Publications

Volcanic air pollution from both explosive and effusive activity can affect large populations as far as thousands of kilometers away from the source, for days to decades or even centuries. Here, we summarize key advances and prospects in the assessment of health hazards, effects, risk, and management. Recent advances include standardized ash assessment methods to characterize the multiple physicoc

Lava lake surfaces display the tops of active magma columns and respond to eruption variables such as magmatic pressure, convection, degassing, and cooling, as well as interactions with the craters that contain them. However, they are challenging to study owing to the numerous hazards that accompany these eruptions, and they are typically difficult to observe because the emitted gas plumes obscure

Hazard assessment for post-wildfire debris flows, which are common in the steep terrain of the western United States, has focused on the susceptibility of upstream basins to generate debris flows. However, reducing public exposure to this hazard also requires an assessment of hazards in downstream areas that might be inundated during debris flow runout. Debris flow runout models are widely availab

Magma-water interaction can dramatically influence the explosivity of volcanic eruptions. However, syn- and post-eruptive diffusion of external (non-magmatic) water into volcanic glass remains poorly constrained and may bias interpretation of water in juvenile products. Hydrogen isotopes in ash from the 2009 eruption of Redoubt Volcano, Alaska, record syn-eruptive hydration by vaporized glacial me

In active volcanic regions, high-temperature chemical reactions in the hydrothermal system consume CO2 sourced from magma or from the deep crust, whereas reactions with silicates at shallow depths mainly consume atmospheric CO2. Numerous studies have quantified the load of dissolved solids in rivers that drain volcanic regions to determine chemical weathering rates and atmospheric CO2 consumption

Lahars are one of the greatest hazards at many volcanoes, including Volcán de Fuego (Guatemala). On 1 December 2018 at 8:00pm local Guatemala time (2:00:00 UTC), an hour-long lahar event was detected at Volcán de Fuego by two permanent seismo-acoustic stations along the Las Lajas channel on the southeast side. To establish the timing, duration, and speed of the lahar, infrasound array records were

On March 19, 2008, a small explosion heralded the onset of an extraordinary eruption at the summit of Kīlauea Volcano. The following 10 years provided unprecedented access to an actively circulating lava lake located within a region monitored by numerous geodetic tools, including Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), tilt, and gravity. These d

The discovery that large landslides dissected the Hawaiian islands, scattering debris over thousands of square kilometers of seafloor, changed our ideas of island growth and evolution. The evidence is consistent with catastrophic flank collapse during volcano growth, and draws our focus to the currently active island of Hawai’i, the volcanoes Mauna Loa and Kīlauea, and particularly to the actively

Variable eruptive style and explosivity is common in basaltic to basaltic andesite volcanoes but can have uncertain origins. Veniaminof volcano in the Alaska-Aleutian arc is a frequently active open-vent center, regularly producing Strombolian eruptions and small lava flows from an intracaldera cone within an intracaldera ice cap. The September–December 2018 eruption of Veniaminof evolved in explo

We quantified permafrost peat plateau and post-thaw carbon (C) stocks across a chronosequence in Interior Alaska to evaluate the amount of C lost with thaw. Macrofossil reconstructions revealed three stratigraphic layers of peat: (1) a base layer of fen/marsh peat, (2) peat from a forested peat plateau (with permafrost) and, (3) collapse-scar bog peat (at sites where permafrost thaw has occurred).

Infrasound (low-frequency acoustic waves) has proven useful to detect and characterize subaerial volcanic activity, but understanding the infrasonic source during sustained eruptions is still an area of active research. Preliminary comparison between acoustic eruption spectra and the jet noise similarity spectra suggests that volcanoes can produce an infrasonic form of jet noise from turbulence. T

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State unleashed one of the largest debris avalanches (landslide) in recorded history. The debris avalanche deposited 3.3 billion cubic yards of material into the upper North Fork Toutle River watershed and obstructed the Columbia River shipping channel downstream. From the eruption on May 18, 1980, to September 30, 2018, the Toutle River transpor