This is crazy!! I just read your Nature article last month!! This charity is so exciting to me!!
Let me ask two really simple questions (hopefully not too simple):
1) If you had to choose just one thing, what is the single most important thing that would help volcanologists predict when/​if a catastrophic volcanic eruption is going to occur?
2) If volcanologists knew a catastrophic eruption was likely, what is the most promising idea — even if speculative or unlikely to work — for how to prevent or reduce an eruption? (E.g. siphoning off the magma to use for geothermal energy??)
Mitigating risk from large volcanic eruptions seems important, tractable, and neglected, so I wish you the best of luck!!
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.
Here’s a paper that considers 64 different interventions. We thought the most promising was piling soil on top of a supervolcano to make eruption less likely.
This is crazy!! I just read your Nature article last month!! This charity is so exciting to me!!
Let me ask two really simple questions (hopefully not too simple):
1) If you had to choose just one thing, what is the single most important thing that would help volcanologists predict when/​if a catastrophic volcanic eruption is going to occur?
2) If volcanologists knew a catastrophic eruption was likely, what is the most promising idea — even if speculative or unlikely to work — for how to prevent or reduce an eruption? (E.g. siphoning off the magma to use for geothermal energy??)
Mitigating risk from large volcanic eruptions seems important, tractable, and neglected, so I wish you the best of luck!!
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.
Here’s a paper that considers 64 different interventions. We thought the most promising was piling soil on top of a supervolcano to make eruption less likely.