hypothesis of volcano

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Science Projects on Hypothesis for Volcanoes

How to Add a Variable to a Volcano Science Project

Volcanoes have captured the imaginations of science-fair participants for generations. The fun of simulating oozing lava and creating volcanic-like explosions is undeniable. Volcanoes play an important role in the topographical and meteorological patterns of Earth’s past, present and future. The complex science of volcanoes lends itself to a variety of science-project hypotheses.

Amateur Volcanologist

Volcanologists study both active and dormant volcanoes, how they formed, and their current and historic activity. According to the University of Oregon, most of the work of the volcanologist happens in the laboratory, not at the edge of a red-hot volcano writhing with molten lava. In fact, investigating data and coming up with hypotheses is one of the most important jobs of a volcanologist.

Hazardous Volcanoes

Volcanic eruptions have many hazards, from lava flows to spewing ash. Determining where the most hazardous volcanoes are located in the world is a good project hypothesis. First, students would need to determine the main hazards of a volcano and consider factors such as human life, plant and animal life, air quality and damage to property. Data would need to be collected on volcanoes in different parts of the world and students would need to form conclusions based on the same criteria for each volcano.

Effects on Earth System

Throughout history, volcanoes have had a profound effect on Earth’s systems. Volcanoes have changed the topography of the world and even destroyed civilizations. The effects on Earth’s systems by volcanoes that are currently active are more subtle, but they can still have an impact. Choosing an active volcano and hypothesizing about its impact on the environment around it would make an interesting project. Students can consider the impact to air quality, plant life and even the weather.

Chemistry and Volcanoes

A visually pleasing volcano project involves simulating an eruption. The intensity of volcanic eruptions varies widely and students can hypothesize which type of chemical reactions could cause the biggest eruptions. For example, a project could hypothesize that yeast combined with hydrogen peroxide would create a bigger explosion than vinegar combined with baking soda. Students, with adult supervision, can mix different components to demonstrate the power of volcanic eruptions.

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• Glencoe-McGraw Hill: Earth Science; “Ranking Hazardous Volcanoes”

About the Author

Beth Griesmer’s writing career started at a small weekly newspaper in Georgetown, Texas, in 1990. Her work has appeared in the “Austin-American Statesman,” “Inkwell” literary magazine and on numerous websites. Griesmer teaches middle school language arts and science in Austin, Texas.

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Century of Science: Theme

• Shaking up Earth

Birth of a theory

Some great ideas shake up the world. For centuries, the outermost layer of Earth was thought to be static, rigid, locked in place. But the theory of plate tectonics has rocked this picture of the planet to its core. Plate tectonics reveals how Earth’s surface is constantly in motion, and how its features — volcanoes, earthquakes, ocean basins and mountains — are intrinsically linked to its hot interior. The planet’s familiar landscapes, we now know, are products of an eons-long cycle in which the planet constantly remakes itself.

When plate tectonics emerged in the 1960s it became a unifying theory, “the first global theory ever to be generally accepted in the entire history of earth science,” writes Harvard University science historian Naomi Oreskes, in the introduction to Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth . In 1969, geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson compared the impact of this intellectual revolution in earth science to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which had produced a similar upending of thought about the nature of the universe.  

Plate tectonics describes how Earth’s entire, 100-kilometer-thick outermost layer, called the lithosphere, is broken into a jigsaw puzzle of plates — slabs of rock bearing both continents and seafloor — that slide atop a hot, slowly swirling inner layer. Moving at rates between 2 and 10 centimeters each year, some plates collide, some diverge and some grind past one another. New seafloor is created at the center of the oceans and lost as plates sink back into the planet’s interior. This cycle gives rise to many of Earth’s geologic wonders, as well as its natural hazards.

Plate tectonics is “the first global theory ever to be generally accepted in the entire history of earth science.” Naomi Oreskes

“It’s amazing how it tied the pieces together: seafloor spreading, magnetic stripes on the seafloor …  where earthquakes form, where mountain ranges form,” says Bradford Foley, a geodynamicist at Penn State. “Pretty much everything falls into place.”

With so many lines of evidence now known, the theory feels obvious, almost inevitable. But the conceptual journey from fixed landmasses to a churning, restless Earth was long and circuitous, punctuated by moments of pure insight and guided by decades of dogged data collection.

Continents adrift

In 1912, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed at a meeting of Frankfurt’s Geological Association that Earth’s landmasses might be on the move. At the time, the prevailing idea held that mountains formed like wrinkles on the planet as it slowly lost the heat of formation and its surface contracted. Instead, Wegener suggested, mountains form when continents collide as they drift across the planet’s surface. Although now far-flung, the continents were once joined together as a supercontinent Wegener dubbed Pangaea, or “all-Earth.” This would explain why rocks of the same type and age, as well as identical fossils, are found on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, for example.

This idea of drifting continents intrigued some scientists. Many others, particularly geologists, were unimpressed, hostile, even horrified. Wegener’s idea, detractors thought, was too speculative, not grounded enough in prevailing geologic principles such as uniformitarianism, which holds that the same slow-moving geologic forces at work on Earth today must also have been at work in the past. The principle was thought to demand that the continents be fixed in place.

German geologist Max Semper disdainfully wrote in 1917 that Wegener’s idea “was established with a superficial use of scientific methods, ignoring the various fields of geology,” adding that he hoped Wegener would turn his attention to other fields of science and leave geology alone.“O holy Saint Florian, protect this house but burn down the others!” he wrote sardonically.

The debate between “mobilists” and “fixists” raged on through the 1920s, picking up steam as it percolated into English-speaking circles. In 1926, at a meeting in New York City of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, geologist Rollin T. Chamberlin dismissed Wegener’s hypothesis as a mishmash of unrelated observations. The idea, Chamberlin said, “is of the foot-loose type, in that it takes considerable liberty with our globe, and is less bound by restrictions or tied down by awkward, ugly facts than most of its rival theories.”

One of the most persistent sticking points for Wegener’s idea, now called continental drift, was that it couldn’t explain how the continents moved. In 1928, English geologist Arthur Holmes came up with a potential explanation for that movement. He proposed that the continents might be floating like rafts atop a layer of viscous, partially molten rocks deep inside Earth. Heat from the decay of radioactive materials, he suggested, sets this layer to a slow boil , creating large circulating currents within the molten rock that in turn slowly shift the continents about.

Holmes admitted he had no data to back up the idea, and the geology community remained largely unconvinced of continental drift. Geologists turned to other matters, such as developing a magnitude scale for earthquake strength and devising a method to precisely date organic materials using the radioactive form of carbon, carbon-14 .

Data flood in

Rekindled interest in continental drift came in the 1950s from evidence from an unexpected source — the bottom of the oceans. World War II had brought the rapid development of submarines and sonar, and scientists soon put the new technologies to work studying the seafloor. Using sonar, which pings the seafloor with sound waves and listens for a return pulse, researchers mapped out the extent of a continuous and branching underwater mountain chain with a long crack running right down its center. This worldwide rift system snakes for over 72,000 kilometers around the globe, cutting through the centers of the world’s oceans.

Armed with magnetometers for measuring magnetic fields, researchers also mapped out the magnetic orientation of seafloor rocks — how their iron-bearing minerals are oriented relative to Earth’s field. Teams discovered that the seafloor rocks have a peculiar “zebra stripe” pattern: Bands of normal polarity, whose magnetic orientation corresponds to Earth’s current magnetic field, alternate with bands of reversed polarity. This finding suggests that each of the bands formed at different times.

Meanwhile, growing support for the detection and banning of underground nuclear testing also created an opportunity for seismologists: the chance to create a global, standardized network of seismograph stations. By the end of the 1960s, about 120 different stations were installed in 60 different countries, from the mountains of Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa to the halls of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to the frozen South Pole. Thanks to the resulting flood of high-quality seismic data, scientists discovered and mapped rumbles along the mid-ocean rift system, now called mid-ocean ridges, and beneath the trenches. The quakes near very deep ocean trenches were particularly curious: They originated much deeper underground than scientists had thought possible. And the ridges were very hot compared with the surrounding seafloor, scientists learned by using thin steel probes inserted into cores drilled from shipboard into the seafloor.

A WWII submarine-hunting device helped prove the theory of plate tectonics

With a boost from World War II, the fluxgate magnetometer became a portable and invaluable tool.

In the early 1960s, two researchers working independently, geologist Harry Hess and geophysicist Robert S. Dietz , put the disparate clues together — and added in Holmes’ old idea of an underlying layer of circulating currents within the hot rock. The mid-ocean ridges, each asserted, might be where circulation pushes hot rock toward the surface. The powerful forces drive pieces of Earth’s lithosphere apart. Into the gap, lava burbles up — and new seafloor is born. As the pieces of lithosphere move apart, new seafloor continues to form between them, called “seafloor spreading.”  

The momentum culminated in a two-day gathering of perhaps just 100 earth scientists in 1966, held at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. “It was quite clear, at this conference in New York, that everything was going to change,” University of Cambridge geophysicist Dan McKenzie told the Geological Society of London in 2017 in a reflection on the meeting.

“It was quite clear, at this conference in New York, that everything was going to change.” Dan McKenzie

But going in, “no one had any idea” that this meeting would become a pivotal moment for the earth sciences, says seismologist Lynn Sykes of Columbia University. Sykes, then a newly minted Ph.D., was one of the invitees; he had just discovered a distinct pattern in the earthquakes at mid-ocean ridges. This pattern showed that the seafloor on either side of the ridges was pulling apart, a pivotal piece of evidence for plate tectonics.

At the meeting, talk after talk piled data on top of data to support seafloor spreading, including Sykes’ earthquake data and those symmetrical patterns of zebra stripes. It soon became clear that these findings were building toward one unified narrative: Mid-ocean ridges were the birthplaces of new seafloor, and deep ocean trenches were graves where old lithosphere was reabsorbed into the interior. This cycle of birth and death had opened and closed the oceans over and over again, bringing the continents together and then splitting them apart.

The evidence was overwhelming, and it was during this conference “that the victory of mobilism was clearly established,” geophysicist Xavier Le Pichon, previously a skeptic of seafloor spreading, wrote in 2001 in his retrospective essay “My conversion to plate tectonics,” included in Oreskes’ book.

Plate tectonics emerges

The whole earth science community became aware of these findings the following spring, at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting. Wilson laid out the various lines of evidence for this new view of the world to a much larger audience in Washington, D.C. By then, there was remarkably little pushback from the community, Sykes says: “Right away, they accepted it, which was surprising.”

Scientists now knew that Earth’s seafloor and continents were in motion, and that ridges and trenches marked the edges of large blocks of lithosphere. But how were these blocks moving, all in concert, around the planet? To plot out the choreography of this complex dance, two separate groups seized upon a theorem devised by mathematician Leonhard Euler way back in the 18th century. The theorem showed that a rigid body moves around a sphere as though it is rotating around an axis. McKenzie and geophysicist Robert Parker used this theorem to calculate the dance of the lithospheric blocks — the plates. Unbeknownst to them, geophysicist W. Jason Morgan independently came up with a similar solution .

With this last piece, the unifying theory of plate tectonics was born. The hoary wrangling over continental drift now seemed not only antiquated , but also “a sobering antidote to human self-confidence,” physicist Egon Orowan told Science News in 1970.

People have benefited greatly from this clearer vision of Earth’s workings , including being able to better prepare for earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. Plate tectonics has also shaped new research across the sciences, offering crucial information about how the climate changes and about the evolution of life on Earth .

And yet there’s still so much we don’t understand, such as when and how the restless shifting of Earth’s surface began — and when it might end . Equally puzzling is why plate tectonics doesn’t appear to happen elsewhere in the solar system, says Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “How can something be a complete intellectual revolution and also inexplicable at the same time?” — Carolyn Gramling

• Unsung characters

Marie Tharp’s groundbreaking maps brought the seafloor to the world

In part because of her gender, Tharp was the right person in the right place at the right time to make the first detailed maps of the ocean’s bottom.

Understanding our Earth

In the decades since plate tectonics was established, scientists have increasingly peppered the planet with seismic sensors that pick up Earth’s rumblings, pinged the seafloor with sonar from ships and drilled cores into the planet’s surface . New technologies have also joined the toolbox, including satellite positioning systems such as GPS that can help track ground movements over time and ever-more-powerful computers that can interpret and analyze large amounts of data.

These tools have offered new views of Earth’s exterior and opened new windows into its interior. In the 1960s, for example, researchers had demonstrated that underwater mountain chains called mid-ocean ridges were places where two tectonic plates pulled away from each other, and where new seafloor was forming. But in the early 1970s, scientists for the first time saw the consequences close-up , with the first manned submersible explorations of a mid-ocean ridge in the Atlantic Ocean.

And mid-ocean ridges held more surprises: A few years later, oceanographers exploring another mid-ocean ridge, the Pacific Ocean’s Galápagos Rift , discovered the first known hydrothermal vents, fissures that spew superheated, mineral-rich water. To the amazement of the team members, the vents were teeming with giant tube worms and clams and other forms of life.

Abundant new seismic data and amped-up computing power, meanwhile, led to insights about the mysterious regions where Earth’s tectonic plates were sinking back into the planet’s interior, dubbed “ subduction zones .” A heavy, sinking slab of lithosphere, researchers discovered, can exert an extremely powerful pull on the rest of the plate — the first suggestion that subduction might be one of the main engines keeping plates on the move. Scientists also found that those plates might descend much deeper into Earth’s interior than once thought, and could play a big role in stirring up circulation of dense, hot rock within the mantle, the 2,900-kilometer-thick layer between the planet’s rigid outer layer and its superheated, metallic core.

Other researchers began to probe the strangeness of “hot spot” volcanoes , such as Hawaii’s island chain, which are located puzzlingly far from the edges of tectonic plates. Once thought to originate from magma pooling just under the surface, seismic images of the mantle suggested that the volcanoes are instead fueled by giant, buoyant plumes of hot, molten material originating hundreds to thousands of kilometers deep inside the planet, some nearly to its core.

But for every new discovery or question answered, dozens more arise about the dynamic nature of the planet. Here are a few of the big ones:

Can we predict earthquakes?

“The big question is whether there is any hope of being able to predict earthquakes,” says seismologist Lynn Sykes of Columbia University.

“The big question is whether there is any hope of being able to predict earthquakes.” Lynn Sykes

To try to answer that, scientists are looking to understand the physics of how faults move. It’s not an easy problem: As tectonic plates grind against one another, stress builds in the rocks, creating complex networks of fractures . These fault zones can include both microscopic cracks and vast fissures. Some faults may suddenly slip, causing an earthquake; others may inch along more slowly , possibly heralding a much larger quake in the near future. A quake can “jump” from one fault to another as the locus of stress shifts. The presence — or removal of — groundwater adds yet another wrinkle. Water circulating underground may help lubricate a fault, or it may add new stress.

Scientists are trying to find order in this seeming chaos. Seismic networks have dramatically expanded over the past few decades, with about 26,000 seismic stations currently installed around the globe. More stations mean more precise measurements of where a quake started and how quickly it travels, adding a few extra seconds to minutes of warning .

