Breaking News: Volcanoes

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To combat complacency and improve disaster preparedness, a University at Buffalo researcher is heading a new project focusing on two locations: Kīlauea in the Hawaiian Islands, and the Long Valley caldera and volcanic field in eastern central California.

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Large volcanic eruptions inject considerable amounts of sulphur in the stratosphere which, once converted into aerosols, block sun rays and tend to cool the surface of the Earth down for several years. An international team of researchers has just developed a method, published in Nature Geoscience, to accurately measure and simulate the induced drop in temperature.

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Luke Bowman, who received his PhD from Michigan Tech this summer, gets to the heart of geohazards on the San Vicente Volcano in El Salvador.

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New research led by the University of Adelaide hopes to close the debate on whether a major mud volcano disaster in Indonesia was triggered by an earthquake or had man-made origins.

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University of Utah seismologists discovered and made images of a reservoir of hot, partly molten rock 12 to 28 miles beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano, and it is 4.4 times larger than the shallower, long-known magma chamber. The hot rock in the newly discovered, deeper magma reservoir would fill the 1,000-cubic-mile Grand Canyon 11.2 times.

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By crushing minerals between diamonds, a University of Utah study suggests the existence of an unknown layer inside Earth: part of the lower mantle where the rock gets three times stiffer. The discovery may explain a mystery: why slabs of Earth’s sinking tectonic plates sometimes stall and thicken 930 miles underground.

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URI doctoral student Brennan Phillips is on the hunt for underwater volcanoes so he can collect data on the plumes of hot fluids and chemical compounds emanating from hydrothermal vents in and around the craters. His latest adventure took him to the unexplored Kavachi volcano off the Solomon Islands.

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Research on underwater volcanoes, Great Lakes pollution, subseafloor life and much more will be among the 40 projects that will be presented by scientists from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco from Dec. 15 to 19.

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For seven years, an area larger than the city of Madison has been rising by 10 inches per year. That rapid rise provides a major scientific opportunity: to explore a mega-volcano before it erupts. That effort, and the hazard posed by the restless magma reservoir beneath Laguna del Maule, are described in a major research article in the December issue of GSA Today.

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The surface of Mars clearly shows what looks like evidence of flowing water: riverbeds, deltas, and the like. But these signs have been a puzzle – until now. The Weizmann Institute’s Dr. Itay Halevy and Brown University’s Dr. James Head III have identified a possible source: violent eruptions from massive volcanoes that periodically melted Mars’ ice.

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By measuring how fast Earth conducts electricity and seismic waves, a University of Utah researcher and colleagues made a detailed picture of Mount Rainier’s deep volcanic plumbing and partly molten rock that will erupt again someday.

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University and government scientists are embarking on a collaborative research expedition to improve volcanic eruption forecasting by learning more about how a deep-underground feeder system creates and supplies magma to Mount St. Helens.

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A temporary seismic array in Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica recorded two bursts of activity in 2010 and 2011. Careful analysis of the events shows they originate from a subglacial volcano at the leading end of a volcanic mountain chain. The volcano is unlikely to erupt through the kilometer of ice that covers it but it will melt enough ice to change the way the ice in its vicinity flows.

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A study finds that hollow, land-based lava pillars in Iceland likely formed in a surprising reaction where lava met water without an explosion. Such formations are common deep under the ocean, but have not been described on land, the lead researcher says.

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Reservoirs of silica-rich magma – the kind that causes the most explosive volcanic eruptions – can persist in Earth's upper crust for hundreds of thousands of years without triggering an eruption, according to new University of Washington research.

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Earth scientists are laying plans for a two-year study covering a broad area of southwestern Washington state to develop a better understanding of how Mount St. Helens gets its supply of volcanic magma.

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Swarms of small earthquakes can precede a volcanic eruption, sometimes resulting in "harmonic tremor" resembling sound from some musical instruments. A new analysis shows tremor during a 2009 sequence at Alaska's Redoubt Volcano glided to substantially higher frequencies, then stopped abruptly just before six of the eruptions.