the.com/lahar
a volcano's mudslide assassin, cementing whole towns in concrete while the lava just watches.
means A lahar is a fast-moving slurry of volcanic ash, rock, and water that surges down a volcano's slopes, capable of burying everything in its path.
from Borrowed in the early 20th century from Javanese 'lahar,' meaning a volcanic mudflow — a word geologists scooped straight from Indonesia, where the slopes of volcanoes like Merapi and Kelud have spawned these flows for as long as anyone has lived beneath them. It entered scientific English because the Javanese had already named the thing better than anyone else could.
- speed
- Can race downhill at 60 mph
- texture
- Flows like wet concrete, sets like dry
- deadliest
- Killed 23,000 in Colombia, 1985
- trigger
- Needs no eruption, just rain on ash
- origin
- Indonesian word for volcanic mudflow