Add new Australian volcanic activity to the list of worries…

6 September 2024

As if climate change, and the increasingly unstable weather it will bring, isn’t enough to worry about, parts of Australia may see an increase in volcanic activity. Not in the immediate future, thankfully, but at some point nonetheless:

It is much less likely that a volcano that has already erupted will start again. It is a lot more likely a new volcano will form somewhere else. That is almost a given. It is going to happen. The follow-up question is when is this going to happen? It may be in 100 years, or 5,000 years. We don’t know. We need to have more information to answer that question.

I’m unsettled by this lack of certainty here… one-hundred years isn’t really much. Nor, for that matter, is five-thousand years, speaking in geological terms. Let’s hope these new volcanoes appear later rather than sooner, or ideally, not at all.