SIGNS of embryonic volcanoes that could erupt hundreds of millennia from now have been detected for the first time.
The Cheb basin in the Czech Republic was last volcanically active about 300,000 years ago. Over the past 12 years, Karin Bräuer from the Leipzig-Halle Centre for Environmental Research in Germany and her colleagues have recorded a significant increase in the ratio of two helium isotopes in the gas bubbling up from mineral springs in the area. This ratio is known to be higher in the Earth’s upper mantle than the crust, so the increase implies that melt from the upper…
