21st Century Complete Guide to Volcanoes: Huge and Comprehensive Collection of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Documents with Extensive Coverage of Volcano Monitoring, Research Projects, Volcanoes Around the World, Maps, Tables, Scientific and Threat Data-Technical and Scientific Reference (DVD-ROM)

Volcanoes usually give warning that they will erupt. USGS scientists have developed a forecasting system to alert public officials and the general public to the fact that a volcano may erupt. Most eruptions at Hawaiian volcanoes are not explosive and are characterized by the relatively quiet outflow of very fluid lava. These eruptions can still be deadly, because the lava may be erupted in huge volumes, and on steeper slopes, fluid lava can rapidly travel many miles from its source. The island of Hawaii (the largest of the Hawaiian islands) experiences thousands of earthquakes associated with active volcanoes each year. Most of these are too small to feel, but about once a decade, a large quake shakes the entire island and causes widespread damage. Before and during an eruption, many small earthquakes occur as molten rock forces its way through the upper parts of a volcano's interior. Such quakes often provide early warnings of changes in eruptive activity. In the past few thousand years, the volcanoes of the Cascade Range, which stretches from northern California into British Columbia, have produced more than 100 eruptions, most of them explosive. However, individual Cascades volcanoes can lie dormant for many centuries between eruptions, and the great risk posed by volcanic activity in the region is therefore not always apparent. When Cascades volcanoes do erupt, high-speed avalanches of hot ash and rock (pyroclastic flows), lava flows, and landslides can devastate areas 10 or more miles away, and huge mudflows of volcanic ash and debris (lahars) can inundate valleys more than 50 miles downstream.

This incredible DVD-ROM is packed with over 82,000 pages, much of it reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software - allowing direct viewing on Windows and Macintosh systems. The disc contains nearly 4 gigabytes of material in over 21,000 files!

Contents include thousands of spectacular photographs, information on hazards and hazard reports, monitoring data, news, research projects, and very extensive individual coverage of volcanoes in the Cascade Range, Yellowstone, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Our news and educational CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs are privately compiled collections of official public domain U.S. government files and documents - they are not produced by the federal government. They are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Adobe Acrobat form