Black Rock Desert volcanic field Black Rock Desert volcanic field The Black Rock Desert volcanic field in Millard County, Utah, is a cluster of several volcanic features of the Great Basin such as Pavant Butte and Tabernacle Hill. The field's Ice Springs event was an explosive eruption followed by lava flows that were Utah's most recent volcanic activity (1140–1440 AD). which overlapped the older flows of Pavant Butte. The Pleistocene-Holocene field has been an active tectonic area for approximately 2.7 million years. Within the past 1.5 million years, local volcanism has produced both rhyolitic and basaltic cones from near twenty-four vents from which lava escapes
Lava is commonly shortened to "lava". Although lava can be up to 100,000 times more viscous than water, lava can flow great distances before cooling and solidifying because of its thixotropic and shear thinning properties. Explosive eruptions produce a mixture of volcanic ash and other fragments called tephra, rather than lava flows. The word "lava" comes from Italian, and is probably derived from the Latin word "labes" which means a fall or slide. The first use in connection with extruded magma (molten rock below the Earth's surface) was apparently in a short account written by Francesco Serao on the eruption of