I was wondering if you could please send some interesting facts on volcanoes to my school. We have been studing volcanoes for a few weeks, we even made volcano models out of clay. We are also writing reports on a volcano that the teacher assigned to the class(in partners). Please send a response even if the answer is yes or no!!!

rocky Joanna Hall

Hi Joanna,

Well, there are thousands of interestng facts about volcanoes. You should probably go back to VolcanoWorld and look in some of the sections on volcanoes of the world, or you can look in the section with previously-asked-questions to see what other people have asked about volcanoes and what interesting facts they have received as answers.
I can give you a few. These come from Volcanoes of the World, by Tom Simkin and Lee Seibert:
They say that there are at least 805 volcanoes on Earth for which there is at least one eruption with a known date of occurrence. There are 706 more that have had reported eruptions but the dates are unknown. The total number of recorded eruptions on Earth during the past 10,000 years is 7886.
There is a system of categorizing the sizes of eruptions that is similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes. It is called the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), and it was devised by Chris Newhall and Steve Self. Volcanic eruptions are much more complex than earthquakes so it is more difficult to come up with a useful scale, but so far this is the best that anyone has devised. Some words that describe the effects of the various VEI levels are:
0       gentle
1       effusive
2-3     explosive
4-5     cataclysimc
6       pyroxysmal
7       colossal
8       ??? (we've never seen one)
Fortunately, the majority of eruptions during the past 10,000 years have been VEI of 3 or less. For example, we have only experienced 84 VEI 5's, 39 VEI 6's, and 4 VEI 7's.
These are just a few of the volcanic facts that you might find interesting. Keep searching on VolcanoWorld and the other volcano-related www pages to learn more!

Sincerely,

Scott Rowland 

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