Ah thanks for the kind comments Yarrow and good questions.
Tricky question actually—we’ve never monitored a volcano that’s had a magnitude 7 and above eruption, and when past studies have looked at this it seems their triggers can be quite different. But if we had a good multi-parametric monitoring system, i.e. a good density of ground seismometers, sensors to measure deformation and gas (i.e. volcano-dedicated satellites). It’s very rare to have all these systems in place for one volcano, but I think we’d be a good position to forecast an eruption weeks or days in advance—AI is helping with this currently (but it’s still hard to know how big the eruption would be). There’s actually a lot more we can do to prepare for such eruptions too through community education and planning, which would save many lives too.
Ah thanks for the kind comments Yarrow and good questions.
Tricky question actually—we’ve never monitored a volcano that’s had a magnitude 7 and above eruption, and when past studies have looked at this it seems their triggers can be quite different. But if we had a good multi-parametric monitoring system, i.e. a good density of ground seismometers, sensors to measure deformation and gas (i.e. volcano-dedicated satellites). It’s very rare to have all these systems in place for one volcano, but I think we’d be a good position to forecast an eruption weeks or days in advance—AI is helping with this currently (but it’s still hard to know how big the eruption would be). There’s actually a lot more we can do to prepare for such eruptions too through community education and planning, which would save many lives too.
We wrote a paper about the ethics of volcano geoengineering here, which might be of interest: https://​​agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/​​doi/​​full/​​10.1029/​​2023EF003714 In this we suggest the research into stratospheric volcano aerosol removal might be most fruitful, something we’re looking into.