New tool helps predict when volcanoes erupt
Mount St. Helens warned residents for months that it was going to blow, venting gasses and shaking the ground. That's generally how active volcanoes advertise that they're awake.
But sometimes the messages are less clear. Now, researchers have another tool to help predict when a volcano such as Mount Rainier might erupt. A new study shows that chemical patterns in volcanic crystals match up with patterns in volcanic earthquake and gas recordings, giving scientists a chance to save thousands of lives before it's too late.
Tiny volcanic crystals, often just 50 to 100 micrometers across, float suspended in magma, the ultrahot mix of molten rock and dissolved gases that can rise beneath volcanoes. Many of these crystals have concentric bands that look like tree rings.
Events such as a new pulse of hot magma into the chamber – similar to what could precede an eruption – can cause elements inside a crystal, such as iron and magnesium, to migrate toward the crystal's core or toward its edges, creating new rings. Once a minor eruption preceding the main event spews a crystal-bearing magma above ground, it all solidifies and locks in the record of the volcano's past, which geologists studying the threat from the volcano can collect and interpret.
Kate Saunders, a volcanologist at the University of Bristol in England, wondered whether the crystals could also be used to predict the future. She and colleagues studied a mineral crystal called orthopyroxene from Mount St. Helens. That volcano erupted catastrophically May 18, 1980, and continued to produce smaller eruptions through October 1986.
The team characterized the chemical patterns of 98 crystals collected over the course of the eruptions and compared those patterns with records of earthquakes and gas release that other researchers collected during this same period.
Crystals start to build up a year before eruptions and peak just before an explosion happens, the team reported online Thursday in the journal Science. Crystals with magnesium-rich rims and iron-rich cores, which signify heating from the intrusion of new magma, were associated with deep earthquakes. A spike in these magnesium-rimmed crystals also occurred just prior to St. Helens' massive eruption, indicating that pulses of new magma preceded the blast.
Crystals with iron-rich rims and magnesium-rich cores, which form when the magma is degassing and cooling, corresponded with peaks in sulfur dioxide gas release. These crystals peaked prior to later eruptions at St. Helens.
Knowing how the chemical fingerprints of crystals link up with other recorded signals will help scientists read a volcano's past to better interpret its future warning signs, Saunders said.
"We can tell if we expect to see new pulses of magma, or if we expect the magma to sit there and degas, and we can start to work out what signs we should be looking for in the monitoring data" to predict eruptions, she said.
"It's a neat package, the fact that they can work backwards with these crystals to nail down the timing of magmatic activity," said Carl Thornber, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash. "It gives us much more solid information to interpret what's going on down below, and how to interpret all the measurements we're making."
"The technique can be transferred to any volcano," Saunders said. Scientists can't monitor the moving and shaking of every volcano worldwide, but they often can collect the products of lesser eruptions, such as these deep-formed crystals, to understand the volcano's behavior. They can also watch for spikes in the types of crystals that might foretell an explosion.
"If we look at these erupted products, we can build up a picture of what's happened and what we expect to happen if the volcano suddenly reawakes," Saunders said.
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