Knowing how to read the signals that a volcano gives before erupting can make a difference between a scare and a tragedy. Some volcanoes make it easy for experts who know how to read these clues but others erupt without prior notice. Or maybe just we couldn’t decipher your signs.
At least until now.
A new tool. A team of researchers has devised a new mechanism to model the behavior of some volcanoes. This tool, its creators stand out, will serve to more effectively monitor the eruptions of some volcanoes reducing the risk associated with these natural phenomena often so violent. Some special usefulness in the case of “silent” volcanoes.
“Despite great advances in monitoring, some volcanoes erupt with minimally detectable or even without them precursors, significantly increasing the risk of nearby populations,” said Yuyu Li, co -author of the study in a press release. As explained by LI herself, some of these volcanoes are located not only near communities, also near important air traffic routes.
Silent volcanoes. For the development of its tool, the team resorted to the Veniaminaf volcano, located in the North American state of Alaska. This is one of the so -called “silent” volcanoes, volcanoes whose eruption is not preceded by the signals that are generally associated with an imminent or close eruption, such as earthquakes or the deformation of the soil in the surroundings of the Magma Chamber.
Veniaminaf’s is just an example that we can find in this family of silent volcanoes that also includes some closer such as Stromboli in Italy or Popocatepetl in Mexico.
Looking inside the volcano. But among all of them, the Veniaminof volcano is perhaps the most paradigmatic. Not because only two of the 13 eruptions that it has protected since 1993 could have been planned, but because in 2021 he achieved the milestone of erupting without anyone noticing up to three days later.
The team responsible for the study analyzed the internal conditions that make it a silent volcano. Factors such as a slow supply of magma and a warm host rock are key in this regard. The monitoring of the volcano was carried out for three summers prior to one of the silent eruptions of the volcano, that of 2018.
A model to get ahead of the eruption. The result, a model that conforms to the state of different variables that can condition the probability of the burst of the magma, such as the volume of the reserve, flow conditions of the magna, depth of the reserve or the form that it acquires is. Thus they could estimate what kind of conditions could be linked to a silent eruption and which ones were not.
The team found that soil deformation could help prevent some eruptions of the volcano but that the relationship between underground magma and rashes were somewhat more complex than it might seem.
The details of the study have been published in an article in the magazine Frontiers in Earth Science.
The following steps. Monitoring the numerous silent volcanoes distributed throughout the world will not be an easy task. For now, the resolution gives a clue to what are the volcanoes to monitor more closely: volcanoes with small and warm reserves and slow magma flows, explains the team.
In WorldOfSoftware | In 2021 a volcano spent three days in eruption without anyone finding out. Now it helps us to unmask the silent volcanoes
Imagen | Alaska Volcano Observatory Photo Gallery
