Volcano vocab

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Today I’ve been thinking volcanoes, which sent me to the dictionary to check out a few technical terms:

tephra

air-fall material (pyroclastics) ejected from a volcano during eruption

ash

fine tephra particles <2mm in diameter

lapilli

tephra particles 2–64mm in diameter; multiple forms

volcanic bombs or blocks

tephra objects >64mm in diameter

fugacity

a thermodynamic property of a real gas that, if substituted for the pressure or partial pressure in the equations for an ideal gas, gives equations applicable to the real gas (this one has my head spinning)

2 comments

  1. Pooh says:

    “fugacity” What a wonderful word! I bet I could use it in conversation w/ high school students and get a whole raft of new meanings.

    “You have the FUGACITY to tell me you’ve finished doing your Ideal Gas Law worksheet when you been gossiping (loudly) to your friend the whole time!”

    The Ideal Gas Law: my friends and I called it the Pervert Law when we learned it in high school. (PV = nRT) P=pressure V=volume n=number of moles of the gas R=a constant (this may be where the fugacity comes in) and T=temperature.

    I told Dan that when he was struggling w/ Chemistry in high school, and he told his teacher. She said if it’s silly or off-color, you’ll be more likely to remember it. Works for me – it was probably 30 years btw my HS chem class and Dan’s. But I never learned about the word “fugacity” – I think I’d have remembered it.

  2. Sammy says:

    The potential for new meanings was certainly why “fugacity” caught my eye; I have no use for it with its real meaning, now that I’ve included here in the “blahg.”