Speakers Evening

On Thursday 16th July the Rotary Club of South Queensferry held a virtual meeting through the medium of Zoom. The speaker was Stuart Monro OBE. Stuart is a Scottish geologist and science commentator. Born in Aberdeen, Dr Monro spent much of his career with the British Geological Survey. He was also instrumental in establishing Our Dynamic Earth on a site bordering Holyrood Park in Edinburgh. His talk was about volcanoes and he explained Edinburgh's rich volcanic heritage with the Castle Rock, Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags plus other sites further down the Forth Estuary in Fife and East Lothian. We were then taken on a world tour starting with the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Moving to Iceland's ice caps and geysers, Stuart described two comparatively recent major events in Iceland's volcanic history. The term 'Surtseyan eruption', now used to describe one which takes place under shallow seas, is named after Surtsey, the ash island that was formed after an eruption 32km off the south coast of Iceland in 1963. After the eruption of Kjafjallajokull such a vast ash and dust cloud was formed that all European and transatlantic aviation had to be stopped.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the North Island of New Zealand contains many volcanoes including Nagauruhoe and Tongariro (Mount Doom) which are famous for volcanic activity. White Island., off the coast of North Island, which was the scene of a fatal eruption in December 2029, was in the news again recently when the geysers erupted and caused huge clouds of superheated steam as they hit the cold sea water. New Zealand scientists have developed an early warning system that could have predicted the fatal eruption. Developed by a team from the University of Auckland, the new alert system uses machine-learning algorithms to teach itself from date fed into it. Hawaii is another hot spot as there are many cracks where steam and lava are erupting and new land is being formed. Amazingly, new vegetation is growing around these lava streams.

Stuart Munro's beautifully illustrated talk was much appreciated by his virtual audience and prompted many questions on Zoom from members and guests.