Toward "Supervolcano" technology

In addition to depicting the ultimate volcano-eruption horror story, the recent Discovery Channel/BBC coproduction “Supervolcano” speculates about what technology will be available to the geophysicist in 2025 to monitor active volcanoes. The result is a fictional Virtual Geophysical Laboratory that, when fed the right data, predicts eruption scenarios, thereby providing information to help guide civil emergency-response decisions. On page 821 of this issue, Patanè et al. (1) report a key step toward realizing such an advanced volcano-monitoring technology.