Question: If you could visit one country to study volcanoes where would you go? Why?

Kate Dobson answered on 13 Nov 2014:

Different parts of the world have different kinds of volcano, and as volcanos are generally found along the edges of tectonic plates, going to one country meand you will probably only see one kind of volcano. Hoeverer every volcano is a little bit different to every other, so you could see lots of sub-types, and possible lots of eruptions with different explosivity.

I would love to go to Chile of Bolivia to look at the volcanos caused by the subduction of the thin Pacific plate under the thick South American plate. The volcanoes in the Andes are generally very explosive because the
Pacific plate carries down some water (mainy trapped in minerals) that then gets let out as the rocks get hot in the mantle. The extra water makes the magma very thick and so the gases can’t escape as the magma rises to the surface, as the gas can’t escape the pressure builds up until it explodes. I am interested in how and when the gas can escape between the crystals in thick magma (it’s one of the things I am working on at the moment). I would also like to see the ruins of the ancient Inca temples and the Nazca lines.

However, can you can let me have a continent instead of a country? If so Africa would be hard to beat. In Ethiopia you can lava lates at Erta Ale, and see a continent breaking apart and what will eventually be a new ocean in the Afar triangle, in Tanzania you can see Ol Doinyo Lengai a volcano that erupts very unusual carbon based mamga (almost all magma is silcon based), in South Africa I would look at the kimberlites – the very odd volcanic fetaures that bring up diamonds from very deep in the earth.

If that’t not allowed then can I have one country and a time machine? The islands on the west coast of Scotland were all volcanoes at about 60 Million years ago when the North Atlantic started to open. Before that we were much closer to America and Greenland. The whole area from the East coast of Canada to Greenland across iceland to Scotland is called the North Althanic Igneous Province, and the volcanic region stretched for 1000’s of miles. There was just enormous volumes of lava erupted in a very short space of time (something over 6.6 million cubic kilometers). If you take all the volcanoes everywhere in the world today we think they produce about 4 cubic kilometers per year. When the North Althanic Igneous Province erupted it produce half that volume in one place. There are lots of unanswered quesitons about what happened and I would like to find us some answers! Nowhere on earth is doing something similar today, but come time in the future it will happen again.