Creating records of eruptive events through time is incredibly important; these records can give us a huge wealth of information about the history of a volcano. The knowledge we can gain from eruptive records is critical to understanding what hazards a volcano may pose in the future, including: how often the volcano erupts, the style… Read More Secrets of the sea: what can submarine sediments tell us about volcanoes?
Derek Keir has recently been awarded a little over half a million pounds through a NERC large grant. Project Rift Volcanism: Past, Present and Future aims to use various geophysical techniques, petrology and geology to understand volcano behavior and hazards in the Ethiopian rift. Derek will be leading the seismology component in collaboration with the… Read More NERC grant awarded to Dr Derek Keir for project: Rift Volcanism: Past, Present and Future
A few years ago I was lucky enough to witness the infamous summit eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. Despite all the hassle it caused, especially the financial losses incurred by the aviation industry, the eruption created more awareness of the importance of volcano research in the UK. Subsequent studies of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption have advanced… Read More The 4 year anniversary of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption: My eyewitness account
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the England football team and trophies, UKIP and meteorology, are just some examples of things that don’t seem to work together, but I believe science and the arts do not belong in this category. Instead, the principles and practices used in these two dis ciplines, when mixed well, can benefit… Read More Science and the arts: Can opposites attract?
What is the fate of the volatiles that are stored in trench sediments, igneous crust and hydrated lithospheric mantle and that are transported into a subduction zone? G&G Marie Curie Research Fellow Jacob Geersen has been involved in recently published research, that constrains and compare the input and output fluxes of water, chlorine and sulfur into the Central Chilean… Read More What goes in must come out?
Volcanoes commonly form on the flanks of young continental rifts, whereas in more evolved rifts the volcanism is more commonly in the rift centre. Derek Keir, Lecturer in Earth Science from the Geology and Geophysics research Group, contributed to a team that modelled the stress field below rift grabens of varying width and depth caused… Read More Off-rift volcanism in rift zones determined by crustal unloading, new paper in nature Geoscience
Catherine Annen from Bristol University, with Tim Minshull and former PhD student Michele Paulatto from G&G, have published a paper in the Journal of Petrology in which they estimate on different timescales the rate that magma flows into the magma storage region beneath the active Soufriere Hills Volcano. They use computer models of magma chamber… Read More Magma fluxes at Soufrière Hills Volcano, Montserrat
I was recently lucky enough to spend some time in Japan as part of a scientific conference in the southern-most tip of Kyushu along with my colleague Sebastian Watt. The conference was called IAVCEI, and is the ‘world cup’ of volcanology meetings, as these international gatherings only occur every 4 years. This was my first… Read More A particularly volcanic volcano conference, Japan – by Mike Cassidy