But scientists are hunting for more data. One strategy is to squeeze as much information as possible out of existing seismic records. By training computers to distinguish even the tiniest of quakes from other kinds of ground-shaking, like passing traffic, scientists increased the number of Southern California quakes logged in one decade by a factor of 10 , for example. Another strategy is to dramatically ramp up how much data is collected in the first place. Some scientists are experimenting using underground fiber-optic cables to create dense seismic arrays, a technique called distributed acoustic sensing .

Earthquakes at subduction zones are particularly tricky to understand, Sykes says. Subduction zone quakes are responsible for some of the most destructive quakes on record, including the 2004 magnitude 9.1 rupture off Indonesia that spawned a deadly tsunami that killed over 250,000 people, and the 2011 magnitude 9.0 quake off Japan that launched a tsunami, killing more than 15,000 people. The 2011 quake also crippled the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, releasing radioactive particles into the atmosphere and groundwater.

And these killer quakes are notoriously hard to anticipate. Subduction zones create extremely deep underwater trenches, making it very difficult to install sensors on the subducting plate that could help identify where strain might be accumulating ahead of a future quake. “A lot of the activity happens offshore,” where the sinking plate lies beneath very deep waters, Sykes says. “So you can’t sit right on top of it.”

Haiti’s citizen seismologists helped track its devastating quake in real time

Two scientists explain how citizen scientists and their work could help provide a better understanding of Haiti’s seismic hazards.

To get around this problem, the Japan Coast Guard has been testing a novel idea: Combining data from GPS systems installed on land with acoustic data collected from a ship. This combination enables scientists to keep an eye on subducting plates and look for changes to the shape of the seafloor that might presage a quake. Gravity-detecting satellites, sensitive to shifting landmasses, might help too; researchers suggest that satellites may have detected deformation in the Japan subduction zone months before the 2011 quake.

Why do volcanoes erupt?

As with earthquakes, anticipating volcanic eruptions remains tricky. Scientists can detect rumbling within a volcano caused by moving magma by using seismometers, and GPS stations can detect changes in land elevation, including those caused by the swelling of magma beneath a volcano’s flanks.

But what those movements mean is not obvious. “Each volcano has its own personality,” and it’s difficult to classify them into broad categories, says John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Sometimes magma moving beneath a volcano just pools in large underground chambers. Sometimes it pushes right to the surface. Different volcanoes also have different magma “plumbing” systems: In some, like Washington’s Mount St. Helens , the magma rises up from a vast, deep underground reservoir to another large chamber just below the surface. In others, like Hawaii’s Kilauea , long conduits snake sideways, feeding lava into numerous rifts at the surface.

How different plumbing systems can affect the explosiveness of an eruption is still unclear. Even intensely studied volcanoes such as Kilauea continue to surprise — in 2018, for example, the usual slow ooze of lava from the volcano was punctuated by explosive bursts of a much more gas-rich lava from some of the fissures.

Sometimes a series of deep, slow earthquakes turns out to presage a powerful eruption, as in the case of the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991. Other times, such quakes are just quiet grumbles . Telling which is the case for a particular volcano can be more of an art than a science, Vidale adds.

How do “hot spots” form?

Most of Earth’s volcanoes form at the edges of tectonic plate boundaries. But some of Earth’s most famous volcanoes — such as those of the Hawaiian Islands — pop up in the middle of a plate, and are fueled by isolated “hot spots” of magma rising from deep within the mantle. Scientists are still trying to fathom why and how these hot spots form.

“Each volcano has its own personality.” John Vidale

The Hawaiian Islands have been a geologic puzzle for decades. Even before plate tectonics theory, scientists wondered what forces could create a 2,400-kilometer-long string of volcanoes, all neatly lined up like ducklings in a row (including many that are underwater). In 1963, geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson suggested that the new idea of seafloor spreading might have something to do with it. If the seafloor were sliding across a stationary region of magma just beneath Earth’s lithosphere, or a hot spot , the result could be a linear march of progressively older volcanoes.

By 1971, the plate tectonics revolution was under way, but Hawaii was still a puzzle. Geophysicist W. Jason Morgan took up the hot spot concept, but went deeper. He suggested that hot spots are fueled by plumes of magma rising up thousands of kilometers from the base of the mantle, where it meets Earth’s core.

Morgan’s mantle plume hypothesis remains the dominant idea even today. But proving it has been tricky, because scientists have almost no direct data from Earth’s interior, and must infer what exists there using indirect methods. One tool that scientists do have is seismic tomography, a visualization technique similar to a CT scan. Using multiple seismic waves from earthquakes, scientists can create 3-D images of the interior of the Earth, based on observations of where the waves slow down or speed up due to changes in temperature or mineral composition. With seismic tomography, scientists have spotted deep plumes, just as expected, beneath Hawaii and Samoa . But such deep plumes haven’t been found beneath other hot spots around the globe, such as beneath the Yellowstone hot spot. In some cases, this may be an imaging problem; some plumes may be too small to detect using this technique.

Why and how hot spot plumes form in the first place is still mysterious. Some scientists suspect that the plumes might be connected to another long-standing mantle mystery. In the 1980s, using seismic tomography, scientists discovered two massive “anomalous zones” near the bottom of the mantle, regions where seismic waves travel much more slowly than they do through the neighboring rocks. One lies beneath Africa (later dubbed “Tuzo” by geophysicists) and another beneath the Pacific Ocean (a.k.a. “Jason”). These regions could represent piles of long-ago subducted lithosphere, and their geochemical makeup looks a lot like the lava erupted from some — but not all — hot spot volcanoes.

Scientists are hard at work trying to determine whether and how exactly these anomalous zones might give rise to hot spot plumes . But there is still a lot of uncertainty about the ultimate link between hot spot volcanoes, subducted plates and Earth’s innards. — Carolyn Gramling

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A force for climate

Before about 2.4 billion years ago, carbon dioxide and methane blanketed Earth in a global haze. The atmosphere contained almost no oxygen — even though single-celled oxygen-producing algae in Earth’s oceans had begun exhaling oxygen as early as 3 billion years ago.

Then, suddenly, atmospheric oxygen levels surged , a phenomenon now known as the Great Oxidation Event. The cause of that abrupt chemical transition is a long-standing mystery.

But one possibility is that the Earth moved.

A massive surge of volcanic eruptions about 2.5 billion years ago may have spurred the event, says James Eguchi, a geochemist at the University of California, Riverside. Using clues provided by changing levels of carbon and oxygen isotopes in carbonate rocks, Eguchi and colleagues have suggested that the lava and bursts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from such eruptions would have warmed the planet and increased rainfall. And that would have kicked weathering into high gear, Eguchi says.

“[ Plate tectonics is ] responsible for mediating the climate on long geological timescales.” Bradford Foley

Volcanic bursts of carbon dioxide in general are known to play a key role in keeping the planetary carbon cycle moving. As acidic, CO 2 -laden rainwater reacts with the rocks, pulling the carbon out of the atmosphere, it forms new minerals that wash into the sea. Microscopic cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, in the oceans flourish as they gobble up carbon-rich minerals, adding oxygen to the atmosphere. Some of the minerals form carbonate rocks, sequestering even more of the carbon. Eventually, those seafloor carbonates, riding atop a sinking tectonic plate, are carried into Earth’s hot interior. They melt and the new magma rises, to be erupted anew out of volcanoes.

Eguchi and colleagues suggest that the combination of continued weathering of volcanic rocks and increasingly efficient cyanobacteria pumping out more and more oxygen helped the gas accumulate. Oxygen levels grew from near zero to about 21 percent of the atmosphere — paving the way for life on Earth as we know it . 

“It’s a big cyclic process that ties Earth’s interior to its climate, as well as to life,” Eguchi says.

What caused the sudden uptick in volcanic activity 2.5 billion years ago is uncertain, he adds. But scientists suspect that plate tectonics may have had many false starts and stutters before really kicking off. The proliferation of volcanoes could signal a major tectonic transition, perhaps to much faster-moving plates or to more widespread, even global, plate movement, he says.

Fast forward to about 252 million years ago, when the Earth experienced another dramatic transition —this one conclusively pinned to volcanic villains. One of the most devastating eruptions in history caused a climate cataclysm that killed off about 90 percent of species, a mass extinction known as the “Great Dying.”

It started with a plume of hot magma that rose from deep inside Earth to pool just beneath the surface before violently erupting. Over 3 million cubic kilometers of molten rock blanketed much of what is now Siberia within just 1 million years. Far more devastating were the enormous pulses of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-altering gases that that burst out near the end of the eruptions, possibly within just a few tens of thousands of years.

Those gases quickly spread around the globe, sending global temperatures soaring and turning once-temperate lands into deserts. Fluorine and chlorine gases ate away at the ozone layer, allowing ultraviolet rays from the sun to scorch Earth’s forests . The oceans also became deadly, with seawater temperatures rising by as much as 15 degrees Celsius while the waters also turned acidic and oxygen-poor , dissolving the shells of some ocean-dwellers while others gasped for breath.

Such calamitous, planet-overhauling volcanic events are rare in Earth’s history, and their link to Earth’s tectonic plates and the swirling of hot, molten rock is still a puzzle.

But Earth’s dynamism isn’t only destructive. By cycling carbon into and out of Earth’s interior, over and over again, plate tectonics has ended up keeping Earth’s temperatures remarkably stable. It has acted as a planetary thermostat for billions of years, says Bradford Foley, a geodynamicist at Penn State. “It’s responsible for mediating the climate on long geological timescales.”

Plate movements have also helped shape weather and climatic features we know today, from the Asian monsoons to the ice sheet covering Antarctica. Beginning around 55 million years ago, the northward push of the Indian subcontinent to collide with the Eurasian plate began to shove parts of the Tibetan Plateau skyward . The plateau effectively walled off central Asia from the Indian Ocean, preventing cold, dry air over Asia from venturing southward. Meanwhile the plateau absorbs enormous amounts of solar energy during the summer. All that heat warms the atmosphere above the plateau, and the rising hot air creates powerful atmospheric currents. Warm, moist air from above the Indian Ocean gets sucked in, producing the intense annual monsoon rains. Those rains in turn shape weather patterns from India to China to Japan.

Antarctica can attribute its current icy state to its separation from South America. Cores of sediment show that around 90 million years ago, the continent was covered with a swampy forest . That’s not because it was closer to the equator; the landmass has barely moved since that time. But about 35 million years ago, the pulling apart of the South American and Antarctic plates opened a deep seaway called the Drake Passage. It was just enough to allow the frigid Antarctic Circumpolar Current to encircle the continent, putting it in a deep freeze that continues today. Across the globe, the path of ocean currents is set by the distribution of landmasses and the shape of ocean basins; these currents ferry heat and so drive regional climates.

Over the past two centuries, humans have interfered with the slow, stabilizing influence of plate tectonics on Earth’s climate. We’ve cranked up the thermostat by adding large amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in a very short period of time. Those emissions are already leading to rapidly increasing global temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, raising sea levels and shifting ocean currents.

Scientists hope to better understand what Earth’s future climate might look like by studying past climatic states , including the influence of different levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But plate tectonics “won’t save us” from ourselves, says seismologist Lynn Sykes of Columbia University. “It doesn’t have much play in terms of changing things on a timescale of, say, 50 years,” Sykes says. “Plate tectonics kind of stands still on that timescale.” — Carolyn Gramling

Crucible of life

Earth is the only known world with plate tectonics. It’s also the only one known to harbor life.

Planetary scientists puzzle over whether and how these two facts might be related — and what it means for just how unusual Earth really is, says Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “Nobody knows how plate tectonics began on Earth, and why it didn’t begin elsewhere,” she adds. “It’s a mystery that connects to a lot of other mysteries, and one of those is habitability.”

We know plate tectonics plays a powerful role in keeping Earth habitable , primarily by moving carbon around. “It’s responsible for mediating the climate on long geological time scales , making sure the climate is more or less temperate for life,” says Roger Fu, a geophysicist at Harvard University.

“Nobody knows how plate tectonics began on Earth, and why it didn’t begin elsewhere. It’s a mystery that connects to a lot of other mysteries, and one of those is habitability.” Lindy Elkins-Tanton

When two tectonic plates collide, one can slide beneath the other, carrying rocks bearing carbon deep into the planet’s interior. The subducting plate begins to melt, and volcanoes bloom on the overlying plate, belching carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. As carbon dioxide builds up, it warms the planet through the greenhouse effect.

This warmer atmosphere then speeds up weathering of rocks on Earth’s surface, by boosting the chemical reaction between carbon dioxide–rich rainwater and the rocks. Those reactions draw the gas out of the atmosphere to form new carbon minerals. The minerals wash into the ocean, where tiny ocean creatures use the carbon to build their calcium carbonate shells. Ultimately those creatures die, their shells sinking to the ocean floor and becoming carbonate rocks themselves. As more and more carbon dioxide gets sequestered away from the atmosphere in this way, the planet cools — until, eventually, the slow grind of plate tectonics carries the carbonate into the planet’s interior with a subducting plate.

This cycle, playing out over many millions of years, doesn’t just keep temperatures mild. The churning also keeps oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients cycling through the atmosphere, oceans and rocks — and chemically transforms them into forms that living organisms can use.

“That’s not to say that life wouldn’t happen without plate tectonics,” Fu says. “But it would be very different.”

In fact, the first life on Earth may predate the onset of plate tectonics. The planet’s ancient rocks bear traces of life dating to at least 3.4 billion years ago , several hundred million years before the earliest known evidence for any plate motions , in the form of fossilized stromatolites, layered structures made of microbes and minerals. Similar microbial communities exist in modern times at hot springs, such as those of Yellowstone National Park. Some scientists to speculate that hot springs — which contain the biochemical recipe for life, including chemical elements, water and energy — may have set the stage for Earth’s earliest life .

It’s certainly theoretically possible for planets without plate tectonics — like the early Earth — to have livable atmospheres and liquid water, as well as abundant heat, says Bradford Foley, a geodynamicist at Penn State. Foley has simulated how much carbon dioxide could seep out from the interior of “stagnant lid” planets — planets like Mars and Mercury that have a single, continuous piece of lithosphere that sits like a cold, heavy lid over the hot interior. Even on these planets, Foley says, “we still have volcanism,” because there’s still hot rock circulating beneath that heavy lid. Those eruptions release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and produce fresh new rock for weathering.

Volcanism on a climate-altering scale might not last as long as it does when plate tectonics keeps things churning along, but it theoretically could persist for 1 billion or 2 billion years , Foley says. That means that some stagnant lid planets could create an atmosphere and even have temperate climates with liquid water, at least for a time.

Then there’s Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon. The surface of the moon is broken into a mosaic of plates of ice that slide past and over and under one another, much like those on Earth. “Instead of subduction, it’s referred to as subsumption,” Fu says. But the result of this icy cycle may be similar to the hard-rock recycling on Earth, moving nutrients between surface ice and liquid ocean below, which in turn could help support life on the moon.

“What exactly plate tectonics is isn’t an answered question,” Fu says. The term, he says, has become a catchall that encompasses numerous physical features on Earth — mid-ocean ridges, subduction, moving continents — as well as geochemical processes like nutrient cycling. “But there’s no guarantee they always have to happen together.”

