This is a really neat image. This is Pulpit Terrace, part of Yellowstone’s Mammoth Hot Springs named because it looks so much like a preacher’s pulpit from the side that you can find old photographs of people standing behind it and looking like they’re preaching (see our twitter page below). This image shows it as it appeared in 1898, but it’s not a photograph.
Our modern thinking behind hotspots is that they are generated by mantle plumes. A huge plume of extra warm mantle rises up to the surface, triggering formation of a large igneous province – a huge pile of igneous rocks somewhere on the surface. That is followed by a long chain of volcanoes, produced by warm mantle continuing to rise up the pipe formed by the plume.
This is an excellent capture of a pyroclastic flow put out by Stromboli Volcano in Italy last week. Note how ash seems to flow down the slope in a channel - that’s the behavior of a pyroclastic flow.
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