Pity the BBC can't get its terms right and has dumbed down from using the word 'lahar'.
Originally Posted by: DEW
From the article:
'The phrase cold lava is a translation of the term "lahar" in Indonesian and Tagalog.'The term is a new one on me, and I earned a B in GCSE in geography at a grammar school! The closest we ever got was "pyroclastic flow" - but that's quite a bit hotter, of course. It could also be the fact that the teacher was hopeless: I remember he gave only the briefest attention to physical geography (as he "didn't like it"), and instead focused on the (to me, boring) human geography. We had more lessons on the Maasai tribe than we did on the entire topic of volcanoes and plate tectonics, for example.
Annoyingly I ditched geography for business studies at A level, as he was going to be the teacher of it... he then quit unexpectedly over the summer holidays, but it was too late to change. That was the end of my dream (at the time) of working in meteorology, as the careers advisor said A level geography was a must. Pah.