Wet and wild: There's lots of water in the world's most explosive volcano
2021-01-22
(Press-News.org) There isn't much in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula in northeastern Russia just across the Bering Sea from Alaska, besides an impressive population of brown bears and the most explosive volcano in the world.
Kamchatka's Shiveluch volcano has had more than 40 violent eruptions over the last 10,000 years. The last gigantic blast occurred in 1964, creating a new crater and covering an area of nearly 100 square kilometers with pyroclastic flows. But Shiveluch is actually currently erupting, as it has been for over 20 years. So why would anyone risk venturing too close?
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis, including Michael Krawczynski, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences and graduate student Andrea Goltz, brave the harsh conditions on Kamchatka because understanding what makes Shiveluch tick could help scientists understand the global water cycle and gain insights into the plumbing systems of other volcanoes.
In a recent study published in the journal Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, researchers from the Krawczynski lab looked at small nodules of primitive magma that were erupted and preserved amid other materials.
"The minerals in these nodules retain the signatures of what was happening early in the magma's evolution, deep in Earth's crust," said Goltz, the lead author of the paper.
The researchers found that the conditions inside Shiveluch include roughly 10%-14% water by weight (wt%). Most volcanoes have less than 1% water. For subduction zone volcanoes, the average is usually 4%, rarely exceeding 8 wt%, which is considered superhydrous.
Of particular interest is a mineral called amphibole, which acts as a proxy or fingerprint for high water content at known temperature and pressure. The unique chemistry of the mineral tells researchers how much water is present deep underneath Shiveluch.
"When you convert the chemistry of these two minerals, amphibole and olivine, into temperatures and water contents as we do in this paper, the results are remarkable both in terms of how much water and how low a temperature we're recording," Krawczynski said.
"The only way to get primitive, pristine materials at low temperatures is to add lots and lots of water," he said. "Adding water to rock has the same effect as adding salt to ice; you're lowering the melting point. In this case, there is so much water that the temperature is reduced to a point where amphiboles can crystallize."
INFORMATION:
Read more on the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences' website.
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-01-22
DURHAM, N.C. - Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated that human muscle has an innate ability to ward off the damaging effects of chronic inflammation when exercised. The discovery was made possible through the use of lab-grown, engineered human muscle, demonstrating the potential power of the first-of-its-kind platform in such research endeavors.
The results appear online on January 22 in the journal Science Advances.
"Lots of processes are taking place throughout the human body during exercise, and it is difficult to tease apart which systems and cells are doing what inside an active person," said Nenad Bursac, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. "Our engineered muscle ...
2021-01-22
When tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) began to move from water to land roughly 390 million years ago it set in motion the rise of lizards, birds, mammals, and all land animals that exist today, including humans and some aquatic vertebrates such as whales and dolphins.
The earliest tetrapods originated from their fish ancestors in the Devonian period and are more than twice as old as the oldest dinosaur fossils. They resembled a cross between a giant salamander and a crocodile and were about 1-2 meters long, had gills, webbed feet and tail fins, and ...
2021-01-22
New research suggests the majority of people in the UK are willing to use privacy-encroaching tracking technology and support the introduction of 'immunity passports' to protect themselves and others in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, found more than two thirds of respondents overall would accept some form of smartphone tracking app to help manage social distancing and the relaxation of a full public lockdown.
However, its findings are not reflected in the number of people who have downloaded the NHS Test and Trace app, prompting calls for this issue to be addressed.
Lead author Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol, said: "Attitudes were surprisingly permissive and this ...
2021-01-22
Predictions of future climate change require a clear and nuanced understanding of Earth's past climate. In a study published today in Science Advances, University of Hawai'i (UH) at Mānoa oceanographers fully reconciled climate and carbon cycle trends of the past 50 million years--solving a controversy debated in the scientific literature for decades.
Throughout Earth's history, global climate and the global carbon cycle have undergone significant changes, some of which challenge the current understanding of carbon cycle dynamics.
Less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cools Earth and decreases weathering of rocks and minerals on land over long time scales. Less weathering should lead to a shallower calcite compensation depth (CCD), which is the depth in the ocean where ...
2021-01-22
Laser beams can be used to change the properties of materials in an extremely precise way. This principle is already widely used in technologies such as rewritable DVDs. However, the underlying processes generally take place at such unimaginably fast speeds and at such a small scale that they have so far eluded direct observation. Researchers at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have now managed to film, for the first time, the laser transformation of a crystal structure with nanometre resolution and in slow motion in an electron microscope. The results have been published in the journal Science.
The ...
2021-01-22
Head and neck cancer is the sixth most common cancer worldwide, and while effective treatments exist, sadly, the cancer often returns.
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati have tested a new combination therapy in animal models to see if they could find a way to make an already effective treatment even better.
Since they're using a Food and Drug Administration-approved drug to do it, this could help humans sooner than later.
These findings are published in the journal END ...
2021-01-22
Washington, DC - January 22, 2021 - New research shows that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) reduced both antibody and inflammatory responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection in mice. The study appears this week in the Journal of Virology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.
The research is important because "NSAIDs are arguably the most commonly used anti-inflammatory medications," said principal investigator Craig B. Wilen, Assistant Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Immunology, Yale University School of Medicine.
In addition to taking NSAIDs for chronic conditions such as arthritis, people take them "for shorter periods of time during infections, and [during] ...
2021-01-22
UPTON, NY - New results from an atmospheric study over the Eastern North Atlantic reveal that tiny aerosol particles that seed the formation of clouds can form out of next to nothingness over the open ocean. This "new particle formation" occurs when sunlight reacts with molecules of trace gases in the marine boundary layer, the atmosphere within about the first kilometer above Earth's surface. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, will improve how aerosols and clouds are represented in models that describe Earth's climate so scientists can understand how the particles--and the processes that control them--might ...
2021-01-22
Millions of students around the world could benefit if their educators adopted a more flexible and practical approach, say Swansea University experts.
After analysing the techniques current being used in higher education, the researchers are calling for a pragmatic and evidence-based approach instead.
Professor Phil Newton, director of learning and teaching at of Swansea University Medical School, said: "Higher education is how we train those who carry out important professional roles in our society. There are now more than 200 million students in HE worldwide and this number is likely to double again over the next decade.
"Given the size, impact, importance and cost of ...
2021-01-22
Researchers at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) in Argentina have found that, since the 1990s, up to 25% of reported bee species are no longer being reported in global records, despite a large increase in the number of records available. While this does not mean that these species are all extinct, it might indicate that these species have become rare enough that no one is observing them in nature. The findings appear January 22 in the journal One Earth.
"With citizen science and the ability to share data, records are going up exponentially, but the number of species reported in these records is going down," says first ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Wet and wild: There's lots of water in the world's most explosive volcano
