 Good evening and welcome to Open Minds, the Open University's series of talks. Tonight's topic is from underground to outer space, studying the impact of volcanoes. We're delighted to have you with us tonight, either here at our campus in Milton Keynes or if you're joining us remotely. Welcome! Before we start, for those who are here in person, I'd like to draw your attention to the health and safety details on the slide. If you're following us on Twitter or you want to tweet, it's hashtag OUTalks and of course you can access this event through live stream and the details are up. I'm sure many of you will remember the 2010 volcanic eruption in Iceland and the chaos the ash clouds caused locally and to air travel. As a result, the world is now better equipped to respond to a crisis if it happens again. However, the bigger question our speakers from the Open University's science faculty will explore tonight is whether we are now equipped to spot the signs of another major volcanic eruption anywhere in the world. Academics will describe the devastation and environmental impact caused by recent volcanic eruptions and demonstrate how their research is mitigating the effect of these eruptions and predicting new hazards and will unveil a system to monitor volcanoes through satellite from space 24 hours a day anywhere in the world. Tonight, our first speaker will be Professor Hazel Reimer, Dean of the OU's Faculty of Science. She'll describe her research with Earthwatch and use of citizen scientists. Next, you'll hear from Dr Dave McGarvey, senior lecturer in the Faculty of Science, who explores the likelihood of another disruptive Icelandic eruption and presents research illuminating the potential impact of eruptions from other Icelandic volcanoes. Finally, you'll hear from Professor Fabrizio Ferrucci, Professor in Geophysics in the Faculty of Science, who will reveal a new system inspired by EVOS. EVOS stands for European Volcano Observatory Space Services. EVOS, developed at the OU, made it possible to monitor volcanoes from space. I hope you find this an inspiring exchange of views and ask you to save up your questions for our speakers until the end when there'll be an opportunity for a panel Q&A discussion. For those of you joining us online, use the hashtag, hashtag at OU Talks to join in the conversation. But without further ado, please join me in welcoming Professor Hazel Reimer. Hello, welcome. Volcanoes and the contribution of citizen scientists. Well, you can't start any talk like this without defining a volcano. Usually, we think of a volcano as a nice pointy-peak thing, perhaps with some snow on the top, like these very well-behaved volcanoes over here. Quite often, they're actually really rather small, unimpressive-looking cinder cones. But more often, they're a great big hole in the ground. They don't look impressive at all. In fact, they're so unimpressive that people tend to build villages and towns in them quite often. And when you have large explosions, you then have some growth inside a cone afterwards. So the point is that volcanoes come in all shapes and sizes and their impacts, similarly, are all shapes and sizes. A question I often get is, are there more volcanoes now than there used to be? They seem to be in the news all of the time. Are there more of them? Well, if we look back through the record, going back to the 1400s through to more or less now, the number of known volcanoes has certainly increased through time. The number of volcanoes active along this curve here has increased through time and so has the population. So, obviously, volcanoes cause population increase. It just shows you can prove anything with statistics and graphs. Now, of course, what this is actually suggesting is that there are more people around and they're aware and able to report on volcanoes and their eruptions. But what's actually rather interesting is if we look in the detail of this last part here where increases in the numbers of volcanoes appear to have happened. And so here we're going from the 1800s onto to the present time. If we look at all eruptions here, okay, they've increased through time. Sorry, the number of eruptions have increased a little bit and that's, as I showed earlier, because there are more people looking at these things now. There are some interesting dips here, or interesting features altogether. The eruption of Cracota in 1883 and the eruption of Montpellet in 1902 do seem to be associated with an increase in activity or perhaps reporting of activity for a period of time when people were very excited about it. Then there were some periods here, World War I and World War II, when volcanic activity decreased or perhaps interest or ability to record these things decreased. But perhaps the most significant is this bottom graph here, which shows the size of eruptions over about 0.1 cubic kilometre. So they have sort of reasonable size, but not enormous volcanic eruptions. Has broadly speaking stayed more or less the same in the last couple of hundred years where records are really quite secure. So no, they haven't changed dramatically in human times. I'm going to talk a little bit now about a project I've been involved with for some time now with Open University students and Earthwatch volunteers. And it's been based in a country, Nicaragua, here in Central America. We've also worked in Costa Rica. But just focusing here in Nicaragua, here's Nicaragua has a nice long line of volcanoes in it. They form part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. And on a map like this, they're nice little triangles and they're proper volcano shaped volcanoes. You look at Google Maps and you wouldn't even know that they were volcanoes, actually. This dotted line here marks the outer parts of the big caldera structure of the Messiah volcano. Most of it doesn't look at all like a volcano. It's got a great big lake in it. It's got people living on the edges here. But it does have some little holes here which are the active craters. It's got several active craters, in fact. If you happen to be taking snapshots from the space shuttle, this is what you would see, his Central America. And this is here. This is Messiah volcano. And this is a plume of gas, mostly water, but also sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and various other gases coming out of the volcano and disappearing off there into the Pacific. And if you're closer to the ground, that's what it looks like. Looks like a lot of cloud most of the time and nothing too significant. You land at the airport and really just looks like some cloud on the horizon. Does help if you've got a label on it. But there is the Messiah volcano. Digassing