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 […]
Category Archives: Volcanoes
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 […]