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There's a new island in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to an underwater volcano eruption that's been going on for the past month.
The new island is in the Tonga archipelago--a group of islands southeast of Fiji. Scientists discovered it on January 16, about a month into the volcano's eruption. The volcano, called Hunga Tonga, has since stopped erupting.
The island is mostly made of ash and formed around the crater of the volcano, measuring a little more than half a mile wide. The before-and-after images, from the Pleiades satellite, gives a clear picture of how far the ash spread, extending toward on of the two islands that border the underground volcano.

Huw James took a trek up Mount Etna and decided to show us what actually happens when a volcano erupts!

With a little bit of help from Dr Suze Kundu and using a simple demonstration heating a glass beaker of wax, stone, sand and water we can see what happens when a volcano erupts.

We can actually tell a lot about a volcano looking at the lava that comes out. If the lava is quite dense and thick we know it contains a lot of the compound silica. If it is less dense it has less silica and spreads out a lot more.

Thick lava will generally erupt from one vent and follow one flow down the side of the volcano. Thinner lava, lava that is less dense, generally erupts from the surrounding magma chambers and flows in many different channels.

"When you hear about a volcano erupting, what do you think is going on? If you're like us, you think of red hot chunks of rock being hurled thousands of feet in the air, flows of liquid magma, and plumes of smoke. That's not always the case. Some volcanoes erupt underwater and their smoking hot by-products are immediately cooled. With the Storm in a Cup, you can see what happens underwater on a smaller, safer scale."

We have known for some time that Bárðarbunga was going to do something-we just didn't know what. Because it is covered in ice, we rely on instruments to reveal its behavior.

Now that it has stirred, it is giving us clues about what it is about to do. The clues from the patterns of earthquakes and earth movements reveal two clusters where magma is moving toward the surface, and if it gets there, it will erupt. But whether this will be a gentle or a violent eruption is uncertain at the time of writing.

There is no way to predict when the eruption may happen, but we should get a few hours' notice. The good news for air travel is that both clusters are away from the heart of the main volcano, which makes it less likely that an eruption will produce the fine ash that causes disruption.

Have you ever found yourself in the path of molten lava? Has the volcano you're climbing suddenly erupted and you don't know what to do? Well keep watching because Huw James has all you need to know.

The earth is built on tectonic plates that move around on the mantle. Sometimes these plates move around and come together to form mountain chains like the Himalayas, some rub together and set off earthquakes, and some like Mount Etna, interact and one plate goes underneath the other.

This year will be another exciting one for space exploration. While 2014 will be remembered as the year we landed on a comet(!), 2015 may be known as the year of Pluto (and other dwarf planets). The New Horizons spacecraft begins its approach to Pluto this month, and will get closest to the dwarf planet in July, taking in the best view ever of the icy, remote world-possibly revealing a dramatic landscape with mountains, volcanoes, and geysers. In March, the Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is another icy world, possibly with liquid water under a frozen surface, making it potentially habitable for life.

A scientist takes a big risk to get a lava sample from the rim of a lava lake.