Science Alert March 20, 2022 Large volcanic eruptions occurring in the last glacial period can be detected by their accompanying sulfuric acid deposition in continuous ice cores. Using such data an international team of researchers (Demark, Switzerland, Italy, UK, Canada) estimated the emission strength, frequency and the climatic forcing of large volcanic eruptions that occurred during the second half of the last glacial period and the early Holocene epoch. Due to limited data resolution and large variability in the sulfate background signal, they identified 1113 volcanic eruptions in Greenland and 737 eruptions in Antarctica within the 51 kyr period. They found […]
Category Archives: Volcanoes
Tongan volcano eruption leaves scientists with unanswered questions [24 minutes]
Nature Podcast February 16, 2022 On the 15th of January, a volcano in the South Pacific Ocean erupted, sending ash into the upper atmosphere, and unleashing a devastating tsunami that destroyed homes on Tonga’s nearby islands. Now scientists are trying to work out exactly what happened during the eruption — and what it means for future volcanic risks. Podcast
Why the Tongan eruption will go down in the history of volcanology
Nature.com February 19, 2022 The eruption that devastated Tonga on 15 January lasted just 11 hours, but it will take years for scientists to work out exactly what happened during the cataclysmic explosion — and what it means for future volcanic risks. Geochemical analysis of that material, described in a paper found that the 2009 and 2014–15 eruptions involved molten rock that had not risen recently from the great depths of Earth’s mantle. Instead, it had spent some time in a magma chamber located 5–8 kilometres deep in Earth’s crust and gone through some tell-tale chemical changes before ultimately erupting […]
Tonga Volcanic Explosion Was Strong Enough to Send Gravitational Waves to the Atmosphere
Nature World News January 22, 2022 Tonga’s population has suffered a huge disaster due to a volcanic eruption and following tsunami on the South Pacific Island country. On January 15, 2022, the volcano that had been erupting since December 2021 burst spectacularly. The shock wave from the blast was so powerful that it was detected as far away as Antarctica according to Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna, Austria, which oversees an international network of remote monitoring stations. Even days after the eruption the network can still detect the faint echo of the shock wave as it orbits Earth’s atmosphere. […]
Unnerving Study Reveals There May Be No Warning For The Next Supervolcano Eruption
Science Alert November 6, 2021 An international team of researchers (China, Taiwan, Switzerland, Malaysia, Indonesia) conducted a a detailed study of the Toba volcano in Sumatra, Indonesia analyzing the chemistry of zircons minerals produced by explosive volcanic eruptions to determine the age of the minerals. Their findings suggest that the gigantic eruptions from Toba some 840,000 years ago and 75,000 years ago were not preceded by a sudden influx of magma into the volcano’s reservoir. Instead, the magma collected steadily and silently ahead of the blasts. The second super-eruption needed less than half the time for magma to build up than […]
How to better identify dangerous volcanoes
Phys.org October 12, 2021 Volcano eruption style is thought to be strongly controlled by fast conduit processes, limiting our ability for prediction. To understand if the eruptive behaviour is predetermined by the state of the magma in the subvolcanic reservoir an international team of researchers (Switzerland, USA – Brown University) analysed the pre-eruptive storage conditions of 245 units from volcanoes around the world. They showed that pre-eruptive crystallinity, dissolved water content and the presence of exsolved volatiles in the chamber exert a primary control on eruptive styles. Magmas erupt explosively over a well-defined range in dissolved water content (~4–5.5 wt%) and […]