Recreating a volcanic eruption

Researchers say that recent experiments in a lab that successfully recreated conditions relevant to a volcanic eruption could be useful to improve methods of predicting eruptions, researchers report in the Oct. 9 issue of Science. Philip Benson and colleagues violently deformed rocks from Mount Etna volcano in Italy, and carefully monitored the small-scale seismic signals, or “acoustic emissions,” of the breaking rocks with an array of special transducers. These ultra-sensitive transducers recorded many low-frequency events, similar to those detected right before an eruption, and the researchers determined their source to be caused by fluid (water, steam, gas, or magma) rushing through tiny cracks and fractures in the basalt. Benson and colleagues then found that their data from these small-scale lab simulations could be scaled up and related to a natural volcanic event, with fractures of 50 millimeters in their lab corresponding to faults of about 200 meters in nature. Their results support pre-existing evidence that low-frequency events are generated by fluid interactions in the rocks, and might be used to help with forecasting eruptions in the future. In a Perspective, Luigi Burlini and Giulio Di Toro explain why these findings provide such a good model for predicting eruptions.

ARTICLE #10: "Laboratory Simulation of Volcano Seismicity," by P.M. Benson; P.G. Meredith at University College London in London, UK; P.M. Benson; R.P. Young at University of Toronto in Toronto, ON, Canada; S. Vinciguerra at Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Rome, Italy.

ARTICLE #4: "Volcanic Symphony in the Lab," by L. Burlini at ETH Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland; G. Di Toro at Università di Padova in Padova, Italy.