away quietly. Apparently not doing any harm to anybody. If you are growing coffee crops, though, nearby, you sometimes find this happens. Can you see around the edges here? They're burned with acid rain, basically, that's being dumped out from the volcano. So that's very much a local environmental impact. If your gateway here is made of metal, you can see that easily gets corroded. And a lot of people use corrugated iron roofs. And they also get corroded and, of course, don't work quite so well in the rainy season if you live downwind of the volcano. So there are a lot of local environmental impacts of this sort of volcanic activity. We call this persistent degassing, not surprisingly, because it keeps on degassing. So what's this got to do with citizen scientists? Well, you will have heard lots about citizen science in the news over the last several months and years. It's becoming an increasingly used term, and it means all sorts of things to different people. It can mean using your computer, the CPU time on your computer to do some calculations and you don't actually have to have anything to do with it. It can involve you downloading some images and looking through them, because actually people are rather better than software for picking out certain things and images. And this is used for some of the astronomy-type projects. Other projects involved, as these people here are, collecting all sorts of strange bits of data, which, as an individual piece of data, seems a bit mad, but you put it all together and always the whole is much greater than the individual parts of data that you collect. This is an oceanography project, of course, but we can do exactly the same sort of thing on a volcano. And the great advantage to using citizen scientists is for a start they are there because they want to be, so unlike some students, not open university students, obviously, but like some students, they really want to be there and they really, really want to be engaged with the work that's going on. They come from all sorts of walks of life and so provide a terrific amount of support and insights just because they do other things in their real lives. Quite often, they're electrical engineers, for example, and they can fix our pieces of kits. That's really helpful, but there are all sorts of other reasons. And another is that for the sort of monitoring work that I do on the volcanoes I'm looking at, I need to keep making these measurements over and over again over a long period of time and you can't do that without an army of people coming to help make the measurements. So, this is what it looks like at Messiah Volcano on the ground here. And, well, it sometimes looks like this. These are obviously not citizen scientists here because they're running away, not looking at it and making the measurements. So, this volcano, it degasses quietly most of the time, but every now and then it has a vent clearing episode where it has a little explosion. What is the citizen scientists doing? They're doing these sorts of measurements, groveling around in the mud, making, in this case, resistivity measurements. Quite a lot of standing around by an expensive piece of kit, pressing buttons every now and then. Sometimes a bigger piece of kit. Sometimes setting pieces of kit up and leaving them to record, doing the same sort of thing, looking down into the crater there. But the point is there are lots and lots of different types of measurements that we need to make. And one solution is to find yourself a fantastic research student, give him a gas mask, put all the pieces of kit on his back and send him on his way. They wear out, he can't do that for long. I've tried. So, how much better to take your team of volunteers, citizen scientists, and this is me training them making, this is a gravity meter, you can't really see it in there, but making gravity measurements, GPS and gas and various other measurements, teach people how to make these measurements and then they can go off and make measurements themselves and you can get many, many more measurements in a particular amount of time. There is no limit, as far as I have discovered so far, to what volunteers can actually do. They're very willing to be trained up to do anything and their tolerance for doing awful things is huge. Well, they're not awful, it's just very hot there. So, as an example of the sorts of things that we've been able to do is we've been able to look at the sulfur dioxide flux, that's the amount of sulfur dioxide coming out of the volcano over a long period of time. And when you make an individual measurement, you don't really, of course you don't know what the next measurement's going to be, but you don't know what that's telling you about the volcano until you've got this long series to look at. And here, these red lines indicate when there were eruptions. So now we can see when the level of gas goes down and eruption of some sort follows. And we can develop a plumbing system, a model for what's going on in the subsurface underneath the active crater at this volcano. Here's the active vent. This is a cross section through the other craters. And underneath this active vent, we have bubbly rock and much harder, more consolidated, less gas-rich rock underneath it. And all we're looking at is the ratio or the thickness of the two. So we get a bigger, thicker frothy layer on the top there. And we can actually monitor that through time using these geophysical measurements. Some other measurements that we do in the field is with these petri dishes here that we make here in the labs. We stick them with lots and lots of duct tape onto various trees around the volcano. And we also compare those results with these things here. I hope you can just make them out. Telanzia, air plants, you can buy them in garden centres here. They're very expensive, but they grow all over the place at Messiah Volcano. If you map out, see these little red dots here, these are all the places citizen scientists went off and made these measurements. They were looking at the air plants, measuring the quality and quantity of them, looking at the gas and other things and putting these sulfation plates up next to them so we could see what the quality of the air was. And what we found was that where we had a huge amount of gas coming out of the volcano, we had no or very poor quality Telanzia plants. And that tells us that we've actually discovered here a rather cheap and easy gas monitoring system. But it does help us to see what the air quality in the particular volcano is. So here are some citizen scientists at the end of the day preparing samples. This is grass samples that they're preparing for analysis. And one