3. Are there any truly predictive events prior to an eruption?

Here is where the rubber meets the road: can we ever predict a volcanic eruption. By this I mean being able to look at the signs of volcanic unrest like earthquakes and tremor, degassing (carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and other volcanic gasses), deformation of the land surface and being able to say this volcano will erupt in 3 weeks (and then being right about it). Contrary to what might be out there on the internet, we have no way to do this, rather we can offer probabilities of an eruption (e.g., likely in weeks to months), which can be difficult to translate to risk for people living near the volcano. If we can actively monitor volcanoes to look at all the changes at the volcano before an eruption, we might be able to find a parameter (or more likely, a bunch of parameters working in concert) that can give us a better timetable for an eruption. However, this means we need to fund monitoring equipment and people to look at all the data that the equipment generates something that is not in vogue in many countries right now. 4. What controls flare-ups of magmatic activity? Why is the Kamchatka arc much more active than the Cascades? Why did South America and North America experience a period of massive caldera volcanism 20 million years ago that seems to have petered out today (the so-called ignimrbite flare-up)? What causes the changes of volcanic output globally over geologic timescales? These questions all boil to looking for the roots of volcanic productivity, which likely lie in plate tectonics. Even though over the Holocene (last 10,000 years) we know that volcanism hasnt really sharply increased or decreased globally, there are definitely periods in the geologic past when volcanic activity was much higher than today.

Ash from the Puyehue-Cordn Caulle eruption spread around the globe, as seen in this June 13, 2011 image of ash from the eruption over Tasmania. Image: NASA Earth Observatory.

5. What are the key reasons why some volcanoes strongly effect global climate and some dont? Again, a topic rife with speculation, but it is clear that some very large eruptions have a profound impact on the global climate think about Tambora or Krakatoa while other massive events dont seem to perturb climate much (see the White River Ash mentioned above). Weve also seen that some smaller eruptions have a much more profound effect on the climate than we might have expected. A lot of it might be the location of the volcano and the atmospheric dynamics that spread the ash and volcanic aerosols around the world. Some of it might be the amount of volcanic aerosols released by the volcano, especially the sulfur dioxide. Some of it might be the season in which the eruption occurred and how tall the plume reached. Likely it is a complex combination of all of these factors, but what factors weigh more in the equation and what might be a red herring is unclear. This is why merely noting that an eruption happened to coincide with some climatic shift or extinction isnt enough to make a correlation. Careful examination of the climate record from ice or sediment cores with the volcanic record to look for interrelationships and causal mechanisms might help in starting to parse out what the controls might be, but right now, when a big eruption occurs, we just have to wait and see what the results will be.

Related You Might Like Story Resources Related Links by Contextly

o o

First Anniversary of the Puyehue-Cordn Caulle Eruption

o o

Eyjafjallajkull one year on: What have we learned (and not learned)?

o o

Speculating on the 2011 Nabro eruption in Eritrea

o o

30-Year Time-Lapse: Mount St. Helens Recovery From Space

Erik Klemetti is an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University. His passion in geology is volcanoes, and he has studied them all over the world. You can follow Erik on Twitter, where you'll get volcano news and the occasional baseball comment