Supervolcanoes

Peter Lewis is taking the stage at Torquay Museum on Thursday 4 November for a talk on supervolcanoes, one of the Torquay Museum Society's lectures. It's a mid-morning session, starting at 10:45 am, so it's more of a coffee-and-a-chat kind of thing than an evening out.

Lewis is going to walk through the history, the geology and the existential dangers of supervolcanoes. He describes them as some of Nature's most awesome but often hidden features, and the talk works its way from how they form to what they can actually do. It's not just a look at the eruptions themselves, but at the geology that drives them and the scale of the risk they pose.

If you're not familiar with the term, a supervolcano isn't just a big volcano. It's a volcanic centre that has had at least one eruption of more than 1,000 cubic kilometres of material—enough to change the climate of the whole planet, not just the local landscape. That's the 'existential' part of the talk: the kind of event that doesn't just affect a city or a country, but the world as a whole.

It's a Torquay Museum Society lecture, so it's free for Society members. For everyone else, tickets are £5 and you pay on the door. The museum is at 529 Babbacombe Rd, Torquay, TQ1 1HG, and the talk kicks off at 10:45 am on Thursday 4 November.