NSW Government Education and Communities Sites2See

Volcanoes

Explosive Earth. Volcanoes erupt somewhere on earth every day

Activity just under the earth’s crust  causes volcanoes. Watch an undersea eruption; link to YouTube video

Image of the earth's core, linked to Volcanoes 101 video

Watch National Geographic video on Volcanoes.

A pyroclastic flow (like those from Mount Mayon, photo right) is six times hotter than boiling water, travelling faster than an F1 racing car, and will submerge the body in fire — ‘the first breath vaporises the internal organs, the body is almost instantly reduced to charcoal’ (from Pompeii: The Last Day, site above right). Would you survive?

Track the latest volcanic activity

Mt Vesuvius erupts. Start of quote from Pliny the Younger, 'The air turned to fire and a living city became a fiery tomb.'

... darkness came … like the black of closed and unlighted rooms. You could hear women lamenting, children crying, men shouting …’17-year-old Pliny the Younger was an eyewitness to the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD 79.

At Archaeology.org read about the historic and more recent digs in Pompeii, which tell us more about what it was like to live near Mt Vesuvius, and what exactly happened on that summer’s day in AD 79.

Pyroclastic flows on the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines in 1984, with inset view for space, linked to Wikipedia entry

Australian volcanoes. Find a list of volcanoes on the Australian mainland and Tasmania on Wikipedia

Use the National Geographic Mapmaker with tectonic and volcanic activity layers active to explore The Australian plate. Use Google Maps with the terrain layer to see where the tectonic plate boundaries are under the sea.

Learn about volcanos

Learn about the eruption in 2005 on McDonald Island, or Heard Island in 2016.

Australia is not on the edge of a tectonic plate, so its extinct volcanoes are due to hot-spot activity.

Learn about 50-million-year-old volcanos just off the coast near Sydney.

Tectonic activity. Molten rock from the mantle of earth oozes or erupts to the surface when tectonic plates move. Link to a podcast about volcanoes.

Investigate the earth’s structure and plate tectonics, with ABC Education and National Geographic.

Find information at Geoscience Australia and learn about plate tectonics in a nutshell (plus a teaching companion).

See also Sites2See: Earthquakes.

Syllabus links information for teachers