of the best things, of course, is you get to sit and chat afterwards. But as I say always, they provide a huge amount of information and help for us with our project. They come up with all sorts of ideas because no idea is too crazy to come up with. But often, if you're not a professional scientist, you dare to ask some other things that we wouldn't perhaps want to. So I'll just finish with Michael. I'm Michael Perkins. I'm from Edinburgh in Scotland and I'm studying geosciences at the Open University at the moment. I've always wanted to come to Latin America and I love the country, yeah. But the project itself has been great as well. I love working with people who really understand the science here. I think the thing I find most rewarding is being able to go out and make measurements and really contribute to the science effort to do things that without so many volunteers here, just we wouldn't be able to gather as much data. And that for me is the most rewarding thing to really be able to contribute. To learn in the field is a very great experience for me. It's great to go out into the field and do experiments and to be able to take your data from something like this and use that to build it into a project or something like that would be amazing. It gives you much better, much more indefinitiyf knowledge of the field and it inspires you. If you can, go and do an expedition like this because it's well, well worthwhile. You see the local culture, you work with real scientists. It's an amazing experience and it's definitely worth trying. So you might think that the citizen scientists get almost as much out of it as the scientists do. I'm not convinced. Anyway, what next? Well, if you're not already studying Geosciences with the OU, do look into that on the top link there or join an EarthWatch expedition on the second link below. So now Dave McGarvey is next. Good evening. Iceland. Fabio, ysbwysig i'r Llywodraeth, Glacios a Hotsprings. But the whisk is a bit expensive compared to Scotland anyway. So I'm going to talk about our volcanic neighbour and I'm going to focus on what happened in 2010 with a reassuring note that if we had another eruption, we're not going to see what happened in 2010. I'll also talk about what I call the forgotten eruption which happened a year afterwards which people have largely forgotten about. And then I'll focus a little bit on what the Open University is doing to help us understand Icelandic volcanoes with a view to what might happen should another one go off, which one might go off and what we'll do about it. So here we have... Everybody calls it the Icelandic volcano, of course, because Eia Fiatlai Yco is quite a mouthful to talk about. And there's a picture of in April 2010 when it's doing its spectacular eruption. And just to remind you of what actually happened at the time, I've got a short video clip to show you. What I hope you can see here is that some beautiful explosions taking place and hopefully two different sizes of material. From simple observation you can see there's a lot of fine grain material being carried up and being drifting away with the wind. But a lot of very big clumps as well coming out and landing nearby. And this is all secret of volcanoes as bubbles. It's simply to get explosions and eruptions like this, you just need a lot of gas escaping to form bubbles. And different sizes of explosions taking place, different sizes of bubbles coming out. And that's for you, one of the key seekers of volcanoes. To get an eruption you need bubbles. And lots of them produce an explosive eruption as in Eia Fiatlai Yco 2010. I've called it a perfect eruption, so why do I call it a perfect eruption? There's really five key factors that made this so disruptive to us. It was unusually long-lived. 45 days is a very long time for an explosive eruption. It also produced an unreasonable amount of very fine ash, this sort of fine ash that can be cied very long distances. Absolutely perfect for disrupting European airspace. And the winds actually took the ash direct towards us. It didn't go swirling over the North Atlantic for days before coming to us. It took it straight from Iceland to us. And a dry weather period, as well, meant that we didn't see much of the ash being washed out by weather, by winds, by rain. And perhaps the key one was, at the time, the flight rules basically said, if there's ash in the sky, you don't fly. So suddenly we found ourselves in position and I don't think it's happened since the Second World War where there wasn't any aircraft in the sky at all. The whole place ground to a standstill. Absolutely fascinating. Well, I find it fascinating. And people say, how on earth can you come up with a confusing name like Eia fiatalliochol? Well, the oatmeal came up with a rather nice idea. I'll let you enjoy it for a moment. I like the description. Big and angry, probably going to blow up and ruin everyone's vacation soon. So there you are. That's a nice sort of way. So I'll come back to Eia fiatalliochol later and say why it wouldn't be a problem if it happened again or if it's a bigger problem. But the year afterwards, does anybody remember Greensvot blowing up the year afterwards? Yeah, a few people would do. Well, to volcanologists, it's become a little bit forgotten because everybody still was working on Eia fiatalliochol when this went off. So it didn't really get the attention it deserved. It was unexpectedly large. It was massive. It produced more ash in one day than Eia fiatalliochol did in 45 days. And the plume going up reached 20 kilometres. Eia fiatalliochol reached about 10. So it's double the size of the plume. And it's quite a complex eruption, this. You just see this great big umbrella cloud. But if I move the cursor ever so slightly, you've got a lot of steam in this point here. You've got a lot of brown ash coming here. And you get this very strange, ground-hugging brown ash going off down to the south. So a lot was going on in that particular volcano and it was worthy of much further study. And perhaps why it was forgotten was it did not cause the disruption that Eia fiatalliochol did because the ash took a very circuitous route from Iceland, swirled around to the north, around to the west, before it trickled towards the UK. And the red colour is where we've got an ash concentration more than 4,000 milligrams per cubic metre. And that's where you shouldn't take an aircraft into that. You notice it's over Scotland. By a wonderful twist of irony, my flight was meant to take off that day to Iceland. So I was stuck for a few days until the ash cloud cleared. I was fortunate enough, slightly after Greenwater erupted in 2011, to join an expedition to go out