For a long time, scientists generally believed that the Moon had been 'dormant' for 3 billion years, but the samples brought back by the Chang'e 5 and 6 missions show that volcanic eruptions occurred ...

Magma with low silica (defined at 47-53% of the magma made of silica by weight) is called "mafic". If you erupt mafic magma, we call that lava "basalt", a term that many of you have heard before.

The vertical growth rate of basaltic magma chambers remains largely unknown with available estimates being highly uncertain. Here, we propose a novel approach to address this issue using the ...

Basaltic magma is hot, crystal-poor, gas-poor and silica-poor (relative to rhyolite), so you expect that a basalt should have a lower viscosity than a rhyolite.

Large magma eruptions have produced great floods of basalt lava on the continents during Earth’s history. Conventionally, the largest flood basalt eruptions are thought to be possible only in ...

New research suggests rapid magma crystallization is responsible for the dark and violent side of basaltic eruptions.

International group of researchers involving geologists from Wits University (Prof. Rais Latypov and Dr. Sofya Chistyakova) in Johannesburg have come up with an unexpected conclusion that basaltic ...

Previous studies presumed the rhyolitic reservoirs were supported by deeper reservoirs of basaltic magma – molten material that has a much smaller silica content than rhyolite, but abundant iron ...

Basaltic magma can also cool underground, in which case it’s called gabbro. Higher-silica magma that erupts on the surface rather than cooling below ground is known as rhyolite.