volcanoes – Quanta Magazine

Inside Scientists’ Life-Saving Prediction of the Iceland Eruption

Robin George Andrews — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:27:49 +0000

On November 10, 2023, Kristín Jónsdóttir, head of the Icelandic Meteorological Office’s department of volcano research, was having a rare day off. “It was my 50th birthday,” she said. Then everything began to shake. She would spend the day staring at her phone, watching the earthquakes bloom across maps of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. The peninsula experiences fissure eruptions...

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The Scientist Who Decodes the Songs of Undersea Volcanoes

Robin George Andrews — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 15:17:27 +0000

We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you would be hard-pressed to find anyone more enchanted by them — and more stubbornly determined to study them — than Jackie Caplan-Auerbach. A volcanologist at Western Washington...

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Scientists Unravel How the Tonga Volcano Caused Worldwide Tsunamis

Robin George Andrews — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 13:35:21 +0000

In August 1883, a mountainous island in Indonesia named Krakatau, or Krakatoa, self-destructed. Episodic volcanic eruptions crescendoed in an explosion that sent debris 80 kilometers high and smothered 800,000 square kilometers of Earth’s surface in corrosive ash. As much of the island blasted apart and splashed into the sea, a tsunami rose up and slammed into the nearby islands of Java and...

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A Massive Subterranean ‘Tree’ Is Moving Magma to Earth’s Surface

Robin George Andrews — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 16:26:53 +0000

Réunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, is like a marshmallow hovering above the business end of a blowtorch. It sits above one of Earth’s mantle plumes — a tower of superheated rock that ascends from the deep mantle and flambés the bases of tectonic plates, the jigsaw pieces that make up the ever-changing face of the world. The plume’s effects are hard to miss: One of the island’s...

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A Burp or a Blast? Seismic Signals Reveal the Volcanic Eruption to Come

Robin George Andrews — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 17:02:41 +0000

Last December, a gloopy ooze of lava began extruding out of the summit of La Soufrière, a volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. The effusion was slow at first; no one was threatened. Then in late March and early April, the volcano began to emit seismic waves associated with swiftly rising magma. Noxious fumes vigorously vented from the peak. Fearing a magmatic bomb was imminent...

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