Scientists instinctively turn to Earth as a template for studying other worlds , and as an example of what to look for in the search for habitability, Elkins-Tanton says. “So many of the things we try to explain in the natural sciences relies on us being in the middle of the bell curve,” she says. “If it turns out we’re unusual, we’re a bit of an outlier, then explaining things is much harder.”

It may be that each world has its own eclectic history, she says. Earth’s happens to include the powerful cycle of plate tectonics. But life elsewhere might have found another way. — Carolyn Gramling

The Richter scale is proposed by seismologist Charles Richter (shown) to compare the magnitude of different earthquakes. The more accurate moment magnitude scale is now used for most earthquakes.

Geochemist Clair Patterson sets the age of the Earth at 4.550 billion years, relying on ages of meteorites (including the Canyon Diablo meteorite, shown) that formed around the same time.

Columbia University researchers Bruce Heezen, Marie Tharp (shown) and Maurice Ewing create the first comprehensive map of an ocean basin , revealing a deep rift right at the center of a long underwater mountain chain cutting through the North Atlantic.

Harry Whittington (shown) leads an expedition to Canada’s Burgess Shale, identifying a riot of new and unusual forms of animal life and boosting studies into the Cambrian explosion.

The first Landsat satellite launched (shown), opening the door to continuous monitoring of Earth and its features from above.

Dives to the seafloor along the Galápagos Rift reveal the first known active hydrothermal vent — and abundant life (including this purple octopus at one vent site).

A powerful eruption from the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo (shown) ejects millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, temporarily cooling the planet.  

From the archive

Earth as soup-kettle.

The story behind Earth’s heat and Arthur Holmes’ idea of a molten inner Earth.

The New View of the World

How the unifying theory of plate tectonics created a “new view of the world.”

Drilling under the Sea

The Deep Sea Drilling Project was an ambitious effort to find glimpses into Earth’s history.

Drift shapes life

Scientists explore how moving landmasses shaped the evolution and dispersal of species.

Unfathomable forces

In the 1970s, the unknown forces driving plate motion occupied “a kind of never-never land, where controversy is great, speculation rampant and information sparse.”

Lunar cataclysm?

In the years after the Apollo missions, scientists grapple with how the moon formed.

Continental Hearts

The flat, stony interiors of continents hold some of geology’s deepest mysteries.

Dinosaur disappearance

Scientists probe the underwater impact site of an asteroid that struck 66 million years ago — the one famous for doing in the dinosaurs.

Once and future supercontinents

Researchers paint a picture of supercontinents of the past and future.

Is it life?

Far back in time, it’s hard to distinguish fossilized traces of ancient life on Earth from worked-over rocks.

Capturing future climate

Scientists puzzle over how best to simulate future climate change, and how to learn from warming episodes in Earth’s past. 

Origins of rarest diamonds

“Superdeep” diamonds form from primordial carbon lingering in the lower mantle, and offer a rare window into Earth’s interior.

No, Yellowstone isn’t about to erupt, even after more magma was found

A new study offers the best views yet of what lurks beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano.

Earth’s inner core may be more complex than researchers thought

Seismic waves suggest that Earth has a hidden heart, a distinct region within the solid part of the planet’s core.

Satellite data reveal nearly 20,000 previously unknown deep-sea mountains

By looking for tiny bumps in sea level caused by the gravity of subsurface mountains, researchers have roughly doubled the number of known seamounts.

Science News is published by Society for Science

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Plate Tectonics and Volcanic Activity

A volcano is a feature in Earth's crust where molten rock is squeezed out onto Earth's surface. Along with molten rock, volcanoes also release gases, ash, and solid rock.

Earth Science, Geology, Geography, Physical Geography

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Learning materials.

• National Geographic MapMaker: Volcanic Eruptions
• National Geographic: Forces of Nature

A volcano is a feature in Earth’s crust where molten rock is squeezed out onto the Earth’s surface. This molten rock is called magma when it is beneath the surface and lava when it erupts , or flows out, from a volcano. Along with lava, volcanoes also release gases, ash, and, solid rock.

Volcanoes come in many different shapes and sizes but are most commonly cone-shaped hills or mountains. They are found throughout the world, forming ridges deep below the sea surface and mountains that are thousands of meters high. About 1,900 volcanoes on Earth are considered active, meaning they show some level of occasional activity and are likely to erupt again. Many others are dormant volcanoes , showing no current signs of exploding but likely to become active at some point in the future. Others are considered extinct .

Volcanoes are incredibly powerful agents of change. Eruptions can create new landforms , but can also destroy everything in their path. About 350 million people (or about one out of every 20 people in the world) live within the “danger range” of an active volcano . Volcanologists closely monitor volcanoes so they can better predict impending eruptions and prepare nearby populations for potential volcanic hazards that could endanger their safety.

Plate Tectonics

Most volcanoes form at the boundaries of Earth’s tectonic plates . These plates are huge slabs of Earth’s crust and upper mantle , which fit together like pieces of a puzzle. These plates are not fixed, but are constantly moving at a very slow rate. They move only a few centimeters per year. Sometimes, the plates collide with one another or move apart. Volcanoes are most common in these geologically active boundaries.

The two types of plate boundaries that are most likely to produce volcanic activity are divergent plate boundaries and convergent plate boundaries.

Divergent Plate Boundaries 

At a divergent boundary , tectonic plates move apart from one another. They never really separate because magma continuously moves up from the mantle into this boundary , building new plate material on both sides of the plate boundary.

The Atlantic Ocean is home to a divergent plate boundary, a place called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge . Here, the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are moving in opposite directions. Along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, hot magma swells upward and becomes part of the North American and Eurasian plates. The upward movement and eventual cooling of this buoyant magma creates high ridges on the ocean floor. These ridges are interconnected, forming a continuous volcanic mountain range nearly 60,000 kilometers (37,000 miles)—the longest in the world.

Another divergent plate boundary is the East Pacific Rise, which separates the massive Pacific plate from the Nazca, Cocos, and North American plates.

Vents and fractures (also called fissures ) in these mid-ocean ridges allow magma and gases to escape into the ocean. This submarine volcanic activity accounts for roughly 75 percent of the average annual volume of magma that reaches Earth’s crust. Most submarine volcanoes are found on ridges thousands of meters below the ocean surface.

Some ocean ridges reach the ocean surface and create landforms. The island of Iceland is a part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The diverging Eurasian and North American plates caused the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull (in 2010) and Bardarbunga (in 2014). These eruptions were preceded by significant rifting and cracking on the ground surface, which are also emblematic of diverging plate movement.

Of course, divergent plate boundaries also exist on land. The East African Rift is an example of a single tectonic plate being ripped in two. Along the Horn of Africa , the African plate is tearing itself into what is sometimes called the Nubian plate (to the west, including most of the current African plate) and the Somali plate (to the east, including the Horn of Africa and the western Indian Ocean). Along this divergent plate boundary are volcanoes such as Mount Nyiragongo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mount Kilimanjaro, in Kenya.

Convergent Plate Boundaries

At a convergent plate boundary , tectonic plates move toward one another and collide. Oftentimes, this collision forces the denser plate edge to subduct , or sink beneath the plate edge that is less dense. These subduction zones can create deep trenches . As the denser plate edge moves downward, the pressure and temperature surrounding it increases, which causes changes to the plate that melt the mantle above, and the melted rock rises through the plate, sometimes reaching its surface as part of a volcano. Over millions of years, the rising magma can create a series of volcanoes known as a volcanic arc .

The majority of volcanic arcs can be found in the Ring of Fire , a horseshoe-shaped string of about 425 volcanoes that edges the Pacific Ocean. If you were to drain the water out of the Pacific Ocean, you would see a series of deep canyons (trenches) running parallel to corresponding volcanic islands and mountain ranges. The Aleutian Islands, stretching from the U.S. state of Alaska to Russia in the Bering Sea, for instance, run parallel to the Aleutian Trench, formed as the Pacific plate subducts under the North American plate. The Aleutian Islands have 27 of the United States’ 65 historically active volcanoes.

The mighty Andes Mountains of South America run parallel to the Peru-Chile Trench. These mountains are continually built up as the Nazca plate subducts under the South American plate. The Andes Mountains include the world’s highest active volcano, Nevados Ojos del Salado, which rises to 6,879 meters (over 22,500 feet) along the Chile-Argentina border . 

For many years, scientists have been trying to explain why some volcanoes exist thousands of kilometers away from tectonic plate boundaries.

The dominant theory , framed by Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson in 1963, states that these volcanoes are created by exceptionally hot areas fixed deep below Earth’s mantle. These hot spots are able to independently melt the tectonic plate above them, creating magma that erupts onto the top of the plate.

In hot spots beneath the ocean, the tectonic activity creates a volcanic mound. Over millions of years, volcanic mounds can grow until they reach sea level and create a volcanic island. The volcanic island moves as part of its tectonic plate. The hot spot stays put, however. As the volcano moves farther from the hot spot, it goes extinct and eventually erodes back into the ocean. A new and active volcano develops over the hot spot, creating a continuous cycle of volcanism—and a string of volcanic islands tracing the tectonic plate’s movement over time.

For Wilson and many scientists, the best example of hot spot volcanism is the Hawaiian Islands. Experts think this volcanic chain of islands has been forming for at least 70 million years over a hot spot underneath the Pacific plate. Of all the inhabited Hawaiian Islands, Kauai is located farthest from the presumed hot spot and has the most eroded and oldest volcanic rocks, dated at 5.5 million years. Meanwhile, on the “Big Island” of the U.S. state of Hawai‘i—still fueled by the hot spot—the oldest rocks are less than 0.7 million years old and volcanic activity continues to create new land.

Hot spots can also create terrestrial volcanoes. The Yellowstone Supervolcano , for instance, sits over a hot spot in the middle of the North American plate, with a series of ancient calderas stretching across southern part of the U.S. state of Idaho. The Yellowstone hot spot fuels the geysers , hot springs , and other geologic activity at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, United States.

While some data seem to prove Wilson’s hot spot theory, more recent scientific studies suggest that these hot spots may be found at more shallow depths in the planet's mantle and may migrate slowly over geologic time rather than stay fixed in the same spot.

Principal Types of Volcanoes 

While volcanoes come in a variety of shapes and sizes, they all share a few key characteristics. All volcanoes are connected to a reservoir of molten rock, called a magma chamber , below the surface of Earth. When pressure inside the chamber builds up, the buoyant magma travels out a surface vent or series of vents, through a central interior pipe or series of pipes. These eruptions, which vary in size, material, and explosiveness, create different types of volcanoes.

Stratovolcanoes  

Stratovolcanoes are some of the most easily recognizable and imposing volcanoes, with steep, conic peaks rising up to several thousand meters above the landscape . Also known as composite volcanoes, they are made up of layers of lava, volcanic ash , and fragmented rocks. These layers are built up over time as the volcano erupts through a vent or group of vents at the summit ’s crater .

Mount Rainier is an impressive stratovolcano that rises 4,392 meters (14,410 feet) above sea level just south of the U.S. city of Seattle, Washington. Over the past half million years, Mount Rainier has produced a series of alternating lava eruptions and debris eruptions. These eruptions have given Mount Rainier the classic layered structure and conic shape of a composite volcano. The volcano’s peak has also been carved down by a series of glaciers , giving it a craggy and rugged shape.

Volcan de Fuego and Acatenango are a pair of stratovolcanoes that stand more than 3,700 meters (12,000 feet) above sea level near Antigua, Guatemala. While the volcanoes are considered twins because of their similar shape and size, they are made of different types of lava and have distinct eruption histories. While Acatenango erupts infrequently today, Fuego is considered to be the most active volcano in Central America, erupting more than 60 times since 1524.

Shield Volcanoes  

Shield volcanoes are built almost exclusively of lava, which flows out in all directions during an eruption. These flows, made of highly fluid basalt lava, spread over great distances and cool in thin layers. Over time, the layers build up and create a gently sloping dome that looks like a warrior’s shield. While they are not as eye-catching as their steep stratovolcano cousins, shield volcanoes are often much larger in volume because of their broad, expansive structure.

Shield volcanoes make up the entirety of the Hawaiian Islands. The Kilauea and Mauna Loa shield volcanoes, located on the “Big Island” of Hawai‘i, rise from the ocean floor more than 4,500 meters (15,000 feet) below sea level. The summit of Mauna Loa stands at 4,168 meters (13,677 feet) above sea level and more than 8,500 meters (28,000 feet) above the ocean floor, making it the world’s largest active volcano—and, by some accounts, the world’s tallest mountain. The smaller volcano, Kilauea, has been erupting continuously since 1983, making it one of the world’s most active volcanoes. 

The Galapagos Islands are also made up of a series of shield volcanoes. Isabela and Fernandina islands have flatter tops than other shield volcanoes because lava erupts from fissures around their tops and along ridges at their bases. As a result, the volcanoes rise at the top and grow outward at the bottom—but not in the middle, making them look like an “ inverted soup bowl.”

Pyroclastic Cones

Pyroclastic cones are the most prolific type of volcano on Earth. They can develop as part of stratovolcanoes, shield volcanoes, or independently. Also known as cinder cones , they form after violent eruptions blow lava into the air. In the atmosphere , the lava fragments solidify and fall as “cinders” around a singular vent. Often formed from a single eruption or short series of eruptions, pyroclastic cones only stand at heights of tens of meters to hundreds of meters.

Parícutin, Mexico, is a unique pyroclastic cone. It was the first volcano to be studied for its entire life cycle. Emerging from a cornfield in 1943, Parícutin’s explosive eruptions caused it to reach 80 percent of its height of 424 meters (1,391 feet) during its first year of activity. In that time, lava and ash buried the nearby town of San Juan. Over the next eight years, Parícutin built the remainder of its cone—and then went quiet. Geologists learned a great deal about the evolution of volcanoes in Parícutin’s short, nine-year life.

Lava domes are like shield volcanoes in that they are built entirely of lava. This lava, however, is too thick and sticky to move great distances. It just piles up around the volcano vent. Lava domes are often found on the summit or flanks of a volcano, but they can also develop independently. Like pyroclastic cones, they only reach a few hundred meters, as they are formed during singular eruptions or slow lava releases.

One of the most iconic lava domes developed after the devastating 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique. For almost a year, a lava dome grew out of a summit crater created from the eruption, reaching a height of more than 300 meters (1,000 feet). Known as the Tower of Pelée, the obelisk -shaped structure was twice the height of the Washington Monument. It ultimately collapsed into a pile of rubble after 11 months of growth.

Other Important Volcanic Features 

Some volcanoes experience such large, explosive eruptions that they release most of the material in their magma chamber. This causes the land around the erupting vent or vents to collapse inwardly, creating circular depressions called calderas. Depending on their intensity and duration , volcanic eruptions can create calderas as much as 100 kilometers wide.

Crater Lake, Oregon, United States, is in a caldera about 10 kilometers (six miles) wide. Crater Lake’s caldera resulted from an eruption that occurred more than 7,000 years ago. The volcano's magma chamber collapsed, then filled with water from rain and snow , creating the lake. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States. 

