• Question: what made you so interested in volcanoes to do your work based on them?

    Asked by 534tema27 to Kate on 10 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by 449tema46, 322tema33, 284tema46, Oliver, 268tema29.
    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Seeing molten rock solidify in front of my eyes to form new land was pretty exciting, but it is the fact that we know so little about volcanoes and how they work that is the reason I want to work on them. Until we saw Mount St Helens erupt “sideways” in 1980 we didn’t know how this kind of eruption happened. Predicti0n and forecasting can save lives (10% of the worlds population lives near an active volcano), but we need to understand the system before we can predict what it is going to do.

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