Question: Could your work save lives?

Kate Dobson answered on 8 Nov 2014:

I hope so. But it’s probably not going to be a direct effect. 10% of the worlds population live within 100 km of an active volcano. So there are lots of people who need to know when, and how their “local” volcano will erupt.

My work tries to help us understand what makes volcanoes tick. I am trying to answer questions like: Why do volcanes erupt? What changes in a magma chamber before an erution starts? Why does it go from non-erupting to erupting? What do the erupted products tell us about what is happening beneath our feet?

The answers to these questions will mean we understand the physical properties of magma, and how things we can measure (types of rocks, sizes of crystals, volume of bubbles, location and magnitude of earthquakes, gas emmissions) relate to magma chamber and volcano behaviour better than we do at the moment. I, and others doing similar reserach, are all trying to provide the information needed to make the next generation of volcanic forecasting models better and more accurate. The more data and experiments we do the more data we have to test the models.