Deception Island, located off the coast of Antarctica, experienced a violent eruption roughly 10,000 years ago. The volcano summit collapsed, forming a caldera seven kilometers (4.4 miles) wide and flooded with seawater. The caldera gives Deception Island its horseshoe shape, which opens to the sea through a narrow channel . Deception Island’s unique geologic structure makes it one of the only places in the world where ocean vessels can sail directly into an active volcano.

Much like calderas, craters are depressions left after a volcano experiences a large eruption. While calderas are formed by the collapse of material inside a volcano, craters are formed as materials explode out from a volcano. Craters are usually much smaller than calderas, only extending to a maximum of about one kilometer (0.62 mile) in diameter .

Many volcanoes have multiple craters caused by different eruptions. The Maly Semiachik volcano, located on the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia, has six craters at its summit. The youngest of these craters, Troitsky, filled in with water and snowmelt, creating a lake 140 meters (459 feet) deep. The lake is highly acidic , as volcanic gases continue to be released into the water from the active volcano below.

Lava lakes are also found in volcanic craters. Erta Ale, a volcano in Ethiopia, has a lava lake in its summit crater. Lava lakes are where magma has bubbled up to the surface and pooled in a crater. Volcanologists can fly over Erta Ale’s summit crater to see how the lava lake is behaving and predict future behavior.

Types of Volcanic Eruptions

Volcanic eruptions are as diverse as volcanoes themselves—which is to say, very diverse! Some of the ways volcanologists have classified these eruptions are based on the heights they reach, the types of materials they eject , and the explosiveness of these ejections.

Hawaiian eruptions are the calmest eruption type. They are characterized by steady lava eruptions known as lava fountains or fire fountains. Lava fountains are able to reach heights of up to two kilometers (1.2 miles). The highly fluid lava associated with Hawaiian eruptions flows easily away from the volcano summit, often creating fiery rivers and lakes of lava within depressions on the surrounding landscape.

These eruptions are named after the Hawaiian Islands, where they most often occur. Kilauea, which has been erupting continuously since 1983, has produced lava flows covering more than 100 square kilometers (37 square miles) on the island of Hawai‘i. These flows continuously destroy houses and communities in their path, while also adding new coastline to the island. 

Strombolian 

Strombolian eruptions are characterized by short-lived outbursts of lava rather than steady fountaining. The lava is thicker and has a higher gas content than that of Hawaiian eruptions. Large gas bubbles rise from the magma chamber, pushing the pasty lava upward until the bubbles explode at the summit vent. These explosions can reach heights up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) although most don’t go higher than a few hundred meters into the air.

Strombolian eruptions are named after the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, Italy. Considered by many to be the most active volcano on Earth, Stromboli has been erupting almost continuously for 2,000 years. The island’s eruptions are almost always Strombolian in nature: Small gas explosions eject blobs of lava into the air a couple of times per hour. 

Vulcanian eruptions are short-lived but much more explosive than Strombolian eruptions. Very thick lava causes gas pressure to build up in the magma chamber. When this pressure is finally released it creates canon-like explosions that can travel faster than 350 meters per second (800 miles per hour). Lava, rock, and ash are propelled up to 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in the air, although most eruption columns are between five and 10 kilometers high. These plumes of material have the ability to drift moderate distances away from the eruption site.

The 2013 vulcanian eruption of Sakurajima, on the island of Kyushu, Japan, covered the nearby city of Kagoshima in a thick coat of ash.

Reaching as high as 50 kilometers (35 miles) in the atmosphere, Plinian eruptions are the largest of all eruption types. Much like vulcanian eruptions, they eject materials at speeds of hundreds of meters per second. Plinian eruptions, however, are more sustained than the coughing fits of vulcanian eruptions. These consistent eruptions result from the volcano’s magma and growing gas bubbles rising at a similar velocity .

Plinian eruptions are the most destructive type of eruption. They release a deadly mixture of lava, ash, and volcanic rocks such as scoria and pumice , which can fall kilometers away from the eruption site. They are also characterized by pyroclastic flow , a fluid mixture of fragmented materials and extremely hot, toxic gases.

In 79 C.E., a series of Plinian eruptions from Mount Vesuvius buried the nearby Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum (in what is today Italy). The cities and their 13,000 inhabitants were buried in volcanic ash and rock. Rainfall mixed with the ash and created a concrete -like substance that preserved the city for thousands of years.

Surtseyan eruptions occur where magma or lava interacts with water, most often when an undersea volcano reaches the ocean surface. Another term for this sort of interaction is a phreatomagmatic eruption . When heated rapidly by lava, water flashes to steam and expands violently, creating the most explosive of all eruption types. This aggressive interaction between water and heat is able to fragment lava into very fine grains of ash that can reach heights of 20 kilometers (12.4 miles).

Tonga’s islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha'apai are actually the tops of a single, large underwater volcano. In 2009, the volcano erupted for several days, causing steam and ash to explode from the water to altitudes of five kilometers (3.1 miles). While the eruptions killed all signs of wildlife on and around the islands, it also added hundreds of square meters of land to Hunga Ha’apai.

Volcanic Hazards

Volcanoes are some of Earth’s most potent natural hazards and agents of change. They release enormous amounts of energy and material, engaging natural processes that can modify landscapes at a local, regional, and even global scale.

Many volcanic materials and processes pose a threat to human, animal, and other ecological communities. 

Volcanic Gas

Volcanoes regularly release volcanic gases that can be dangerous at concentrated levels. Carbon dioxide and fluorine can collect in soil or volcanic ash, causing crop failure, animal death and deformity , and human illness.

Volcanic eruptions can also release massive amounts of sulfur dioxide, which rises into the stratosphere . There, it reflects incoming solar radiation while absorbing outgoing land radiation, leading to a cooling of Earth’s temperature.

In extreme cases, these “ volcanic winters ” can cause crop failures and drastically affect weather . The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, Indonesia, cooled the average global temperature by as much as 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit), causing the “year without a summer.”

Landslides and Lahars

The enormous energy of volcanic eruptions can cause large landslides that move at speeds of more than 100 kilometers per hour (60 miles per hour). Mount St. Helens, Washington, is a stratovolcano that had an explosive Plinian eruption in 1980. The eruption produced the largest landslide in recorded history, covering a 36-kilometer (14-mile) area of land with ash and rocks. Reaching speeds of 50 to 80 meters (165 to 260 feet) per second, the landslide had enough power to surge over a ridge 400 meters (1,312 feet) high.

Landslides can mix with surrounding rivers, ice, snow, or rain to produce watery mixtures called lahars. This mixture of water, rock, and debris creates a sludge that can obliterate almost anything in its path. The 1985 eruption of Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia, caused small lahars of rock, ash, and melted snow to flow down into the surrounding river valleys . The lahars gained momentum and size as they traveled the riverbeds, ultimately destroying more than 5,000 homes and killing more than 23,000 people.

Pyroclastic Flows

Explosive eruptions sometimes produce pyroclastic flows, a mixture of hot rock fragments and toxic gases that move almost like a liquid out and away from the volcano. Reaching speeds greater than 80 kilometers per hour (50 miles per hour) and temperatures between 200-700° Celsius (392-1292° Fahrenheit), pyroclastic flows knock down, shatter, bury, or burn anything in their path.

Pyroclastic flows are responsible for the haunting figures from Pompeii and Herculaneum, Italy. While many scientists thought residents of Pompeii suffocated to death from volcanic gases released during Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 C.E., new studies suggest that they actually died from extreme heat produced by the volcano’s pyroclastic flow. 

Volcanologist Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo and the Italian National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology recently discovered that the pyroclastic flow that reached Pompeii produced temperatures of up to 300° Celsius (570° Fahrenheit). These extreme temperatures are able to kill people in a fraction of a second, causing them to spasm in contorted postures like those found among the plaster casts of Vesuvius’ victims.

Volcanic Ash 

Huge plumes of volcanic ash can spread over large areas of the sky, turning daylight into complete darkness and inhibiting air traffic . (During the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull in 2011, flights to and from Northern Europe were suspended for more than a week.) Volcanic ash conducts electricity when wet and can contain concentrated levels of toxic materials, posing threats to humans that come in close contact with it on land.

The 1994 double eruption of Vulcan and Tavurvur in Papua New Guinea covered the nearby city of Rabaul in a layer of ash up to 75 centimeters (about two feet) deep. Rains turned the ash into a cement-like substance that was heavy enough to collapse 80 percent of the buildings in the city.

Volcanic Monitoring and Research

Volcanic hazards can be incredibly dangerous to human life. In the United States alone, 54 volcanoes are a very high or high threat to public safety. By closely monitoring volcanic activity, volcanologists can warn people of impending eruptions. While these warnings are not exact predictions, they do provide communities with the valuable time they need to protect themselves against volcanic hazards and ensure their safety.

Volcanologists predict volcanic activity by taking real-time measurements and comparing them against what happened in the past. They use a variety of instruments and technologies to monitor temperatures, gas emissions , water levels, ground movements, and changes in the landscape. These measurements paint a clear portrait of a volcano’s current state, which volcanologists then interpret against historical data. Volcanologists issue eruption warnings when these measurements stray far from the norm or mirror those that preceded a historic eruption.

Different countries use different systems to issue eruption warnings to the public. All of these systems categorize their alerts based on the probability and severity of an impending eruption. Typical volcanic behavior is often represented by the number 1 or the color green, while an imminent and potentially destructive eruption is typically represented by the number 4 or the color red.

A number of international organizations lead the way in volcanic monitoring and research, providing invaluable information to scientists, volcanologists, and the public alike. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program documents current activity for all the volcanoes on the planet through publicly available data, reports, and images. The program also keeps the world’s only archive of volcanic activity from the last 10,000 years.

As part of the UN International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior (IAVCEI) created a list of 16 "Decade Volcanoes" to study because of the high risk they pose to public safety. Mount Nyiragongo in Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, is dangerously close to the city of Goma. Its 2002 eruption killed 50 people and forced roughly 450,000 people to evacuate their communities. The Santa María Volcano, which sits right above the city of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, has been continuously erupting since 2003. The Decade Volcanoes program has brought together geologists, volcanologists, and government officials to closely study these volcanoes and create risk- mitigation plans for potential eruptions.

Decade Volcanoes The “Decade Volcanoes” form a list of what could be considered the most hazardous volcanoes on the planet. The 16 decade volcanoes are:

• Avachinsky-Koryaksky, Russia
• Colima, Mexico
• Etna, Italy
• Galeras, Colombia
• Mauna Loa, USA
• Merapi, Indonesia
• Nyiragongo, Dem. Rep. of the Congo
• Rainier, USA
• Sakurajima, Japan
• Santa Maria/ Santiaguito, Guatemala
• Santorini, Greece
• Taal, Philippines
• Teide, Spain (Canary Islands)
• Ulawun, Papau New Guinea
• Unzen, Japan
• Vesuvius, Italy

Subglacial Eruptions One of the most mysterious types of volcanic eruptions is a subglacial eruption, which takes place on ice-covered volcanoes. Subglacial eruptions often result in flooding, as glaciers are heated by hot magma and volcanic gas. This sudden, violent flooding of glacial meltwater is called a jökulhlaup .

Volcanic Deities Volcanoes are such powerful forces of nature that many cultures in volcanically active regions have sophisticated mythologies supporting gods and goddesses of volcanoes.

• Vulcan (for whom volcanoes are named) is a Roman god.
• Hephaestus is a Greek god from whom Vulcan developed.
• Pele is a Hawaiian goddess.
• Ruaumoko is a Maori god.
• Xiahtecuhtli is an Aztec god.
• Ayanju is a Yoruba orisha, or deity.
• Kagu-Tsuchi is a Japanese kami, or spirit.

Volcanoes ... IN SPACE! The largest volcano known to humanity is not actually on Earth! Olympus Mons is a dormant shield volcano on Mars that is taller than three Mount Everests and is about as wide as the entire Hawaiian Islands chain. The most volcanically active body in our solar system is not Earth at all. It’s Jupiter’s moon Io. At any one time, Io has 400 active volcanoes, which can shoot plumes up to 500 kilometers (300 miles) into outer space! In 2001, a volcano in Io’s Surt region produced the largest eruption ever recorded, covering 1,900 square kilometers (1,180 square miles), an area larger than the U.S. city of Los Angeles, California.

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December 4, 1852

Volcanoes, their Causes—Igneous Theory

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With our ideas of volcanoes we always associate the grand and the terrible ; and a volcanic eruption—a huge piece of artillery, with a mouth perhaps miles in circumference, shooting up rocks and burning lava—is truly a terrific sight. Volcanoes are exceedingly plentiful on our planet, there being no less than sixty-three principal ones; still, they are confined to certain localities, which occupy but limited portions of our globe. The question has often been asked, “ what is the cause of volcanoes 1” And truly, when we consider how disastrous some of these eruptions have been, no wonder the question of their cause has been forced upon the attention of almost ev61:y reflecting mind. It is one well worthy of some speculation, and requires a considerable amount of scientific knowledge to investigate. and this may be usefully employed either in pointing out errors or presenting new facts. Various opinions have been expressed respecting their origin and activity. One thing is certain, they are in no way connected with solar influence, for they exist under the tropics of South America, and are found in the frosty regions of Iceland. It was the opinion of Darwin, that the volcanic districts of the world had earthy crusts resting on lakes of igneous melted matter. Humboldt believes that the volcanic region of Quito, in South America— the whole of that vast Plateau—is a single volcanic surface, composed of a solid crust covering a lake of molten matter. Such opinions, however, have nothing to do with a general theory, of which there are two—one is astronomical, and asserts that this earth was originally a fiery molten mass, and that we live on its crust, beneath which all is molten fiery matter; the other theory is chemical, and asserts that they are caused by explosive materials deposited in huge quantities in the volcanic localities, and which, when saturated by some means with oxygen, and ignited, act exactly like any explosion of artillery. Leibnitz first suggested that this earth was originally in a fiery fluid state ; Sir Wm. Herschell afterwards suggested the hypothesis of matter being originally in a nebulous state, which, by condensation, developed great heat, and our earth became a fiery ball, the surface of which we now live upon being a mere crust, the rest not being cooled yet which, when reached by water, causes an explosion like a steam boiler. This is the nebular igneous theory. The author of “ The World Without” states how easy it is to account for volcanoes by this theory, by spying—” according to the fiery nebulous theory, the earth, at a depth of sixty- five miles, is 7000 degrees temperature, and if water percolates through fissures of the earth, we have a sufficient explanation of earthquakes and volcanoes." This theory is unsound, and will not stand the test of scrutiny. The arguments adduced to prove that the interior of the earth is a fiery molten mass, is, the increase of temperature found to exist as we descend in some mines, which is about 1 degree for every 45 feet. According to this rate, at 25 miles depth, the melting point of iron would be obtained ; but we have no facts to prove that the heat of the earth increases regularly to the centre; after a certain depth, it is perhaps uniform. What signify the experiments made in a few mines not over 2,000 feet, deep. From observations made by Kotzebue, Beechy, and Sir James Ross, the fact seems to be established that the waters of the ocean (it is also matter) are uniform in heat, at the depth of 7,200 feet. At the depth of 100 fathoms, as stated in Maury's Wind and Current Charts, the temperature of the water in “ the cruise of the Taney,” was 64°, while at 50 fathoms, one half, it was 70°. In the soundings by the sloop-of-war Albany, at 680 fathams, the temperature was 81°, while that of the air was 83°, and at 995 (5970 feet) fathoms it was only 80°, while the temperature of the air was 79°. Now if it were true that the heat increased downwards, at the rate of one degree for every 45 feet, as asserted by some, then with a temperature of air at 79°, the water of the sea at 5985 feet of depth, should be at the boiling point—212°. Instead of this it was only 80° at 5970 feet, only 15 feet less. How does this accord with a uniform increase of heat as one descends into the matter composing the earth ? Dr. Daubeny, and Sir Charles I.yell are ad vocates of the chemical theory, and the latter is a decided opponent of the central theory of heat. It is well known that when potassium is dropped upon water, it causes an explosion; if, in certain places of the earth, there were large deposits of this metal, and water percolate to or come in contact with it, a terrific explosion would ensue. It appears to us that volcanoes are local, and generally preceded by earthquakes. If the centre of the earth were fluid, according to the well-known laws of fluids those earthquakes, caused by volcanoes would affect equally every part of the earth's surface, a thing which we know they do not. Our attention was directed to this subject by reading some accounts of the recent eruption of Mount Etna. There is no positive certainty respecting the real cause of volcanoes ; but the general, yea, almost universal opinion expressed by writers on the subject, is that water in some way is an active agent in all eruptions. Water, however, in all likelihood, exerts no agency whatever; and a strong argument in proof of this, is, that in the moon there is neither atmosphere nor water, and yet the volcanoes of the earth are mere dwarfs compared with those on our satellite. Our views, then, are distinctly opposed to the prevailing igneous theory, and we choose, rather, to plead ignorance of the causes of volcanoes than adopt any theory which cannot stand the test of scientific analysis.