and have a look at it. And it was quite a bizarre scene to see this beautiful ice cap with up to 700 metres of ice covered in this fresh ash, which was still cooling down. And the bottom left image shows the hole melted into the glacier by that eruption, that very complex eruption. And part of the fun was getting to drive around in massive jeeps, which, if you're a boy, you can't really ignore that stuff. And that jeep has 48-inch tyres, so that gives you a size of a scale. They go absolutely anywhere. So here's the take-home messages before I move on to some of my own work to get out of these two eruptions. That AFL-2010 was not a typical eruption because typical eruptions only last up to about a week, not 45 days. And that's what Greenswatt did. It was very typical of what we might expect from a volcanic eruption iPhone. Short, sharp blast, a lot of ash in the air, and then you're crossing your fingers that it doesn't actually end up coming over the UK. Number four, the changes to the ash detection and the flight rules means we'll never see disruption like this again. There's no more an ash in the sky you don't fly rule. We now fly when it's an ash in the sky, but within safe limits, safe concentrations. So the current thinking is that if we had an eruption absolutely identical to AFL-2010, with exactly the same conditions, weather conditions, et cetera, 25% of our less of the flights that were cancelled in 2010 would be cancelled. So I think if you need a bit of reassurance, that's hopefully a little bit there. Okay, what are we future? Should we expect more volcanic ash squares from Iceland? Yes, definitely. We sort of dodged the bullet really since 1947, at one of the last big ones of a volcano called Heklae. We've had a number of eruptions. It could have affected us, but it's the growth of commercial air flight which is causing us a problem because of course eruptions affect that. The little diagram there, don't worry too much about it. The rectangle highlights the diagram on the left with all the numbers. It's showing eruptions in Iceland from the 1300s onwards and Greensvot is Iceland's most frequently erupting volcano. We've seen Barthabunga went off at the end of last year into the beginning of this year. So we've got quite a lot of volcanoes that are potentially active in Iceland. And there's the locations of them. The last three, a fiatlioco 2010 down at the bottom, Greensvot 2011 in the centre of the Vatneuco ice cap, then Barthabunga that went off at the tail end of last year, beginning of this year. Showing two locations because one is the location under ice where all the action started and then the actual eruption itself took place beyond the ice out to the north. Cattler down at the very bottom in white is the one that everybody's worried about because up until this century, sorry, last century, it used to go off twice a century creating rather large eruptions and it hasn't really done a bigger eruption since 1918. And that's the one that's been quite heavily monitored at the moment. I'm going to talk about two volcanoes that myself and my PhD students from the Open University are working on. One down the bottom right called Urrylluqol and one over to the left called Tynfxialteyco. Great names, aren't they? Great names. So Urrylluqol in 1362 had a massive explosive eruption and when you go there today, all you can see are remnants of this eruption of this sort of slightly pale looking material draping the landscape here and on top of this lava here. But that's not what it looked like when it did erupt. We have no reliable eyewitness reports of it because people scarpered out of the area due to massive earthquakes. But from reconstructing what's on the ground, it would have been pretty much like to put a tubo in 1991 with an eruption calling up to about 34 kilometres. Now, Eiffelioqol went up to about 10. Greens were up to 20. This is 34. This is an absolutely massive eruption and it happened up that long ago in geological terms in Iceland. So what we're doing is looking at the deposits from eruption and reconstructing what actually happened as a means of helping us understand what could potentially happen to Western Europe in terms of the ash coming over but also looking to assist the Icelanders in local hazards and what might happen should we have another eruption. Two very simple ways in which material, excuse me, falls out of an eruption column. One, it just falls out and you get class dropping out on what we call air fall. We can go to the deposits from this eruption and we can identify the material that fell out of the eruption during air fall and from that we can tell all sorts of interesting information about how high the eruption plume was, which direction the wind was and various other key bits of information used to reconstruct the eruption. I have no youth student working on this and we forensically dissect the different phases of the eruption to see what's going on. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of measurements in the field. It's a small team. Perhaps something for citizen scientists, actually, to do lots of these measurements. One of the other hazards from an eruption that's more local rather than the air fall that comes over Britain is pyvercoastic flows, which some people call PDC, it's called pyvercoastic density currents. You don't want to be in the pathway of one of these. They're very hot, about 400-500 degrees centigrade and they can travel at about 200 kilometres an hour so you can't get out of the way. We found evidence at Oruiwchol for after the very first part of the eruption, we've got the soil down here in the bottom right. We have a number of thin air fall layers. Then we find evidence of two separate phases of pyvercoastic flow activity. Above that, we've got another five metres of various types of ash and various types of information going on. This is just the very early part of the eruption. It's one of the most complex eruptions I know of. We're having fun dissecting that and the information will be used to help us understand what effects another eruption of this kind might have in Iceland but also over Western Europe. In particular, this is another view of the volcano. Just to give you an impression, it's about two kilometres from the far land in the bottom left to the summit. Two kilometres, it's a fair old distance and climbing around on the upper slopes below the ice. It does involve a little bit of hiking up and down, but it's a lot of fun and it's a wonder of discovery because you're always discovering new stuff. That's one of the real buzzies from doing research. So, there's the location again. We've just been to Oruyoko down on the right in