Volcanoes!

Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano has erupted for the first time in 20 years, threatening air traffic and nearby villages with a towering burst of ash. The first blast occurred at 6.38pm Monday NZ time, and it was followed by four smaller eruptions. More eruptions are expected. The 3,108 metre volcano, in a sparsely populated area 170 km southwest of Anchorage, Alaska's largest city with about 260,000 people, had been showing signs of a possible eruption for about two months.

And last week an underwater volcano near Tonga stopped being an underwater volcano, and started building up above the surface, in an eruption that sent clouds of smoke, steam and ash thousands of metres into the sky, forcing air traffic to divert around it. Some great pictures can be found here. The Tongan earthquake on Friday morning which sparked a tsunami warning was not directly related to the eruption.