Big volcano science: needs and perspectives

• Perspectives
• Open access
• Published: 12 February 2022
• Volume 84 , article number  20 , ( 2022 )

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• Paolo Papale   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5207-2124 1 &
• Deepak Garg 1  

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Volcano science has been deeply developing during last decades, from a branch of descriptive natural sciences to a highly multi-disciplinary, technologically advanced, quantitative sector of the geosciences. While the progress has been continuous and substantial, the volcanological community still lacks big scientific endeavors comparable in size and objectives to many that characterize other scientific fields. Examples include large infrastructures such as the LHC in Geneva for sub-atomic particle physics or the Hubble telescope for astrophysics, as well as deeply coordinated, highly funded, decadal projects such as the Human Genome Project for life sciences. Here we argue that a similar big science approach will increasingly concern volcano science, and briefly describe three examples of developments in volcanology requiring such an approach, and that we believe will characterize the current decade (2020–2030): the Krafla Magma Testbed initiative; the development of a Global Volcano Simulator; and the emerging relevance of big data in volcano science.

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Introduction

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Volcano science has deeply evolved during last decades. One of us (PP) presented perspectives for next decade developments at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meetings 2010 and 2020, which are summarized in Table 1 . As from that easy forecast, approaches based on statistics and probabilities have become progressively more widespread in volcanology: a search in the Web of Science shows that the number of entries responding to “volcano” and “probability” more than doubles from the first to the second decade of this century. Similarly, sharing resources, as well as sharing experience, is continuing to increase in relevance. Examples include the large investments from the European Commission in infrastructural developments such as EPOS, the European Plate Observing System ( www.epos-eu.org ), representing the platform for EU-level data accessibility and sharing in solid Earth, and the frame within which European geoscientists discuss and implement common development strategies; and other EU-level investments, facilitated through EPOS, aimed at transverse, transnational access to resources such as advanced laboratories, observatories, data collections, and computational centers, and of which Eurovolc ( www.eurovolc.eu ) represents a valuable example. Other successful sharing initiatives include the VOBP (Volcano Observatory Best Practices) workshop series aimed at sharing best practices for volcano observatories, and including sharing of resources to sustain the inclusion of observatories from developing countries (Pallister et al. 2019 ).

The talk at AGU 2020 focused on the expected major developments in the current decade 2020–2030. Identifying the many sectors of volcanology that may benefit from significant advance is beyond the scope. The aim there, and here with this short paper, was that of identifying some major elements that may contribute significantly to shape volcanology in the next years. Together with the contributions from many other colleagues in this volume, the objective is to present a picture of what volcano science may look like in 10 years from now. The perspective that we present here largely (but not exclusively) refers to examples from Europe, that we believe can be representative of developments at international scale.

Big science and volcano science

The key word describing major upcoming developments in volcanology is big science. Big science usually refers to large scientific endeavors involving big budgets, big staff, big machines, and big laboratories. Other communities have engaged in big science since long, with enormous impacts such as those brought by the Large Hadron Collider in particle physics, the Hubble telescope in astronomy and astrophysics, or the large-scale initiative represented by the Human Genome Project ( https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project ) in life sciences. ODP (Oceanic Drilling Program) activities carrying out exploration of the ocean floor are an example of large-scale projects in the Earth sciences, which have also largely benefited volcanology especially when the research involved volcanic ridges and arcs. One may wonder whether volcano science needs similar large-scale, international cooperative efforts. As a matter of fact, we are deeply convinced of the unique importance of science developed by individual or small groups of researchers. Examples of deep scientific innovation following from modest funding are countless, and, fortunately, science still flourishes on great ideas. It is a fact, however, that some extraordinary achievements strictly require similar extraordinary investments. The standard model of quantum mechanics constituting our current vision of the world would not be the same, without extreme technological implementations at a few large particle accelerators. Similarly, we would not have machines on Mars sending back pictures and data and possibly preparing a next human mission, without the huge investments that such an endeavor requires.

What about volcanoes? Of all the extremes that we have reached so far, none is as close to us yet as hidden and mysterious as real magma below volcanoes. We send probes to directly observe, sample, and analyze the surface of Mars at a distance of order 10 8  km, but have never done the same for magma at just 10 0  km below our feet. If curiosity and pure scientific interest are not enough, then it can be noticed that at least 800,000 people in the world live close enough to active volcanoes to directly suffer from a volcanic eruption (UNISDR 2015 ), and anticipating the occurrence of an eruption strictly requires understanding the nature of magma and its underground dynamics. If one would rank relevance on economic value, then it is useful to recall the immense heat associated with volcanic intrusions, of which the proportion converted into energy at geothermal power plants is nothing but a vanishing fraction (e.g., Friðleifsson and Elders 2005 ; Tester et al. 2006 ; Reinsch et al. 2017 ), as well as the potential of underground brines related to magmatic intrusions to be sources of strategic metals (Blundy et al. 2021 ). Summed up with renewable and clean characteristics of geothermal energy may make the search for real magma a highly remunerative effort in the near future.

In the talk at AGU 2020, the focus was on three themes that we expect are going to represent big developments in volcanology: directly reaching underground magma; collecting and processing volcanic data at unprecedented level; and developing a global volcano model. Ultimately, those themes can be reduced to measuring, analyzing, and modeling, making up the fundamental components of scientific investigation. Current and foreseen developments are described mostly with reference to ongoing or next initiatives in the European research landscape, of size and breath such as to likely represent big directions for developments also at the global scale.

Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT)

If one had to fix a date for the initiation of KMT, that would almost certainly be September 2014, when the first dedicated workshop took place within the Krafla caldera. That resulted from John Eichelberger’s vision and determination, as well as from the openness of Landsvirkjun, the Icelandic energy company owning the Krafla geothermal power plant and hosting the workshop. The story began, however, 5 years earlier, when the drill rig at the IDDP-1 well, aiming at supercritical fluids at 4-km depth, got stuck for days at only 2.1 km before it was realized that rhyolitic melt had been unexpectedly hit (Elders et al. 2014 ; Rooyakkers et al. 2021 ). Retrospectively, it was then realized that buried magma had been encountered a few other times at the same depth while drilling at various locations inside the caldera (Eichelberger 2019 ). Seismic imaging (Schuler et al. 2015 ) suggests that the rhyolitic melt may have a minimum volume around 0.5 km 3 . Flow testing at IDDP-1, before the well casing collapsed, produced an amazing 15–40 MW e (Axelsson et al. 2013 ), suggesting that two such wells would be enough to replace the entire Krafla power plant including a few tens conventional geothermal wells.

The serendipitous encounter with magma at Krafla demonstrates that (i) shallow magma bodies can escape even the most sophisticated geophysical prospections, a fact that is alarming for many high risk volcanoes; and (ii) drilling to magma can be safe, as any known accidental case, including those at Puna, Hawaii, and Menengai caldera, Kenya, did not lead to uncontrolled events (Eichelberger 2020 ; Rooyakkers et al. 2021 ).

Today, a large scientific consortium is engaging with country governments and industrial partners to define a long-term program named Krafla Magma Testbed, or KMT ( www.kmt.is ). KMT is foreseen to be the first underground magma observatory in the world, in the form of a series of long-standing wells for scientific and industrial exploration, directly opening inside and around the shallow magmatic body and equipped with advanced monitoring instrumentation (Fig.  1 ). Scientific fields opening to next level investigation include the origin of rhyolitic magmas in basaltic environments (and ultimately, the origin of continents), the thermo-fluid dynamics and petro-chemical evolution of magmas, the heat and mass exchange with the plumbing system, surrounding rocks and geothermal system, the rheology and thermo-mechanical properties from deep volcanic rock layers to magma and across the melt-rock interface, the relationships between surface records and deep magma dynamics and interpretation of volcanic unrests, and many others. Decades of speculation that still dominates the scientific debate would be overcome by direct evidence and measurements, and by real-scale experiments on the natural system. Similarly, innovative experimentation and measurements could lead to next-generation geothermal energy production systems exploiting extremely efficient, very high enthalpy near-magma fluids and heat directly released from the cooling margins of the magma body.

The KMT concept. A series of wells are kept open inside and around the shallow magma intrusion at Krafla (2.1 km depth). Temperature- and corrosion-resistant instrumentation is placed inside the wells down to magma. The surface is heavily instrumented with an advanced multi-parametric monitoring network. Dedicated laboratories, offices, and a visitor center complement the infrastructure. Background picture: courtesy of GEORG (Geothermal Research Cluster of Iceland)

KMT is, obviously, an endeavor that cannot be faced by a restricted group or a single country. It requires instead a large, coordinated effort involving many diverse expertise and capacities from scientific to industrial, and disciplines embracing from thermo-fluid dynamics and material science to geology, geochemistry, and geophysics. The challenges are such as to require coordinated investments of order 10 8 dollars (see www.kmt.is ), not little money but still much less than the costs of other large infrastructures mentioned above. Currently (October 2021), the Icelandic government is welcoming partners and dedicating resources; a KMT/ICDP project has been recently approved; national and international projects raised in support of KMT are saturating the costs for the KMT preparatory phase 0, and phase 1 involving the first scientific well reaching to magma is getting closer.

Global Volcano Simulator (GVS)

The atmospheric scientists have been developing for decades general circulation models and a global simulation approach to atmospheric dynamics that they employ daily to produce weather forecasts. While the physics governing volcanic processes is of comparable complexity (e.g., Sparks 2003 ; Segall 2019 ; Papale 2021 ), a large part of the volcanic system is not directly observed (see the KMT description above). That makes a huge difference in terms of quality and accuracy, as atmospheric model predictions can be updated in real time with data coming from below (ground-based), from inside (weather balloons and rockets, radars) and from above (satellites). Similar capacities in volcano science exist for the atmospheric dispersion of volcanic ashes (e.g., Stohl et al. 2011 ; Tanaka and Iguchi 2019 ; Pardini et al. 2020 ), and for other sufficiently slow surface phenomena, such as lava flows (e.g., Wright et al. 2008 ; Vicari et al. 2011 ; Bonny and Wright 2017 ). For the complex dynamics of volcanic unrest and escalation to eruption or return to quiet conditions, which are of utmost relevance for volcano early warning systems and implementation of emergency plans, we are limited to indirect observations through multi-parametric monitoring networks. Those networks provide a rich basis over which the deep volcano dynamics are inferred and the short-term evolutions are forecasted. Still, such forecasts suffer from the lack of a global reference model for their interpretation, often resulting in discordant inferences and projections by different groups of experts.

A reference Global Volcano Simulator would allow many different observations to be placed within a unique, consistent physical framework and integrated holistic dynamic modeling approach. Such a framework should allow a physical representation of the coupled processes and dynamics in multiple domains from the volcanic plumbing system to the surface, including the surrounding rocks and geothermal circulation systems through which signals of deep dynamics are transported to our monitoring networks. Together with the KMT initiative described above and providing ground-truth constraints as well as a unique chance for validation tests, such a global approach to the underground (and surface) volcano dynamics would project volcanology fully into the third millennium, bringing it closer to other scientific fields for which the quantitative revolution started much in advance. The large destination Earth initiative by the European Commission ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/destination-earth ) aims at developing a high precision digital model of the Earth to monitor and simulate both natural and man-made phenomena and processes. The initiative provides a long-term perspective which develops largely through the construction of digital twins (Fig.  2 ), that is, digital replicas of natural (physical, biological) or man-made systems. Among the high priority digital twins that are foreseen by the Commission, the one on weather-induced and geophysical extremes ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/workshops-reports-elements-digital-twins-weather-induced-and-geophysical-extremes-and-climate ) is expected to provide the conditions for bringing to a next level some of the recent developments in modeling the complex dynamics of volcanic systems and improving the performance of parallel computing in solid Earth (see also the European Centre of Excellence ChEESE: https://cheese-coe.eu ). As a matter of fact, the digital twin concept applied to volcanoes coincides largely with the GVS described here, showing that the times can be mature for such an ambitious undertaking.

Possible scheme for a digital twin of a volcanic system. Models and data concur to scenarios and forecasts. Models are continuously tested and refined, e.g., by adding more or better microphysics. Both data and models are accompanied by quality assessments and certification. Third parties access data and models, as well as visualization tools. While the scheme is general, the cited resources refer to the European landscape

• Big volcano data

Direct observations and global modeling described above are expected to impact deeply volcano science. The fundamental source of information on volcanic processes and dynamics from most volcanoes worldwide will continue to be the multi-parametric remote and on-site instrumental networks collecting data before, during, and after volcanic eruptions. With the development of the digital age, big data and related technologies such as Machine Learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have exploded in virtually any aspect of science (e.g., Chen et al. 2012 ; Wamba et al. 2015 ; Gorelick et al. 2017 ). AI algorithms can be trained to reproduce some of our capabilities, such as driving a car or writing a meaningful text. What looks more relevant in volcano science, however, is that ML and AI algorithms can be employed to find, hidden within huge sequences of data, meaningful patterns that trained teams of humans may miss in months or years of work. ML is employed already in a variety of research applications related to volcanoes, including automatic classification of seismicity (Masotti et al. 2006 ; Malfante et al. 2018 ; Bueno et al. 2020 ), analysis of infrasound signals (Witsil and Johnson 2020 ), detection from satellite images of eruptions (Corradino et al. 2020 ) or anomalous deformation areas (Anantrasirichai et al. 2018 , 2019 ), establishment of source regions from tephra analysis (Bolton et al. 2020 ; Pignatelli and Piochi 2021 ), identification of changes in eruption behavior (Hajian et al. 2019 ; Watson 2020 ), and volcano early warning analysis (Parra et al. 2017 ).

