The volcano remains active at depth. We think there's a huge magma reservoir – tens of cubic kilometres beneath the island, much bigger than the island itself
- Marie Edmonds
When the USA’s Mount St Helens erupted in 1980, just two months after showing signs of reawakening, its blast was equivalent to 1,600 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It remains the most economically destructive volcanic event in the USA’s history.
When Eyjafjallajӧkull erupted in 2010 in Iceland, the ash cloud it emitted stranded around half of the world’s air traffic, with an estimated global economic cost of US $5 billion. Recently, magma has been on the move again, this time under and beyond Iceland’s Bárðarbunga volcano.
Volcanoes are the vents through which our planet exhales. Yet, not all volcanoes experience spectacular releases of energy, or even erupt at all: of the 500 or so volcanoes that are currently active worldwide, 20 might be expected to erupt in any one year. But, when volcanoes do erupt, they can cause almost total destruction in the immediate vicinity and the ash clouds they release can affect areas thousands of kilometres away.
Fortunately, the ability to monitor volcanoes has dramatically improved in recent years, thanks in part to the work of scientists like Dr Marie Edmonds in Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.
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Image: Soufriere Hills, Montserrat
Credit: Richard Herd
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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