Cracking Volcanoes

If you have been following myself or Liverpool Volcanology , you will probably know that the group has been carrying out an extensive amount of fieldwork around Santiaguito volcano in Guatemala. You can read about those trips in previous posts  here , by Felix on GeoLog , and an amazing article by Nathanial Hoffman . For this post, I'll be writing about the first of hopefully many articles to come out of our efforts, published in Geophysical Research Letters . A gas-and-ash plume rises from the Caliente vent at Santiaguito in November 2014. The article, put together by Silvio de Angelis , details how we used infrasound and infrared thermal data to characterise small explosions at Santiaguito. This analysis was also complemented by measurements of ash collected after the explosions.  What we wanted to know was: how much ash is in the explosion plume, and how fast and high is it being injected into the atmosphere? Silvio, Armando and Andreas  deploying a stat...

When a cloud of hot dust is thrown high into the sky by a big mountain of hot rock, it can be a problem for air ships that fly people around. Right now, we use space machines and special computers to work out how high the hot dust cloud is and to guess where it will go. This way can take too long for people who fly the air ships around. In our paper, we show a really quick way of working out how high the hot dust is. When the big mountains of hot rock throw the hot dust into the sky, they make a sound that we cannot hear but our special machines can. We can use this sound to work out how fast the hot dust is being thrown into the sky. With this, and a special number machine, we can work out how far they will go into the sky. Using the sound from a real hot mountain that threw out hot dust in 2009, we show that our way can very quickly work out how high the hot dust will go. Our way of working out how high the hot dust goes will better help the people who fly air ships around, and help ...