The fundamental element of ML and AI is algorithm training, which requires huge amounts of data before the trained algorithms can be used to mine other datasets. Modern multi-parametric networks at highly monitored volcanoes, constellations of satellites, etc. produce continuous streams of space–time data daily. Satellite data are organized and accessible through space agencies, with increasing levels of accessibility being provided through large-scale initiatives, such as GEO’s Geohazard Supersites and Natural Laboratories ( https://geo-gsnl.org/ ). However, a similar level of organization is still missing for ground-based data collected at volcanoes worldwide. Relevant attempts to provide free, organized access to ground-based volcano data are ongoing (e.g., Newhall et al. 2017 ; Costa et al. 2019 ; in Japan: Ueda et al. 2019 ; in Europe: Bailo and Sbarra 2017 ; etc.), while large funding agencies such as the European Union ( https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/open-science_en ; https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/turning_fair_into_reality_0.pdf ) increasingly require strict adherence to the principles of open science and FAIR data. Definitely, of all the projections one may make for volcano science in the next decade, the one with the highest likelihood of revealing correct is the burst of big volcano data, or otherwise, volcano science would find itself lagging behind other communities who fully profit of big developments that will largely shape research and support scientific advance in the coming years and decades.

Concluding remarks

The volcanological community has been capable of benefiting from substantial infrastructural developments, for example in relation to satellite missions. Even in such cases, however, volcanologists have taken advantage from missions dedicated to other objectives, such as those related to weather forecasts, climate change, or land evolution. Still, the benefits from a “big science” approach in volcanology appear substantial in terms of mitigated risks and increased security on one side, and potential for efficient, clean, and renewable energy on the other side. In comparison, order of magnitude larger funds dedicated to space exploration, while expanding greatly our fundamental understanding of the Universe, does not seem to bring comparable practical benefits, at least over the short-medium time scale.

Decades of volcano science clearly show that major volcanic eruptions in terms of their size or impacts not only have been big drivers for scientific advance, they also have focused substantial attention by the governments, the media, and the public. However, the momentum gets easily lost, and after an initial promising phase of increased funding opportunities, often volcanoes quickly slip backwards in the priority list. As a volcanological community, we may need to improve our capability to stay on the scene, e.g., by transposing our scientific endeavors into effective narratives which tell of the exciting travel towards unexplored frontiers of our planet Earth, at the same time increasing security and contributing to sustainability and preservation of the delicate equilibria of the planet.

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Acknowledgements

A perspective paper is obviously the result of many years of interactions with colleagues having similar or different, sometimes even diverging, views on what our science misses mostly or mostly benefits from. To all of these colleagues, we are grateful, as literally each of them had much to teach us. We are also grateful to Mike Poland and Steve Sparks who reviewed the manuscript and improved it through many insightful comments and suggestions. One of us (DG) benefited from a grant by EPOS-IT.

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The new science of volcanoes harnesses AI, satellites and gas sensors to forecast eruptions

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When Anak Krakatau in Indonesia erupted on 22 December 2018, part of the island collapsed into the ocean, causing a deadly tsunami. Credit: Nurul Hidayat/Antara Foto/Bisnis Indonesia via Reuters

Early in 2018, the volcano Anak Krakatau in Indonesia started falling apart. It was a subtle transformation — one that nobody noticed at the time. The southern and southwestern flanks of the volcano were slipping towards the ocean at a rate of about 4 millimetres per month, a shift so small that researchers only saw it after the fact as they combed through satellite radar data . By June, though, the mountain began showing obvious signs of unrest. It spewed fiery ash and rocks into the sky in a series of small eruptions. And it was heating up. Another satellite instrument recorded thermal emissions from Anak Krakatau that reached 146 megawatts — more than 100 times the normal value. With the increased activity, the slippage jumped to 10 millimetres per month.

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Scientists aim to broaden knowledge of volcanoes

By erin philipson.

Every year at least 50 volcanic eruptions affect more than 10% of the world’s population. Some eruptions, like Mount Pinatubo in 1991 and Laki in 1783, were so powerful that they impacted the climate of the entire planet.

Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica.

A research team from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has received a $1.4 million grant from NASA to lead a study of how volcanic ash from past eruptions affected the Earth, and the potential impact of future eruptions. The project involves collaborators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, among other institutions.

Volcanoes are the main locations for energy and mass exchange between the interior of the Earth and the atmosphere, and thus play a critical role in the climate and habitability of the planet. Volcanic ash can impact air quality, disrupt aviation and change ocean biogeochemistry, among other effects. The research team will study these impacts by integrating volcanology, remote sensing and atmospheric sciences to understand the relationship between volcano pre-eruptive behavior, geochemical signatures, and ash composition.

“The study will focus on micro- and nano-fraction volcanic ash components that are generally not considered traditional volcanology studies,” said Esteban Gazel , associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. “This is critical as these materials can travel miles away from the primary volcanic hazard source and trigger the most substantial global impact.”

Over the past decade, volcanic ash emissions have not been well characterized and have not been included in Earth system models. The research team is combining remote sensing with volcanic eruption measurements to address an important and under-studied question: What is the role of volcanic ash in current and future climate and biogeochemistry?

“For the first time, we will create a database of satellite observations of volcanic ash from the 250 largest volcanic eruptions between the years 1978 and the present,” said Matthew Pritchard , professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. “We will then use the database, along with in-situ chemistry observations, as input to Earth system models to understand the impact of the ash on temperature, precipitation and feedbacks with life in the ocean and on land.”

Not only will the team characterize past emissions, but they will look for predictive capabilities – first by identifying relationships between pre-eruptive gas, thermal emissions, ground displacement, and the composition of eruptive material. Then they will use past records of emissions from volcanic eruptions to assess the importance of future eruption scenarios that can impact the Earth.

The findings of this project aim to improve the understanding of volcanic aerosols and to what extent background eruptions are modifying aerosol distributions, weather, climate and biogeochemistry. The study also aims to test whether the characteristics of pre-eruptive unrest are related to eventual erupted material and evaluate the potential impacts of large eruptions in the future. 

“Volcanoes are one of the most powerful forces of nature and have long lived in human psychology as an incredible force – think of Atlantis or the goddess Pele,” said Natalie Mahowald , the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering. “With this project we will link volcanology, remote sensing and climate science to bring our understanding of volcanoes into the 21st century to see how volcanoes can change climate.”

Erin Philipson is a communications specialist for the College of Engineering.

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Study acid-base chemistry with at-home volcanoes.

Baking soda volcanoes are a fun demonstration, and with a few tweaks they can be an experiment, too

A few kitchen chemicals can give you an at home volcano. But you’re going to need more than one volcano for an experiment.

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October 7, 2020 at 6:30 am

This article is one of a series of  Experiments  meant to teach students about how science is done, from generating a hypothesis and designing an experiment to analyzing the results with statistics. You can repeat the steps here and compare your results — or use this as inspiration to design your own experiment.

It’s a science fair staple: the baking soda volcano. This simple demonstration is easy to do. That clay mountain “smoking” in front of a poster board can be kind of sad, though. The whole thing looks like it was put together the morning of the fair.

But it’s not too difficult to turn this easy science demo into a science experiment. All that’s needed is a hypothesis to test — and more than one volcano.

A baking soda volcano’s foamy rush is the result of a chemical reaction between two solutions. One solution contains vinegar, dish soap, water and a little food coloring. The other is a mix of baking soda and water. Add the second solution to the first, stand back and watch what happens.

The reaction that occurs is an example of acid-base chemistry. Vinegar contains acetic acid . It has the chemical formula CH 3 COOH (or HC 3 H 2 O 2 ). When mixed with water, acetic acid loses a positively charged ion (H+). The positively charged protons in the water make the solution acidic. White vinegar has a pH of about 2.5.

Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate. It has the chemical formula NaHCO 3.  It is a base , which means that when mixed with water, it loses a negatively charged hydroxide ion (OH-). It has a pH of about 8.

Acids and bases react together. The H+ from the acid and the OH- from the base come together to form water (H 2 O). In the case of vinegar and baking soda, this takes two steps. First the two molecules react together to form two other chemicals — sodium acetate and carbonic acid. The reaction looks like this:

NaHCO 3  + HC 2 H 3 O 2  → NaC 2 H 3 O 2  + H 2 CO 3

Carbonic acid is very unstable. It then breaks apart quickly into carbon dioxide and water.

H 2 CO 3  → H 2 O + CO 2

Carbon dioxide is a gas, which makes the water fizz like soda pop. If you add a little dish soap to your acid solution, the bubbles will catch in the soap. The reaction produces a big fwoosh of foam.

Acids and bases will react together until there are no excess H+ or OH- ions present. When all the ions of one type are all used up, the reaction is neutralized. This means that if you have a lot of vinegar, but very little baking soda (or vice versa), you’ll get a small volcano. Varying the ratio of ingredients can change the size of that reaction.  

This leads to my hypothesis — a statement I can test. In this case, my hypothesis is that more baking soda will produce a larger explosion .

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Blowing it up

To test this, I need to make volcanoes with different amounts of baking soda while the rest of the chemical reaction remains the same. The baking soda is my variable — the factor in the experiment that I am changing.

Here’s the recipe for a basic baking soda volcano:

• In a clean, empty 2-liter soda bottle, mix 100 milliliters (mL) of water, 400mL of white vinegar and 10mL of dish soap. Add a few drops of food coloring if you want to make your explosion a fun color.
• Place the bottle outside, on a sidewalk, driveway or porch. (Do not put it on grass. This reaction is safe, but it will kill the grass. I learned this the hard way.)
• Mix together half a cup of baking soda and half a cup of water. Pour the mix into the 2-liter bottle as quickly as you can and stand back!

(Safety note: It’s a good idea to wear gloves, sneakers and eye protection such as glasses or safety goggles for this experiment. Some of these ingredients can be uncomfortable on your skin, and you don’t want to get them in your eyes.)

To turn this demonstration into an experiment, I’ll need to try this again, with three different amounts of baking soda. I started small — with just 10 mL, mixed with 40 mL of water. My middle dose was 50 mL of baking soda mixed with 50 mL of water. For my last amount, I used 100 mL of baking soda, mixed with about 50 mL of water. (Baking soda has a similar volume and mass, in that 10mL of baking soda weighs about 10 grams, and so on. This meant I could weigh the baking soda on a scale rather than have to measure it by volume.) I then made five volcanoes with each amount of baking soda, for a total of 15 volcanoes.

The explosion happens very quickly — too fast to mark its height accurately on a wall or yardstick. But once the eruption happens, the foam and water fall outside the bottle. By weighing the bottles before and after the reaction, and adding in the mass of the baking soda and water solution, I can calculate how much mass got ejected from each eruption. I could then compare the mass lost to show if more baking soda produced a larger explosion.

When I used only 10 grams of baking soda, the bottles lost 17 grams of mass on average. The eruptions were so small that most never made it out of the bottle. When I used 50 grams of baking soda, the bottles lost 160 grams of mass on average. And when I used 100 grams of baking soda, the bottles lost almost 350 grams of mass.

But that’s not quite the whole story. Because I added different amounts of baking soda and water to the bottles, there might not be as big of a difference here as I think. The extra mass from the 100-gram bottles, for instance, could just be because the reaction started out heavier.

To rule that out, I converted my numbers to the percent of mass lost. The 10-gram bottles lost only about three percent of their mass. The 50-gram bottles lost 25 percent of their mass, and the 100-gram bottles lost more than half of their mass.

To confirm that these results are different, I need to run statistics. These are tests that will help me interpret my results. For this, I have three different amounts of baking soda that I need to compare to each other. With a test called a one-way analysis of variance (or ANOVA), I can compare the means (in this case, the average) of three or more groups. There are calculators on the internet where you can plug in your data to do this. I used this one . 

The test will give me a p value. This is a probability measure of how likely I would be to get a difference between these three groups as large as the one I have by chance alone. In general, scientists think of a p value of less than 0.05 (five percent probability) as statistically significant . When I compared my three baking soda amounts, my p value was less than 0.00001, or 0.001 percent. That’s a statistically significant difference that shows the amount of baking soda matters.

I also get an F ratio from this test. If this number is around one, it usually means that the variation between the groups is about what you would get by chance. An F ratio bigger than one, though, means the variation is more than you’d expect to see. My F ratio was 53, which is pretty good.

My hypothesis was that more baking soda will produce a larger explosion . The results here seem to agree with that.

Of course there are things that I could do differently next time. I could make sure that my bottle weights were all the same. I could use a high-speed camera to measure explosion height. Or I could try changing the vinegar instead of the baking soda.

I guess I’m just going to need to make more explosions.

• White vinegar (2 gallons) ($1.92)
• Food coloring: ($3.66)
• Nitrile or latex gloves ($4.24)
• Small digital scale ($11.85)
• Roll of paper towels ($0.98)
• Dish soap ($1.73)
• Glass beakers ($16.99)
• Baking soda (three boxes) ($0.46)
• Two-liter soda bottles (4) ($0.62)

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5.16: Hot Spots

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In geology, the places known as hotspots or hot spots are volcanic regions thought to be fed by underlying mantle that is anomalously hot compared with the surrounding mantle. They may be on, near to, or far from tectonic plate boundaries. Currently, there are two hypotheses that attempt to explain their origins. One suggests that they are due to hot mantle plumes that rise as thermal diapirs from the core-mantle boundary. An alternative hypothesis postulates that it is not high temperature that causes the volcanism, but lithospheric extension that permits the passive rising of melt from shallow depths. This hypothesis considers the term “hotspot” to be a misnomer, asserting that the mantle source beneath them is, in fact, not anomalously hot at all. Well known examples include Hawaii and Yellowstone.

The origins of the concept of hotspots lie in the work of J. Tuzo Wilson, who postulated in 1963 that the Hawaiian Islands result from the slow movement of a tectonic plate across a hot region beneath the surface. It was later postulated that hotspots are fed by narrow streams of hot mantle rising from the Earth’score-mantle boundary in a structure called amantle plume. Whether or not such mantle plumes exist is currently the subject of a major controversy in Earth science. Estimates for the number of hotspots postulated to be fed by mantle plumes has ranged from about 20 to several thousands, over the years, with most geologists considering a few tens to exist. Hawaii, Réunion, Yellowstone, Galápagos, and Iceland are some of the currently most active volcanic regions to which the hypothesis is applied.

Most hotspot volcanoes are basaltic (e.g., Hawaii, Tahiti). As a result, they are less explosive than subduction zone volcanoes, in which water is trapped under the overriding plate. Where hotspots occur in continental regions, basaltic magma rises through the continental crust, which melts to form rhyolites. These rhyolites can form violent eruptions. For example, the Yellowstone Caldera was formed by some of the most powerful volcanic explosions in geologic history. However, when the rhyolite is completely erupted, it may be followed by eruptions of basaltic magma rising through the same lithospheric fissures (cracks in the lithosphere). An example of this activity is the Ilgachuz Range in British Columbia, which was created by an early complex series of trachyte and rhyolite eruptions, and late extrusion of a sequence of basaltic lava flows.

