Munich: Magma, Glasses and Melts
Last week I flew to Munich to join 29 other students to take part in the Magma, Glasses and Melts short course. The course is about the behaviour of magmas under certain conditions and what implications this has for volcanic activity. You also get the chance to see laboratories which replicate the conditions inside volcanoes and have helped produce the research taught in the course. It has been run annually for over a decade by the volcanology group which is headed by Prof. Don Dingwell. Don has been at the forefront of this research area for over 25 years so there is no one more suitable for teaching the course. An explosion at Volcan de Colima earlier this year. Was this explosion started by fracturing bubbles? The purpose of the course is to teach about the peculiar properties of magma as it squeezes and stretches on its way up to the surface. Small changes in temperature, pressure and chemistry can have a dramatic effect on the viscosity of the magma. Viscosity is a mea