Volcano monitoring: last night's PGS meeting
Last night I attended my first meeting of the Potomac Geophysical Society (PGS). The PGS meets on Thursday nights, and I usually can't make it because I teach on Thursday nights. (I do however attend meetings of the Geological Society of Washington quite regularly, but those are on Wednesday nights.) Now that the semester is over, I was able to make it to the final PGS meeting of the spring.
The meeting was held at Fort Meyer Officer's Club. It's on a military base adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, and before entering, my Prius had to be searched for bombs (as did all other civilian vehicles). The Officer's Club was about what you would expect, I guess -- kind of 1950's decor, elegant once. I noticed they had compact fluorescent light bulbs in all the sockets, which pleased me. PGS meetings consist of: (1) beer downstairs in the lounge, (2) dinner upstairs in the "Campaign Room," (3) business details, and (4) a talk by a guest speaker.
Last night's speaker was Bill Burton, from the USGS's volcano hazards and monitoring program. Bill's office will be launching a comprehensive new volcano website later this year, and he gave us a brief preview of its features in last night's talk. If you'd like a look for yourself, they have a beta version of the site online now.
The meeting was held at Fort Meyer Officer's Club. It's on a military base adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, and before entering, my Prius had to be searched for bombs (as did all other civilian vehicles). The Officer's Club was about what you would expect, I guess -- kind of 1950's decor, elegant once. I noticed they had compact fluorescent light bulbs in all the sockets, which pleased me. PGS meetings consist of: (1) beer downstairs in the lounge, (2) dinner upstairs in the "Campaign Room," (3) business details, and (4) a talk by a guest speaker.
Last night's speaker was Bill Burton, from the USGS's volcano hazards and monitoring program. Bill's office will be launching a comprehensive new volcano website later this year, and he gave us a brief preview of its features in last night's talk. If you'd like a look for yourself, they have a beta version of the site online now.
Bill reviewed the efforts of his office to monitor a whole lot of volcanoes in U.S. territory (including the protectorate of the Mariana Islands). The map above shows how they've got their work cut out for them.
I was struck by two things about Bill's talk. First, that the volcanoes that the USGS has fully equipped with monitoring instruments (high-precision GPS, seismographs, etc.) provide a wealth of information which makes it relatively easy (relative to say, earthquakes) to predict eruptions. We've learned enough that we can use subtle signals to issue eruption watches and warnings, for both people on the ground and planes in the air.
I was struck by two things about Bill's talk. First, that the volcanoes that the USGS has fully equipped with monitoring instruments (high-precision GPS, seismographs, etc.) provide a wealth of information which makes it relatively easy (relative to say, earthquakes) to predict eruptions. We've learned enough that we can use subtle signals to issue eruption watches and warnings, for both people on the ground and planes in the air.
But the second thing I noted is that they don't have every volcano in their area of responsibility fully instrumented. In fact, they don't even have every "dangerous" volcano in their areas fully instrumented. A striking example of this was a story Bill told while showing us this image:
That's Cleveland Volcano, one of the Aleutians. The photograph was taken by an astronaut, who then called the duty officer in the Alaska Volcano Observatory and told them "Cleveland's erupting." The AVO doesn't have instrumentation on Cleveland, so this phone call (from space!) was the first they knew about the eruption! That's a pretty big gaping hole in the program, it seems to me. We should know at the very least when our volcanoes are already erupting. Even better would be to fully instrument all our potentially-dangerous volcanoes to the fullest possible extent, so we can predict in advance when they will erupt.
At the end of the talk, I asked Bill about this: "How much more money would your office need to outfit the under-instrumented volcanoes to the level you think they need?" Bill estimated $80 million, both for installation and the constant upkeep these instruments require. This morning on the drive into work, I heard that the new farm bill has $450 million set aside for Chesapeake Bay environmental work, so while $80 million seems like a lot to me, I guess it's not all that much in the grand scheme of things. In a post this morning, Nicholas at The Critical Zone examined this issue of huge numbers, and all the science that could get done with that money.
At the end of the talk, I asked Bill about this: "How much more money would your office need to outfit the under-instrumented volcanoes to the level you think they need?" Bill estimated $80 million, both for installation and the constant upkeep these instruments require. This morning on the drive into work, I heard that the new farm bill has $450 million set aside for Chesapeake Bay environmental work, so while $80 million seems like a lot to me, I guess it's not all that much in the grand scheme of things. In a post this morning, Nicholas at The Critical Zone examined this issue of huge numbers, and all the science that could get done with that money.
In the wake of the recent tragedies in Myanmar and China, it seems like the US would be wise to invest some money in outfitting our volcanoes with the full suite of monitoring equipment. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Who knows how many human lives an ounce of seismograph is worth? When a destructive eruption does happen, we're going to wish we had spent that $80 million when we had the chance.