The hotspot hypothesis is now closely linked to the mantle plume hypothesis.

Comparison with Island Arc Volcanoes

Hotspot volcanoes are considered to have a fundamentally different origin from island arc volcanoes. The latter form over subduction zones, at converging plate boundaries. When one oceanic plate meets another, the denser plate is forced downward into a deep ocean trench. This plate, as it is subducted, releases water into the base of the over-riding plate, and this water mixes with the rock, thus changing its composition causing some rock to melt and rise. It is this that fuels a chain of volcanoes, such as the Aleutian Islands, near Alaska.

HOTSPOT VOLCANIC CHAINS

The joint mantle plume/hotspot hypothesis envisages the feeder structures to be fixed relative to one another, with the continents and seafloor drifting overhead. The hypothesis thus predicts that time-progressive chains of volcanoes are developed on the surface. Examples are Yellowstone, which lies at the end of a chain of extinct calderas, which become progressively older to the west. Another example is the Hawaiian archipelago, where islands become progressively older and more deeply eroded to the northwest.

Geologists have tried to use hotspot volcanic chains to track the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates. This effort has been vexed by the lack of very long chains, by the fact that many are not time-progressive (e.g. the Galápagos) and by the fact that hotspots do not appear to be fixed relative to one another (e.g., Hawaii and Iceland.)

Postulated Hotspot Volcano Chains

• Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain (Hawaii hotspot)
• Louisville seamount chain (Louisville hotspot)
• Walvis Ridge (Gough and Tristan hotspot)
• Kodiak–Bowie Seamount chain (Bowie hotspot)
• Cobb-Eickelberg Seamount chain (Cobb hotspot)
• New England Seamount chain (New England hotspot)
• Anahim Volcanic Belt (Anahim hotspot)
• Mackenzie dike swarm (Mackenzie hotspot)
• Great Meteor hotspot track (New England hotspot)
• St. Helena Seamount Chain – Cameroon Volcanic Line (Saint Helena hotspot)
• Southern Mascarene Plateau–Chagos-Maldives-Laccadive Ridge (Réunion hotspot)
• Ninety East Ridge (Kerguelen hotspot)
• Tuamotu–Line Island chain (Easter hotspot)
• Austral–Gilbert–Marshall chain (Macdonald hotspot)
• Juan Fernández Ridge (Juan Fernández hotspot)

List of Volcanic Regions Postulated to be Hotspots

Eurasian plate.

• Eifel hotspot
• Iceland hotspot
• Azores hotspot
• Jan Mayen hotspot
• Hainan hotspot

African Plate

• Hoggar hotspot
• Tibesti hotspot
• Jebel Marra/Darfur hotspot
• Afar hotspot
• Cameroon hotspot
• Madeira hotspot
• Canary hotspot
• New England/Great Meteor hotspot
• Cape Verde hotspot
• St. Helena hotspot
• Gough hotspot
• Tristan hotspot
• Vema hotspot (Vema Seamount)
• Discovery hotspot (Discovery Seamounts)
• Bouvet hotspot
• Shona/Meteor hotspot
• Réunion hotspot
• Comoros hotspot

Antartic Plate

• Marion hotspot
• Crozet hotspot
• Kerguelen hotspot
• Heard hotspot
• Balleny hotspot
• Erebus hotspot

South American Plate

• Trindade/Martin Vaz hotspot
• Fernando hotspot
• Ascension hotspot

North American Plate

• Bermuda hotspot
• Yellowstone hotspot
• Raton hotspot
• Anahim hotspot

Indo-Australian Plate

• Lord Howe hotspot
• Tasmanid hotspot (Gascoyne Seamount)
• East Australia hotspot

Nazca Plate

• Juan Fernández hotspot
• San Felix hotspot
• Easter hotspot
• Galápagos hotspot

Pacific Plate

• Louisville hotspot
• Foundation hotspot
• Macdonald hotspot
• North Austral/President Thiers (President Thiers Bank)
• Arago hotspot (Arago Seamount)
• Maria/Southern Cook hotspot (Îles Maria)
• Samoa hotspot
• Crough hotspot (Crough Seamount)
• Pitcairn hotspot
• Society/Tahiti hotspo
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Contributors and Attributions

Original content from Kimberly Schulte (Columbia Basin College) and supplemented by Lumen Learning . The content on this page is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

How to Write Up an Elementary Volcano Science Project

Jennifer tolbert, 27 jun 2018.

The baking soda and vinegar volcano is a favorite science experiment among elementary students. It is important to make your presentation stand out from the other students at the science fair with an exceptional presentation. Also be sure to follow the teacher's guidelines or science fair guidelines to ensure that your score is as high as possible.

Write an introduction. The introduction is your first impression. Be sure it is concise and accurately introduces exactly what you studied in the experiment. This is also an excellent place to include fun facts, background information or general volcano information. The reaction is due to the properties of bases and acids and would be important to include in your experiment. Identify the variable that you are testing, such as the ratio to vinegar and baking soda. Or maybe you would like to see what other base-acid combinations would produce similar eruptions.

Write a hypothesis. Remember a hypothesis is an educated guess or prediction. Explain what you believe will happen during the experiment based upon your previous knowledge or research. The hypothesis should be written in a declarative sentence.

List your materials. Provide a detailed list of all of the materials you used when you conducted the experiment. Be sure to also include how much of each material was used. Explain whether you made your own volcano or bought a kit.

Write your procedure. The procedure should be written step-by-step, in detail. If someone else could easily reproduce your experiment, you have probably written a fairly clear procedure. Be detailed, accurate and logical in your explanation. Procedures are usually written in a numerical list format.

Explain your results. Be sure your results reflect exactly what you were testing. You can provide observations or measurements. If applicable, you can create a chart or graph to describe any numerical data you may have taken. You may want to describe what the eruptions looked like, how long they lasted or how explosive the reactions were.

Write a conclusion. Basically, sum up what you learned during the experiment. Say whether or not your hypothesis was correct. Point out patterns in your data and explain if they were consistent with your previous knowledge of the subject. Also, do not forget to relate how that information can be used in the real world. This would also be a good spot to place recommendations if there are changes you would make to the experiment.

• 1 Discovery Education: Science Fair Center
• 2 Science Buddies: Science Fair Project Final Report

About the Author

Jennifer Tolbert currently resides in Magnolia, Texas. She holds a Bachelor of Science in agricultural communications from Texas Tech University and a Master of Science from Texas A&M University. She has written several award-winning special sections as a marketing writer and is currently a special education teacher.

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• Why We’re Unique

Make a Volcano Model

Introduction: (initial observation).

When a volcano erupts, large masses of molten rocks along with smoke and dust exit the top of the volcano known as vent.

Have you ever wondered why these materials come out of a volcano?

Can it be caused by the underground pressure of gases?

In this project you learn about the parts of a volcano, different kinds of volcano and volcanic eruption. You will also make a model of a volcano and display the eruption process and the release of lava or magma caused by the pressure of gases.

This project guide contains information that you need in order to start your project. If you have any questions or need more support about this project, click on the “Ask Question” button on the top of this page to send me a message.

If you are new in doing science project, click on “How to Start” in the main page. There you will find helpful links that describe different types of science projects, scientific method, variables, hypothesis, graph, abstract and all other general basics that you need to know.

Project advisor

Information Gathering:

Find out about volcanoes. Read books, magazines or ask professionals who might know in order to learn about the causes and the locations of volcanoes. Keep track of where you got your information from.

Following are samples of information you may find:

A volcano is a geological landform (usually a mountain) where a substance, usually magma (molten rock of the Earth’s interior) erupts. The name “volcano” originates from the name of Vulcan, a god of fire in Roman mythology. The study of volcanoes is called vulcanology (or volcanology in some spellings).

The Three Big Ones The last three volcanic eruptions to cause major loss of life were Krakatoa, Indonesia, where 32,000 were killed in 1883; Mt. Pelee, Martinique, where 29,000 were killed in 1902; and Nevada del Ruiz, Colombia, where 23,000 were killed in 1985. Fiery lava was not the culprit in any of these disasters. Details…

A volcano constitutes a vent , a pipe , a crater , and a cone .

The vent is an opening at the Earth’s surface.

The pipe is a passageway in the volcano in which the magma rises through to the surface during an eruption.

The crater is a bowl-shaped depression at the top of the volcano where volcanic materials like, ash, lava, and other pyroclastic materials are released.

Solidified lava, ashes, and cinder form the cone . Layers of lava, alternate with layers of ash to build the steep sided cone higher and higher.

Source…

Information about volcano models are available at: _ http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_models/models.html _ http://www.madsci.org/experiments/archive/854444893.Ch.html _ http://www.aeic.alaska.edu/Input/lahr/taurho/volcano/volcano.html _ http://www.rockhoundingar.com/pebblepups/volcano.html _ http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~ekrauss/ _ http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Products/Pglossary/volcano.html

Question/ Purpose:

We want to see what happens that a volcano erupts. A review of current and past volcano eruptions indicates some kind of under ground pressure that forces the lava out of a volcano. Can we simulate such underground pressure?

Identify Variables:

We use different kind of material that may release gas and create a display similar to a real volcanic eruption. Such material and their quantity are our variables.

Hypothesis:

Baking soda and Vinegar can produce enough gas to simulate a volcanic eruption.

Experiment Design:

Mix baking soda and vinegar in a plastic bottle in different ratios and see which combination and rates of mixture will create the most foam and is the best for a volcanic eruption display.

After you find the best setup and combination, cover the bottle by papers, aluminum foil, clay and other material to make it look like real volcanic mountain. So in the center of your volcano model will be a bottle with chemicals that create the eruption.

In your first experiment use a small cup of vinegar and start adding baking soda to that. Initially baking soda will release gas as soon as it gets to the vinegar. But if you continue, at some point there will be no gas any more. In this way you record the amount of baking soda and vinegar that create gas with each other.

In the second experiment check to see which substance must be at the bottom to create a better and faster reaction, baking soda or vinegar.

In the third experiment add some liquid detergent and some red food coloring to vinegar before reaction with baking soda. Liquid detergent may help the foams last longer and food coloring gives a better look to the erupting volcano. You may also add some flour to the baking soda that you are using to create a more viscose lava.

When the chemical composition is experimented successfully, mount the bottle on the center of a card board and cover it with newspaper and aluminum foil to look like a real volcano.

Baking soda and vinegar are frequently used for volcano projects simply because they are easily accessible and less dangerous. Personally I prefer other methods that create better display and of course have more risk. In one example you fill up your volcanic cone with Ammonium bichromate and light it up at the display. Ammonium dichromate is a flammable solid and burns very similar to a volcano. It has a nice display and creates a lot of smoke. Use heavy aluminum foil to cover your card board and construct your cone and do your display in an open area. If you want to do this, make your volcano as small as possible (about 2″ high).

The other method that I like is using a solid acid instead of vinegar. Citric acid for example, specially if you get it in powder form can be a good choice. You can mix it dry with baking soda, paint powder such as Iron oxide (red) and detergent powder. So when you are ready to do your demonstration you just add some water and reaction starts.

Need a volcano related graph for your display?

If you need a graph as a part of your display, you must first come up with a question that its answer or data are in the form of a table. You will then gather the information and fill up your data table. Finally you can use your data table to draw a graph.

Following are some sample questions.

What are the numbers of active volcanoes in different continents?

For this question your data table will look like this:

How many volcanoes are there in each state of USA?

You can use the following website for data that you need.

http://www.volcano.si.edu/gvp/world/

Materials and Equipment:

• Plastic bottle (Wide mouth, 5 to 9 inches tall)
• Baking soda
• Liquid detergent
• Food coloring (red)
• Aluminum foil
• Masking tape

Results of Experiment (Observation):

Experiments showed that the reaction between baking soda and vinegar creates some gas, but it is not fast enough to create a violent reaction and simulate a real volcanic reaction. We can stir or shake the mixture to create more gas, but it is not very realistic to shake a volcano to cause eruption.

To speed up the reaction we must fill up the plastic bottle with baking soda while leaving an empty hole in the center of that for adding vinegar.

This hole should be as wide as possible so your bottle will hold more vinegar than baking soda. To do this you need to make paste of baking soda. Take one spoon liquid detergent, two spoons water, a few drops of food coloring and start adding baking soda slowly while mixing. Continue adding baking soda until you get a sticky paste. If your bottle is very small and your volcano is small too, this should be enough. For larger bottles you may need to repeat this part to make more paste. Apply a thin layer of this paste to the inner sides of your bottle (about 1/4″ tick).

The reason that we add liquid detergent is that bobbles are unstable and disappear very fast. Liquid detergent will make bubbles last for a few seconds. Do this a few times and add vinegar to see how much foam comes out. After a few experiments you will be ready for your final product.

When your bottle is ready for final volcano, take a card board and using a masking tape secure the bottle in the center of the card board. Before you start building your volcanic mountain around the bottle, you may also want to use some glue or masking tape around the neck of the bottle. This will prevent the foam from going inside your mountain.

You can almost use anything that can look like a mountain to cover your bottle. I used some packing paper and cut a cross on the center of that to make it easier to be attached to the neck of the bottle.

Cover the bottle with your mountain material such as paper or aluminum foil and paint it. Since my paper was not large enough, I has to use some extra magazine paper to give more body to the mountain.

Before painting, cover the the bottle with something to make sure that paint will not enter the bottle. I used spray paint, but you can use any latex paint as well. (Don’t add water).

I painted my volcano in the backyard, spray paints release harmful fumes and it’s better not to use them inside a building. While the paint was still wet, I also spread some sand to make it more natural. Paint will act like a glue and holds sand in place.

When your volcano is ready and it is your turn to display, fill up a small bottle or a test tube with vinegar and pour it in to your volcano. The eruption will start in a few seconds and lasts for a few minutes.

Remember you can do it only once and when the volcano erupts, it gets wet and you can not repeat your display unless you build everything from the beginning.

Final display that will last only a few seconds may look like this. As you notice I did not use food coloring and my lava is white. Also I used black color to paint the mountain that is not the best choice. If you have enough time for your project, you may use multiple colors and food coloring to get a better display.

Calculations:

Calculate what ratio of baking soda and vinegar produce the most gas.

Summery of Results:

Summarize what happened. This can be in the form of a table of processed numerical data, or graphs. It could also be a written statement of what occurred during experiments.

It is from calculations using recorded data that tables and graphs are made. Studying tables and graphs, we can see trends that tell us how different variables cause our observations. Based on these trends, we can draw conclusions about the system under study. These conclusions help us confirm or deny our original hypothesis. Often, mathematical equations can be made from graphs. These equations allow us to predict how a change will affect the system without the need to do additional experiments. Advanced levels of experimental science rely heavily on graphical and mathematical analysis of data. At this level, science becomes even more interesting and powerful.

Conclusion:

Using the trends in your experimental data and your experimental observations, try to answer your original questions. Is your hypothesis correct? Now is the time to pull together what happened, and assess the experiments you did. The pressure of underground gases in a volcanic mountain will force the molten material out of the volcanic mountain.