the south-east. I'm now going to take you to the final volcano, Tin Fjalltajoko, over towards the west. I've gone over to you PhD students to start it. We don't know anything about this volcano apart from the fact that it may have produced a very large eruption about 50,000 years ago that would have sent another enormous ash cloud across Western Europe. So, we basically have got a great deal of fun going there and working out what's actually happened. We do it, for example, by looking for a distance and seeing what's going on and making some guesstimates about what we... using our experience to map the volcano from a distance, but you have to get up close and personal if you're really going to understand the volcano. And this one's quite fun because you have a lot of crumbling up and down on ridgies, on-screen, and you get the opportunity for some nice sunset pictures as well. And there we go. So, we've just started this project with it 10 days on it last September and my students out there at the moment and I'll be joining them in a couple of weeks to continue the research on this volcano. And my final slide is a big question. When will the Icelandic eruption happen? Well, Iceland tends to produce an eruption every three to four years and we've seen this pattern continuing for us in centuries. We have some candidates that we think might go off and the wonderful aspect about the Icelanders are they know the volcanoes very well. This is part of the underground within the title of this entire session. They have equipment there to detect what's happening beneath the surface, seismic energy, ground deformation and in the past few eruptions they've been able to give us a week to two weeks notice that an eruption is about to happen by using this equipment to detect a movement of molten rock beneath the surface under volcanoes before it actually starts to erupt. So, I can't tell you when it's going to happen. I can't tell you where it's going to happen but we should get a couple of weeks notice of what might happen, makes the eruption and using that we can look ahead to see what the weather might be doing and use that to mitigate any possible impacts on the UK. Thank you. I'll hand over now to Fabricio. Good evening. Well, I think I'll move to the next slide. The difference with respect to the call to the talks of my colleagues is that we move volcanologists away from volcanoes. So, that may be an advantage for volcanologists. Surely not an advantage for scientists but in any case it's a bit way different. The reason for is that we have plenty of volcanoes worldwide and if we think global, we have to monitor all of them at once. And the good reason for that is not only environment but also because we have, well, take Iceland. Iceland has stranded thousands of flights and 100 of 1,000 passengers and caused damage for, say, 10 billion pounds minimum. And this can happen everywhere. And airlines flying from London to any other place in the world, for instance, flying from, say, Los Angeles to Japan, they have to fly over tens of volcanoes. All potentially erupting and creating volcanic eruptions with clouds and so forth. So, the problem is serious and how to monitor 1,500 volcanoes which are considered to be active as they have erupted at least once in the last 12,000 years. Well, we have three ways. Well, one is that of course of being very close, ground-based. That's not citizen sciences, they're crazy scientists, very close. It's a monsterised, it was the last eruption on British land. And on the left, it's very close, definitely. On the left, you have taken from airplane, it's quite close, dangerous as well. And the third case is not close at all, it's from satellite. And that's a development, you don't see the island, but you see that in about three hours, the cloud has covered as much as 2,000 kilometres. And on the right, this is a perfect modelling by showing what can be done today. So you can establish, which is the concentration, this is sulphur dioxide. And you can see with the framework every 15 minutes, you can observe and predict where is the cloud and which is the concentration. Sulfur dioxide can be dangerous for a minor danger for aircraft, but usually it's considered to be accompanying ash. So in both cases, this is something that should be done everywhere, anytime, worldwide. So the challenge, this is done for meteorology, but it's not done for volcanology, so we have to reach this point. Let's say how, again, here we just see something, it's a mountain and what is in red, definitely, is what is melt. So what is in red is the source of heat from the crater and what you see developing in black is ash. So this is observed from 36,000 kilometres above Earth, it's a geostationary satellite and this is available because it's a meteorological satellite and you can see that you have control both on the cloud and on the source, so we can do it. But we don't. And the point is that, why we cannot do this? Well, if you take this and you have 1,500 volcanoes, it means that you need a very complex system for handling that. This is not sufficient, you have to be real-time, you have to monitor these important hotspots, what we call them hotspots, and then after that you have to calculate to compute. Of course you don't have time of looking at a picture as the one you see there, but from this picture you can see that there are moments in which every measure, every five minutes, in which you can find that this probable ash means that your ash cloud is not yet developed but you can predict that it could be in moments. And again this should be done everywhere, all the time, so you cannot look at that. Some machine has to do this for you and the machine cannot be wrong, so this is the main challenge. And from that what you do, when you are on ground, say you on an observatory, consider that worldwide there are 1,500 volcanoes, but you can count maybe 30, 30 good observatories, meaning that almost 1,500 volcanoes are not observed from ground. But if you had an observatory there you could do something, if I can, yeah. You could compute the development of the lava flow. You inject in your computing code, from your computing code how many cubic metres per second you have measured by satellite, you insert there and you see the lava flow when it can go, how long it takes and when it will stop. This is the main problem for volcanology. Scientists mainly look at prediction, but once the prediction is done then you have to predict when the eruption will be over, where the lava flow will stop and so forth. This is much more difficult, because it impacts directly on your civil protection operations. And this bears major responsibilities, so