blocks that collapsed from…