It developed along the point where a 'hot spot' or mantle plume coincided with a plate boundary.
Successive eruptions have laid layers of lava as flood basalts, spiked through with small effusive moments and the occasional larger eruption: Katla, Hekla, Laki etc.
Image: Natthagi Lavas - some people walking on lava just a few years old.
Do the benefits of this activity outweigh the potential risks and problems?
King's students know the end to that quote... "buildings do."
Here, just too late for the Year 11 mocks sadly is a nice illustrated piece on the BBC's Future site, which explores how technology can be used to protect skyscrapers from damage in the event of an earthquake. Excellence for resilience and mitigation.
For a while, we've had an emoji sheet by the classroom door in OH1 where students can choose a quick feedback on what they felt about the lesson that had just finished.
We saw an idea for using the emojis as a resource and a stimulus for discussion during a lesson, and reflection on themes, by providing a symbol with several meanings
It was the work of Jonathan Taylor, who tweets at @HistGeoBritSec. He'd shared his ideas for megacities.
There are plenty of posts on the twitter feed, and quite a few teachers seem to have been using the idea following Jonathan's session at Practical Pedagogies.
Mr. Parkinson decided to try it with this context, and came across this website where you are presented with a list of emojis and selecting a particular symbols adds it to a tweet box, which can then be sent, and therefore screenshotted...
There's also the Emoji Copy website or Get Emoji, which allows you to build up a list by copying and pasting the icons into a box once again...
A few colleagues then tried the idea having seen it on my twitter feed, and had the idea of perhaps building up a 'library' of emoji boards for use in Geography. And Mr. Parkinson came up with the name of 'emojiography' for this sort of activity....
Down to Apollo Victoria Theatre with a group of Year 12 and 13 students this week for the annual Tectonic Hazards Student Day.
As usual, this involved sessions by examiners and academics. There were apparent;y around 1500 students and teachers in attendance.
I made notes on each of the presentations, as did the students we hope. We will also be getting a link for electronic copies of the PPTs themselves.
A few points from me: Sue Warn
- investigate the zoning of R/Y/G for buildings in Christchurch
- develop an understanding of ridge-push and slab-pull rather than convection currents, and remember to mention the tectonic setting of any boundaries that are referred to
- good to see GeoCapabilities colleague Duncan Hawley getting a mention
Dr. Martin Degg
- changes in size are more important at the top of the MMS rather than lower down
- 75% of global seismicity energy release happens in the Ring of Fire
- talked through the Alpine-Himalayan Zone
- introduction to CATDAT Database
- Dhajji Dewari building system
- gender inequality in risk: 80% of casualties in Indian Ocean tsunami were female)
- the development of the SENDAI Framework
- the addition of the word sustainable to their priority language
- "build back better" - is this actually happening? fast enough?
Professor Fiona Tweed
- Iceland focus - remember that we have images and stories from those who went with us in 2015
- she mentioned that plates travel at the rate your fingernails grow, which is often mentioned - I always wonder how true that is and need to set up an experiment...
- remember to check out http://www.vedur.is
- Read Kate Smith's article on Katla in 'The Conversation'
- Comparison of the people who had gone 'home' in Haiti or Fukushima... my thoughts on these statistics were - what is it that constitutes going home? Won't it take longer to rebuild the homes of people in Japan rather than those in Haiti? How similar are their homes?
Professor Iain Stewart
- reminded us how lucky we have been that we haven't had a direct hit on a major city for over a century - when will our luck run out?
- described the "fatal attraction" of cities like Bam, where the fault line which provided the threat also released water, which helped make the area fertile (important for a city surrounded by desert)
- the unzipping of the fault, and the threat facing the Sea of Marmara - the threat of tsunamis from a bathymetric scarp
- important to consider the fatalism of people in Japan, compared to other locations, in this New Scientist article
- in terms of building quality, one issue is that we won't know whether they are going to keep people alive until the earthquake happens - the density of people living in new high rise blocks has now increased the population living in risky areas
David Redfern
- the 4 M's - a little rushed and a lot of case studies visited in a short time - may need further following up...
- he showed a Charlie Hebdo cartoon which some saw of as being in bad taste, given the previous support for the magazine following the terrorist attack on their offices
As I've previously blogged, we are very fortunate to have a seismometer on the school site, which is connected to the global network, and is able to record the trace of seismic waves which are coming from major earthquakes on the other side of the world.
Over the last week we have had a number of major earthquakes, including the large one in New Zealand.
More on this to come...
"...the only sign of life [was] an ownerless mobile phone ringing inside an abandoned bag". Year 9's Risky World topic explores the problems of Tectonic Hazards.
These affect locations around the world, which lie along the boundaries between large sections of the earth's crust.
There are lots of potential case studies of eruptions for volcanoes and earthquakes.
We will be exploring HAITI in particular, using materials created by Miss Kyndt. Just yesterday, there was another reminder that Geography isn't just in the News, Geography IS the News. Mount Sinabung: a volcano on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia explosively erupted, killing a reported 11 people... I heard about it first, as I often do these days, via Twitter.
It was picked up by the major news channels such as CNN
Sadly, the reports today are saying that the death toll might be higher and there was also damage to crops and other structures. A reminder that this relates the definition of a Natural Hazard that we discussed.
The volcano has been on high alert for some months now, as reported by the BBC
You can also check out the special HAZARDS Flipboard magazine which is being curated by a number of teachers. Flipboard is an App on the iPads, and you could start to contribute your own articles to a journal that you have created as an alternative form of prep. Be creative and make sure that you are reading around the topics that we are covering in the classroom.