Related Questions & Answers:

Q. How can we make a volcano that errupts more than once?

A. Instead of attaching the bottle to the base board, make and attach a cylinder from heavy paper that can hold the bottle. In this way you will be able to remove the bootle for refill or just use a second bottle that you have already prepared to repeat the erruption test.

When you do one eruption experiment, your volcano will get wet. So for multiple eruptions make your volcanic mountain from more durable material. Heavy paper with lots of paint can resist a few tests, but for more tests, make your volcanic mountain from plastics, aluminum foil, wood or even chalk (Plaster of Paris) that will be much heavier.

Possible Errors:

If you did not observe anything different than what happened with your control, the variable you changed may not affect the system you are investigating. If you did not observe a consistent, reproducible trend in your series of experimental runs there may be experimental errors affecting your results. The first thing to check is how you are making your measurements. Is the measurement method questionable or unreliable? Maybe you are reading a scale incorrectly, or maybe the measuring instrument is working erratically.

If you determine that experimental errors are influencing your results, carefully rethink the design of your experiments. Review each step of the procedure to find sources of potential errors. If possible, have a scientist review the procedure with you. Sometimes the designer of an experiment can miss the obvious.

References:

Other receipes attached may also give you new ideas on how to make your model.

Model Volcano Project

James Signorelli

Dwight Morrow High School

Science Department

The purpose of this project is to produce a model that simulates the building processes found in actual volcanoes. These processes include the layering of ash from the eruption to builds the cinder cone. They also show how the mass of the cone in time causes the Caldera to form when the crater collapses in on itself. A model can also be made that simulates the violent eruptions of a composite volcano. For this model, additional chemicals are required to produce the violent explosive eruption responsible for hurling dust and pyroclastic bombs into the air.

Phase #1 – the mountain

A. Obtain a piece of thick corrugated paper and line with several layers of aluminum foil. This is your primary fire shield.

B. Place a large, ceramic crucible in the center of the board and anchor with wall board joint compound. [available from Home Depot at $ 10.00 / 5 gallon pail]

C. Make a skeleton of the mountain with shaped layers of corrugated paper in the form of a top-o-graphic map.

D. Cover the layers with the wall board joint compound until your mountain has the desired shape.

E. Allow model to dry for several days. You may scratch in detail such as ravines and depressions before the plaster hardens. Plaster has a natural tendency to shrink and crack, adding realism to the surface of the model.

F. Paint the model by first spraying with BBQ black. Use Tempera paint for all other detail.

Phase #2 the chemicals [cinder cone model]

Perform this Demonstration in a fume hood or outdoors for proper ventilation. Treat the ash as hazardous chemical waste and recycle for proper disposal. Vacuum or sweep up all ash.

A. Obtain Ammonium Dichromate from the chemical storage area of your school. It is stored in the oxidizer cabinet.

B. Place approximately one table spoon of Ammonium Dichromate into the crucible.

C. Light the chemical with a match and step back. The effect is more graphic in a darkened room.

D. The orange Ammonium Dichromate burns in a firey plume (fountain) into chromic oxide, a green colored ash.

E. The ash builds layer upon layer to form the cone.

F. As the ash cone reaches higher and higher, it becomes unstable and collapses in on itself to form the broad Caldera, from the crater.

Phase #3 the chemicals [composite volcano model]

This model requires the use of an explosive mixture of chemicals. Do Not use more than ½ teaspoon and do not pack it into the crucible.

A. In a non-flammable container, mix equal parts of table sugar and Potassium Chlorate. Stir, do not use a mortar & pestle.

This mixture does not like friction !

B. Place approximately ½ teaspoon of the mixture into the large crucible.

C. Completely cover this mixture with the Ammonium Dichromate as in the Cinder Cone model. None of the sugar mixture should be visible. This works best if ¾ inch or more of the dichromate crystals covers the sugar mixture.

D. Light the model as in phase #1. Stand back! When the dichromate eventually reaches the sugar layer, the volcano becomes Mt. Saint Helen. The carbon balls (pyroclastic bombs) land several inches from the model. The center of the cinder cone is blown away, producing a very wide crater. If you dont tell the students that this final reaction is due any minute, the surprise really gets their interest!

Please& Use professional judgement.

Dont allow students to handle any of the chemicals.

Practice safe use of all chemicals

Start with small quantities and develop your learning curve before trying this in front of a class.

Treat all fuel, ash and waste as a hazardous chemical. Dispose of properly.

• 1 cup vinegar
• Red food color
• 2 generous drops of dish washing soap
• 2 tablespoons of baking soda

Build a volcano of clay around a container that is thin and tall. You can use an empty tin can. You cut the top off a soda bottle or use pint milk cartons. Instead of clay you can mix flour with water into a paste and let it dry. Plaster of paris is also good for the outside. Mix the liquids together. When 2 tablespoons of baking soda are added a bright red foamy lava comes out.

Experiment:

• Present two clear containers (bottles, jars,) of equal volume and shape. Add 1 cup of vinegar to each container. You will need a tray to catch the overflowing foam.
• In one container add the drops of dish washing soap. Do not add any soap to the other.
• Measure the tablespoons of baking soda into two other cups so that it can be dumped into the two containers of vinegar at the same time.
• Have the students name the only difference between the mixtures in the two containers. (One has soap.)
• Have students speculate or predict in writing if the two will appear different or not and what we will see.
• Dump the baking soda from the cups into the containers at exactly the same time.
• Have students read what they wrote and use adjectives to describe how the two mixtures are different. Does one formula last longer? What was the only difference between the two cases?

It is always important for students, parents and teachers to know a good source for science related equipment and supplies they need for their science activities. Please note that many online stores for science supplies are managed by MiniScience.

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Science Interviews

• Earth Science
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Forming Volcanoes - A Geological Controversy

Interview with , part of the show how do you weigh a volcano, aa_large.jpg.

Chris -   We are talking all about the science of volcanoes this week, and to help us forecast an eruption, we need to understand as much as possible about the processes that cause a volcano to form in the first place, and we're joined now by Professor Gillian Foulger who works on understanding how volcanoes form in places like Hawaii.  Gillian Welcome.

Gillian -   Hello, Chris.

Chris -   Welcome the Naked Scientists.  Tell us if you would.  First of all, how do volcanoes form and what are the areas of contention?

Chris -   Can you give us some example of those?

Gillian -   Well, an example is Tristan da Cunha, Reunion Island, people also interestingly enough put Iceland in that category, and of course, Hawaii.

Chris -   Okay, so these are volcanoes that pop up in the middle of a plate.  So what goes at the margin of a plate or plate boundary cannot go for what's going on in the middle.  So what do scientists think is driving the emergence of a volcano at that point then?

Gillian -   Well, there are two competing hypothesis.  There's the plate hypothesis which says, "Hang on, plates are not completely rigid.  That's just like a cartoon world."  Geology is much more complicated than that, and huge plates do have cracks, they do pull apart in their middles, and we can have the occasional volcano that comes up through the crack in the middle of a plate.

The competing hypothesis is the traditional plume hypothesis which suggests that you have a hot diapir, a hot thermal coming out from the Earth's core, rising 3,000 kilometres through the Earth's mantle and punching its way through the plate at the surface, not caring whether it's in the middle of a plate or not.

Chris -   Have we any idea as to why such a pulse of energy should be unleashed by the core in that way?  Why should that happen and why don't we see this more extensively then?

Gillian -   Well that's a very good question, Chris, because you often hear people say - Hawaii is a typical example of a plume, but in fact, Hawaii is completely unique on the Earth's surface.  There isn't anything else like it anywhere.  But coming back to your original question - why should this happen - people have suggested, people have pointed out that the earth's core is about 1,000 degrees hotter than the material immediately above.  So they have this model like a kettle on a stove with a hotplate underneath and the hotplate is heating water in the kettle, and causing diapirs to rise up.  So, that's the fundamental concept behind that theory.

Gillian -   Well one of the primary methods used is using earthquake waves to CAT scan the Earth.  So, when earthquakes occur, rays go through all parts of the Earth and we have seismometers on the surface, so this is like taking a person into a hospital and CAT scanning them.  We can look at the structure inside the Earth.  And what we're really looking for is to see if under places like Hawaii and Iceland, if we see some kind of a structure going all the way from the surface right down the Earth's core, and if we saw that, that would pretty much be strong evidence in favour of the plume hypothesis.

Chris -   So what have you seen?  You presumably haven't seen that yet.  So what have you seen?

Gillian -   No.  What we tend to see almost everywhere is structures which can go down several hundred kilometres, but they don't go down the full 3,000 kilometres that they would have to do to reach the core.

Chris -   So do you think it's just a question of making more observations or do you think we need to rethink this model and in fact, you don't need to go all the way down to the core?  Perhaps it can act as a sort of vent for pressure slightly outside the Earth's core.

Gillian -   Yes.  I think we don't need to go down to the Earth's core.  I think everything is happening just in the upper 3, 4, 5, 600 kilometres.  It's not going all the way down 3,000 kilometres to the core. But regarding how do we address this problem, well, part of the reason why this controversy is so exciting is because a lot of things - a lot of human aspects are weaving in which almost stand outside the science.  The plume hypothesis has been popular for a very, very long time and there's great reluctance to let it go partly because it can sort of be trotted in to explain everything.  Whatever you see or you don't see, you can find some way of turning the plume hypothesis around to explain that.  But the plate hypothesis on the other hand makes specific predictions which we should be able to go out and test.  So, there's great excitement in the geological community at the moment and some people say this is the most exciting and fundamental controversy that's developed since plate tectonics.

Chris -   So obviously, we will be in a position at some point in the future to make reasonable predictions about volcanic activity at plate margins where one plate is either subducting or overriding another, but if we've got this problem with plume volcanoes, how can we predict those?  If we don't understand what's causing them in the first place, how can we predict their activity?

Gillian -   This subject is really looking at big scale and long term volcanic behaviour.  So, unlike what Hazel (Rymer) was describing , Hazel is looking at the activity of specific volcanoes on the kind of timescales that are relevant to human beings a few years or a few decades.  But we're looking at the big scale of things and we're looking on timescales of millions of years.  So the sort of problem we would be interested in that we could contribute to would be when Kilauea in Hawaii becomes extinct, where is the next volcano going to form.

Chris -   And presumably also, you're in a position to inform the climate change debate because we know that volcanoes and volcanism have had a big contribution to the Earth's atmospheric composition over many, many years, and understanding this important contributor must therefore also feature quite heavily in the argument.

Gillian -   Yes.  It would certainly give relevant data to that subject indeed.

Chris -   We must leave it there.  Thank you, Gillian for joining us.  That was Professor Gillian Foulger, who is at Durham University.

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Latest Earthquakes |    Chat Share Social Media  

Volcano Watch — HVO and Collaborators Continue Seismic Surveys Across the Active Volcanoes of Hawaii

The Island of Hawai‘i is one of the most seismically active regions in the world. In the last five years, an average of 600-1200 earthquakes per week have been detected by the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO). This regular rumble of activity across the island can be used to our advantage to assess the hazards that Kīlauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes represent. 

Volcano Watch  is a weekly article and activity update written by U.S. Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory scientists and affiliates. 

The permanent HVO seismic network consists of nearly 100 stations located across the island. HVO scientists use these stations to monitor the location and character of seismic activity, paying particular attention to signals that might herald migrating magma or potential eruptive activity. 

As seismic signals move through the ground, they are affected by the structure of the subsurface that they travel through. The presence of magma or fault zones below the ground surface can change how the seismic signals move through these regions. Scientists can take advantage of these altered signals, which are recorded on seismometers at the surface, to create images of where magma is located below. 

Using data from only the permanent HVO seismometers provides us with fuzzy pictures of underlying magma storage. As the number of seismometers at the surface is increased, more of the seismic waves traveling through regions of magma storage are recorded. This yields a crisper picture of where magma is located; how big that region of magma storage is; and how it might connect to the surface. The higher resolution the image of magma storage is, the better our understanding of the volcanic hazard a particular volcano represents. 

To move beyond the fuzzy images of magma storage at Kīlauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes created in past studies using only permanent seismic stations on the Island of Hawai‘i, HVO has purchased a pool of lightweight, portable seismometers that can be easily deployed to target regions of interest. HVO’s seismic nodes were purchased as part of the USGS Additional Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Relief Act of 2019 (H.R. 2157). 

In the summer of 2022, these 80 seismic nodes were deployed across the Pāhala region to understand the cause for swarms of deep seismic activity experienced below. Specifically, HVO and collaborators at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa are testing the hypothesis that magma stored 15–25 miles (24–40 km) below this area migrates laterally through the subsurface (potentially to Kīlauea and Mauna Loa), causing the observed high earthquake rates. 

In the summer of 2023, HVO scientists and collaborators at the University of Miami and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute deployed 1800 seismic nodes (both HVO’s nodes and nodes borrowed from the EarthScope Consortium’s instrument pool) across Kīlauea summit. The focus of this experiment is to understand where magma is stored beneath Kīlauea’s summit and how it migrates to the surface before eruptions. 

Currently, HVO and collaborators at ETH Zürich, a public research university, are finalizing locations for about 300 nodes to be deployed in the summer of 2024 across the East Rift Zone of Kīlauea. This deployment will collect data near the 2018 Kīlauea eruption site, focusing on understanding how much magma is distributed across the East Rift Zone and how it connects to Kīlauea’s summit magma reservoir. 

Finally, HVO and collaborators at the University of Miami will put out another 50 seismic nodes across Mauna Loa’s summit and rift zones in summer 2024 to gain a greater understanding of how much magma is stored in these regions and how they might be connected to the surface. 

Results from all of these seismic node experiments will be interpreted together to form a cohesive view of magma storage below the most active volcanoes on the Island of Hawai‘i. We hope to determine how much magma is possibly stored deep beneath Pāhala and whether it connects to Kīlauea and/or Mauna Loa. At Kīlauea and Mauna Loa, we will determine how much magma is stored beneath the summits and rift zones and the potential pathways to the surface. By better understanding the magma storage regions and their connections, we can better asses the hazards posed by these volcanoes. 

Volcano Activity Updates

Kīlauea is not erupting. Its USGS Volcano Alert level is ADVISORY. 

Earthquake activity below Kīlauea's summit remains low relative to periods before recent intrusions or eruptions. Less than 200 events were detected over the past week, which is comparable to the week before. Tiltmeters near Sand Hill and Uēkahuna bluff continued to record modest inflationary trends over the past week. No unusual activity has been noted along the rift zones. 

Mauna Loa is not erupting. Its USGS Volcano Alert Level is at NORMAL. 

Webcams show no signs of activity on Mauna Loa. Summit seismicity has remained at low levels over the past month. Ground  deformation  indicates continuing slow inflation as  magma  replenishes the reservoir system following the 2022 eruption. SO 2   emission rates are at background levels. 

One earthquake was reported felt in the Hawaiian Islands during the past week: a M2.4 earthquake 19 km (11 mi) WNW of Kalaoa at 34 km (21 mi) depth on April 5 at 11:30 p.m. HST.

HVO continues to closely monitor Kīlauea and Mauna Loa.

Please visit HVO’s website for past Volcano Watch articles, Kīlauea and Mauna Loa updates, volcano photos, maps, recent earthquake information, and more. Email questions to  [email protected] .

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