Cracking Volcanoes

A selection of the large eruptions that Santiaguito has produced in 2016. Left: 11 April (Source: INSIVUMEH ). Middle: 19 May (Source: INSIVUMEH ). Right: 17 June (Source:  Stereo100Noticias ). Last week Anthony Lamur and I were back in Guatemala to collect more observations from Santiaguito volcano . The fieldwork was prompted by the occurrence of several very large eruptions at the volcano in 2016 (like those in the image above), a departure from the regular but relatively small explosions that are typical of the place. What we wanted to know was what mechanism is driving the much larger explosions? Our campsite on Santa Maria on the morning of June 13th. The shadow of Santa Maria (3,772 m high) stretches far into the distance.  Our task for the trip was simple: we would camp on Santa Maria and watch Santiaguito for a few days with optical and thermal cameras to record any explosions. We also deployed a temporary acoustic microphone to record the infrasound produced by t

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 station with o