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VOLCANOLOGY

Super-volcanic investigations

Nature Geoscience volume 11, pages 227–229 (2018)Cite this article

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Multi-disciplinary analyses of Earth’s most destructive volcanic systems show that continuous monitoring and an understanding of each volcano’s quirks, rather than a single unified model, are key to generating accurate hazard assessments.

Campi Flegrei, a 40,000-year-old volcano in Italy, poses a threat to 5 million people living in the surrounding area. Yet, we do not know exactly how much eruptible magma exists at depth beneath the volcano, or where and how the magma is stored. This caldera-forming volcano is just one of many around the world that pose significant risk to the 800 million people living within 100 km of an active volcano1. It is imperative that scientists better understand how these volcanoes form, the dynamics and architecture of the magma plumbing and storage systems, as well as the eruption processes at these large, silicic systems. Only then can scientists correctly interpret the signals of unrest that foreshadow eruptions. This was the focus of the American Geophysical Union Chapman conference2 ‘Merging Geophysical, Petrochronologic, and Modeling Perspectives of Large Silicic Magma Systems’, held in Quinamávida, Chile, in January 2018. The meeting convened scientists from 13 countries, bringing together geologists, geophysicists, volcano observatory staff, petrologists and numerical modellers to spark discussions aimed at improving our understanding of these enigmatic volcanic systems.

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Fig. 1: The Laguna del Maule volcanic system in the Andes Mountains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth & Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Christy B. Till & Karalee K. Brugman

  2. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Matthew Pritchard

  3. GNS Science, Taupo, New Zealand

    Craig A. Miller

  4. Volcano Science Center, U. S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA, USA

    Juliet Ryan-Davis

Authors
  1. Christy B. Till
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  2. Matthew Pritchard
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  3. Craig A. Miller
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  4. Karalee K. Brugman
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  5. Juliet Ryan-Davis
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Correspondence to Christy B. Till.

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Till, C.B., Pritchard, M., Miller, C. et al. Super-volcanic investigations. Nature Geosci 11, 227–229 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0100-1

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