Volcanic disasters have been studied since Pompeii was buried in 79 A.D., leading the public to believe that scientists already know why, where, when and how long volcanoes will erupt.
Volcanic disasters have been studied since Pompeii was buried in 79 A.D., leading the public to believe that scientists already know why, where, when and how long volcanoes will erupt. But Jonathan Fink, volcanologist and director of PSU’s Digital City Testbed Center, said these fundamental questions remain a mystery. Fink and Idowu "Jola" Ajibade, associate professor of Geography, recently published an article about how climate change will affect the societal impacts of eruptions. Their work is part of a novel 33-paper collection in the Bulletin of Volcanology, co-edited by Fink, which attempts to track how the entire field of volcanology has evolved over the last several decades.
“The public rarely thinks about how science changes — we learn odd facts from classes or news stories, but assume that the overall knowledge stays relatively constant. The reality is quite different,” Fink said. “Volcano science advances steadily, in step with technological progress. But it also can change immediately and radically, in response to unusually large or impactful eruptions.”
Consider Washington’s Mount St. Helens’ eruption in 1980, which taught the world about catastrophic volcanic landslides and blasts, or Campi Flegrei in Naples, Italy which threatens to erupt explosively any day. In 1980, geologists thought the earth’s crust behaved like a solid layer containing isolated pools of molten magma. Today we know it’s more like a complex mush, making predicting when large volcanoes eruptions will occur considerably more difficult.
Read more at: Portland State University
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