everybody wants to avoid it, of course. Let's go ahead more recently, where this can, of course this is used for everywhere, for airlines, whatever, and so forth. But very recently, the most recent major eruption involving major civil protection problems was in Fogo, Cape Verde. Cape Verde is a very poor country, so they have a minimal organisation, so they have some seismic station, they have some good volcanologists, they don't have money for doing too much. And therefore, they asked us, almost in real time, we knew that the eruption was going on, because you had just detected that it was happening, and they asked us to tell them what. The flow, you see the flow in this picture, and the risk was that the flow could escape this summit caldera, this sort of hole at the top of the volcano, and go downslope. Going downslope, all major cities are downslope. It's not a very big, so you have 150,000 people living on the island, but 150,000, if one third or 150,000 is threatened by an eruption, is very much. And therefore, the risk was, are we able to predict if this flow will go out of the caldera and going down, or stay within the caldera, in that case, take the picture. That's fine, so you have a picture, nobody's there, it's okay. Question, we were able to answer this question, and it was not that easy. We were observing the start of the eruption when you see red means that is starting. This is a 15 minutes observation rate, and this is the very few hours of the beginning of the eruption, and you see that red can correspond to a measure of cubic meter per second, the flow of magma from the bocas from the crater. This is what is shown, because in observatory you usually do graphs, and in the graphs you have the time against the cubic meter per second. So you know every five minutes, in this case every 15 minutes, what's happening, and therefore which is the prediction in terms of length of your flow. And this is what you see from a very high resolution picture, you see the flow, this is near infrared, but this is very nice, the picture above is very nice, but you can take this picture seldom. There were four taken during the eruption, the eruption lasted for two months, so basically you cannot use them for doing anything, just for knowing in detail, but it's not sufficient for organising a response. Conversely, we were able to know, everybody understands, on the left you have the history of the eruption, you see that the eruption starts very strong, and then after a few days of confusion, then declines, and you can say the end of the eruption is where you have no more points, basically you can say that after 20 days that nothing serious was going to happen, and we told them, and luckily we were right, some responsibility, but not so much. And on the other side, which is interesting in terms of what is more scientifically interesting, while you are detecting how many cubic metres per second are being erupted and therefore your flow, how long it will go, how far it will go, on the same time you can compute how many cubic metres have been erupted, and therefore you know from, say, 20 days, between 20 and 30 days of the start of the eruption that have been erupted about 10 million cubic metres, and the end will be 11 million cubic metres. So from both graphs, you know that something, that the situation is no longer serious. What is needed? Well, plenty of things are needed for global organ monitoring, indeed, because the advantage as speakers before being said properly is the advantage of volcanoes is first that you know where they are, which is not a case for earthquakes. And second, that you have plenty of measurement that makes sense. You can measure thermal power. You see top left, there is a very nice picture taken from satellite, 700 kilometres above Earth, and what you see is what you hear in Lava Lake is something about one kilometre is the hole, the crater, and within that you have 100 metres in which you see a network of reddish lava. You see that from 700 kilometres. You cannot see every day. You cannot see, say, once per month, maybe, but you can do it. And second, gas fluxes. The red spot is a volcano in between a retrain Ethiopia, Nabro. Nabro was a volcano oversleeping, is the word, meaning that it was sleeping since a very long while and probably 5000 years, but scientists do not agree on that figure. But suddenly these volcano erupted. Why suddenly? Because the place is a very delicate place because in the boundary between Ethiopia and Eritrea is a place of a past war, very recent war. You have anti-personal land mines. It's a place where you have nobody accepting few nomads, etc. Therefore, you don't have an observatory, indeed. And so the volcano suddenly started erupting. And, of course, it had certainly had, there were pre-cursory signs, but nobody could see them. And what you see there is the story of the sulfur dioxide emitted by that volcano. In two days and a half, it went to Egypt, then to Afghanistan, then to China. So we can track it. We can measure it, meaning that we can do plenty of things. The story here, in the bottom right, you have this ash cloud. And finally, you have other things that can be measured by radar satellites. And all this is feasible. This is feasible in real time, near real time, delay time, but it's feasible. What is the problem is that each of, there are, you would say, 20 to 25 satellites today that could measure everything everywhere. The problem is organisation. And if the problem is global, global means that you need a global organisation. So the real problem I see, I think that science is there, technology is there, everything is feasible. And it's not that expensive, in my opinion. That expensive means that we could set up a preliminary service with 10 million. 10 million is nothing. It's less than one kilometre of motorway, if you want. But with the plus, plus, plus, no TVA, no VAT. The point is that for that, you need something which is between political, diplomatic and science. The three things. There is a good case, it's the case of meteorology. Meteorology works worldwide and 24-7. We should be able to do that. I think it is feasible. I'm personally confident that before retiring, I see something of that. Thank you very much. Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Hazel. Dave and Fabrizio, that was inspiring material and I'm sure it's left us all with a great deal to think about and even put a few questions. So now it's time for you to erupt for your questions and comments until around 7.30 when we invite you to stay and have some cheese and drink with us and chat more informally with the speakers and other guests here tonight. But full time being, let the panel rejoin us. So Hazel, David and Frazzizio, if you could join us on the panel. Just down that way. Thank you. Let me just settle in. We've already got a couple of questions from Facebook and I will also take your questions from here. When you put your question, please say who you are and where you're from and please, if possible, keep your questions short so we can answer as many questions as possible in the time allowed. So any questions? Oh yes, one at the back. So the microphone will get to you. Question for David. Did you have any involvement with the Mocha aircraft, the Met Office Civil Contingency aircraft, the design for sniffing the air basically which is what you were talking about for air monitoring? Myself or Fabrizio? Well, I'm more focused on satellites than aircraft but the advantage, maybe I can give some my opinion. We are not using that but this is done usually when you have a crisis. The point with aircraft that you have two points. The first you have to fly through. And if you don't know yet which is the concentration of ash, for instance, can be dangerous. And independent if you are a jet or with a propeller in both cases. The second point is that in terms of timeliness, the response is delayed because you have to know where is the eruption, where is how far you are from that, then you have to fly your aircraft and then it takes time. Probably the best is that you run both things together so you have satellite observation and with that you refine your observation through aircraft, it would be good. If I could maybe actually answer the question, sorry. I didn't have any involvement with that aspect of the two eruptions in Iceland. I'm very much a ground based man and my job is really going out and looking at the source of eruptions and trying to use that. But certainly during the 2010 and 2011 eruptions, the Met Office aircraft were used quite extensively and they got quite a bit, a little bit damaged. Certainly in 2010, I think one of them was actually working in 2011 and had the time to repair it when the next eruption came on, okay? Okay, very good. I have a question from the back there. Thanks very much, Vicky. Thank you. My name is Patsy Cann. I'm an ex-OU psychology student. I wanted to ask you what type of research was carried out after the 2010 no-fly eruption to decide what would be safe for the future? Okay, I think that's one for me. A variety of things. First of all, they went to places in the world where they have frequent volcanic eruptions in ash clouds and where they have a protocol set up for what's safe to fly and what's not. For example, in Alaska, there's a number of eruptions very frequently put out ash clouds. So they learned from there and then they talked to the various aeronautical engineers to decide what was the safe conservation of ash to fly. It's a balance between you can fly an aircraft through an ash cloud up to a certain point. When the ash gets to such a high concentration, the ash actually melts within the engine and then the engine stalls. And this has happened on a couple of occasions in the past, but you have to go right into the heart of one of these plumes of ash coming up and to experience that. But the damage to the aircraft can be extensive, even with the modest amount of ash. So there was a balancing act taken. Well, you can fly through the ash cloud, but only within a certain concentration, because at that point you're getting modest damage to the engine and the airframe, but not compromising the safety of aircraft and the passengers inside. So it was quite an interesting debate at the time. Thank you. Thank you. Good. Any other questions? There's one at the back there. Any other questions while we take that one? Okay, go ahead. Dari from the Opium University. I was just wondering if there's any scope or any possibility for a volcanic eruption that could be so big in the sort of near future that could affect the weather to the point that affects the climate long-term or is that kind of science fiction? It's happened before and it will happen again. It depends when you mean by soon. Soon for a scientist or soon for an average human being? I don't know. 200 years or something? Maybe. If we think of things like Toba, for example, and you can expect a large eruption every two to 300 years. We use a volcanic explosivity index where you'll have a mild effect on the climate. And eruptions that tend to take place near every equator tend to affect the climate more because you get into both hemispheres. Eruptions on Iceland and Antarctica tend to affect that hemisphere alone. But the really biggest eruptions that Hazel was referring to, they occur once every 100, 200,000 years. And there's a general rule in volcanology that the larger the eruption, the larger the precursor signals for that large eruption. So I think if something was stirring at depth beneath, say, Yellowstone or Long Valley or some of the big cold air systems in Argentina, we would expect to see something of it. But that's part where, for bits of those work comes in because some of these remote volcanoes don't have any ground-based monitoring. And so ground deformation from satellites would probably be very useful for detecting movements over a period of time. It's working currently. I think the scary thing is that we haven't monitored one of those volcanoes erupting because fortunately we haven't been around to do it. So our monitoring is getting better and better and using the ground-based measurements, we're understanding more about the plumbing systems of volcanoes and how they work. And then we can apply that to the remote sensing, the satellite-based measurements, and we can infer what's going on at the ground because we've got the ground-based measurements as well. So you need some of both of those, but we haven't had one of those enormous eruptions. So we don't actually know what the precursors are. We can make some pretty intelligent guesses as to what they might be. But how long those precursors would go on for is something that I would say there was some debate over. If you wanted to have a little Google search for something interesting going on at the moment, look up a volcano called Uturuncu, U-T-U-R-U-N-C-U, much easier to pronounce than A, if you'll take a look. I can remember it as Bolivia or Peru, but the ground is rising underneath that volcano at quite a remarkable rate, suggesting that something very interesting is going on underground. But you remember the situation on Camping for Grey in 1983? 1971, 1983. In total, it was three metres. Uplift, no eruption. Uplift and then it went back down again. No, it's difficult to recover the deformation. But basically, why did it not erupt? Who knows. So sometimes there's a precursor, and sometimes there isn't. All precursor. Another question there, sir? Yeah, I'm Roger Pitfield. I think some of you know me, I work at the OU. As well as being a former student, et cetera. A question I like to ask is, some of the maps are interesting with the triangles. There's places I saw I could recognise and other places I couldn't. What can you tell us about undersea volcanoes? Were they represented in that map? And what's the kind of ratio between land and sea? Suba area of volcanoes. So we don't show underwater volcanoes. They do exist and if they are deep, you usually don't take care of them. But recently there were two eruptions, three eruptions, it was in Tonga and it's likely before two years of eruption in the Canary Islands in Yerro. And another eruption in the Red Sea is, I don't remember the name, but in any case it's in Yemen. And these are very shallow. What you can see from satellite is sulphur dioxide. Of course you don't see the thermal signature. It's difficult. But you can see anomalous concentration of sulphur dioxide. So it's doing better and better, I find it. Some of the most impressive chains of volcanoes in the world are at what we call the Medoesian ridges that run along the plate boundaries. But these are under three, four kilometres of water. So they don't really pose any danger to us in terms of ash clouds. But the ocean islands that do pop up above the surface, they could potentially, places like Tenerife, have had large eruptions in the past. And those are particularly interesting as well because the hazard is not just the volcanic eruption. That's quite significant where you are. And of course, if it's big enough, you can have effects on the weather for a period of time or something even worse. But of course you can have tsunami and all sorts of things being caused by eruptions like that. So all sorts of hazards associated with those. Just a few questions coming in. People are interested in the different types of volcano. I don't know if it's possible to give us a description of different types of a volcano. It's particularly a question in what is a shield volcano. You have a picture, a beautiful picture of a shield volcano. Well, a shield volcano is a very obvious name actually because it looks like an upturned shield. It's a very low elevation volcano. And it's made of lava flows principally and the lavas are quite runny, and so they flow away. And so if your volcano is made of slightly more sticky viscous lava, then it is able to make up a big edifus. But if it's made of slightly runnier material, then the edifus is much lower and forms a shield volcano. So it's to do with the stuff it's made of. Any more questions? Sorry, basalt or andeside. OK, just one in front. Thank you very much, my cat, auto, my computer today. So I've got a new name if you want one. Nigel Windsor Earthwatch. Just to say thank you, Hazel, for all the work you've done with Earthwatch over the last 20 years, pioneering stuff. The feedback we get from the volunteers is outstanding. If you're going to start your programme again, where would you, starting on a new volcano, where would be an ideal place to start a 20 year programme with Earthwatch for citizen science? There are so many volcanoes in the world that I've not visited. Goodness, almost any. I've always wanted to do some work on Yellowstone. So perhaps there. And the advantage of that is it ticks all of the boxes. It's got the hot pools. It's got the danger of the hazard. It's got the huge caldera. It's doing things. It's really moving around. And it's quite easy to get to and quite easy to get away from, too. So Yellowstone, thank you very much. We're signing that up then. Great question. Any more questions? Yes, gentlemen there. Let's wait till the... Sorry. I'm sorry. I did actually used to work for the Open University. I've actually visited some places. I'll give you an example. Banyos in Ecuador, right beside a volcano that erupts all the time. To something, I do know the name of it. It's just gone out of my head. What I'm curious about is that lots of people do seem to live around volcanoes. Why are they still alive? I was born in Naples. Go on. It's a good question. Why do people live in Naples for Britain? It's about three million. Why are they still alive? Well, they don't erupt all of the time. The hazard isn't enormous all of the time. Of course, when it does erupt, it's very significant and impacts a huge number of people. One of the problems is that there are getting to be more and more people on the planet and more and more people are living closer and closer to volcanoes. Therefore, we are becoming more vulnerable from that point of view. Also from the point of view that our societies are so interconnected now as we're hearing, you have an eruption that goes on in Iceland. It devastates air travel in Europe, which maybe isn't such a bad thing, but there are huge economic effects of that. Farmers in Africa and other places, for example, had produced that they couldn't ship into Europe because of an Icelandic eruption, so we're all very interconnected. But it is safe to visit Naples. Maybe the question concerns Tungurawa, probably. It was Tungurawa. Yes, because it's really in terms of volcanic ash is one of the worst places to visit. Tungurawa. Of course, while you get so many people living next to volcanoes, it's the volcanic ash that falls because it's wonderfully fertile, and food is the main thing that you're looking for to subsist, then of course you're going to go there. The cycles of these eruptions are sometimes 40, 50, 100 years between eruptions, and that's enough for human memory to fade, to get this feeling of it's safe, it hasn't erupted for a long time, I'm safe. And then of course, these frequent erupting of OK. When we call frequently erupting, we meaning every 100 years or so, we don't mean every year. We geologists tend to think in slightly longer time scales. Well, it's an excellent note to finish. Thank you once again to our speakers, Professor. Hazel Rhymer, Dr Dave McGarvey, and of course, Professor Favrizio Ferrucci. Our inspiring academics from the Faculty of Science, a warm round of applause and thanks again to all of you. I very much hope you all enjoyed this evening, whether you're here in person or joining us online. For those of us in the room, there's more time now to chat informally over a drink until around eight o'clock, so do join us if you can. If you're remote and you still have more questions, do continue to send them to us, to our site, hashtag OUTalks. We will respond to your questions as soon as possible after the event. But for now, good night.