(Press-News.org) The study gives the first detailed description of a volcanic eruption from Sierra Negra found on Isla Isabela - the largest of the Galápagos Islands and home to nearly 2,000 people.
The findings, published in Nature Communications, reveal how the volcano inflated and fractured before it erupted and captures a new level of detail for any eruption from a volcano on the islands.
Networks of ground-based seismic and GPS monitoring stations, and satellites, captured data for 13 years before Sierra Negra's eruption, in June 2018.
The surface of the volcano rose during this time, indicating a gradual accumulation of molten rock - known as magma - found in a reservoir under the volcano. The signals were among the largest ever recorded at a volcano of this type, experts say.
The Galápagos Islands have fascinated scientists since Charles Darwin's visit on board the HMS Beagle in 1835. Yet their remote location, in the Pacific Ocean, about 1000km off the Ecuadorian coast, means there were big gaps in scientists' understanding of the volcanic processes that formed them and control their activity.
This eruption provided a rare opportunity to fill some of the gaps, researchers say. An international team, led by the University of Edinburgh, Pennsylvania State University in the US and the Instituto Geofísico in Ecuador, integrated geophysical data with analysis of the chemical composition of the erupted lava. They were supported in doing so by the Parque Nacional Galápagos.
Sierra Negra's eruption continued for nearly two months, spurting out lava flows which extended 10 miles to the island's coast. Fresh earthquakes accompanied the eruption and emptying of the magma reservoir.
After the eruption, the hills within a six-mile wide hollow at the summit of the volcano - known as a caldera - were nearly two meters higher. This phenomenon, known as caldera resurgence, is important for understanding when and where eruptions happen, scientists say. However, it is rare and has never been observed to this extent before.
The team also discovered that the ascending magma permanently uplifted what they call a 'trapdoor' in the floor of the caldera. This raised its surface and, in a complex interplay, triggered large earthquakes that led to the eruption.
The 2018 eruption was a stark reminder of the potential threat to life, livelihoods, and the iconic wildlife of the Galápagos - including the slow moving giant tortoise and land iguana - the researchers said.
This new understanding of volcano behaviour will allow local scientists to track the evolution of volcanic unrest before future eruptions and communicate warnings to local authorities and the public.
Dr Andrew Bell from the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences who led the research, said: "The 2018 eruption of Sierra Negra was a really spectacular volcanic event, occurring in the 'living laboratory' of the Galápagos Islands. Great team work, and a bit of luck, allowed us to capture this unique dataset that provide us with important new understanding as to how these volcanoes behave, and how we might be able to better forecast future eruptions."
Peter La Femina from The Pennsylvania State University in the US, said: "The power of this study is that it's one of the first times we've been able to see a full eruptive cycle in this detail at almost any volcano. We've monitored Sierra Negra from when it last erupted in 2005 through the 2018 eruption and beyond, and we have this beautiful record that's a rarity in itself."
Mario Ruiz from the Instituto Geofísico, the national monitoring agency of Ecuador, said: "Based on constant monitoring of activity of Galapagos volcanoes since 2013, we detected a dramatic increase of seismicity and a steady uplift of crater floor at Sierra Negra. Soon we contacted colleagues from United Kingdom, United States and Ireland and proposed them to work together to investigate the mechanisms leading to an impending eruption of this volcano. This research is an example of international collaboration and partnership."
INFORMATION:
The research team would like to thank the Instituto Geofísico, Parque Nacional Galápagos, and Charles Darwin Foundation for their support with fieldwork in the Galápagos. The study was funded by NERC, and the NSF.
Ithaca, NY--The message about the bird-conservation benefits of shade-grown coffee may not be getting through to the people most likely to respond--birdwatchers. A team of researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Virginia Tech surveyed birdwatchers to learn if they drank shade-grown coffee and, if not, why not. Their findings were published today in the journal People and Nature.
"One of the most significant constraints to purchasing bird-friendly coffee among those surveyed was a lack of awareness," said Alicia Williams, lead author and former research assistant at the Cornell Lab and Virginia Tech. "I was surprised to see that only 9 percent of those surveyed purchased bird-friendly ...
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The liver has a rare superpower among body organs - the ability to regenerate, even if 70% of its mass is removed. It also keeps up its metabolic and toxin-removing work during the process of regeneration, thanks to a subset of cells that expand their workload while the rest focus on multiplication, a new study in mice found.
Furthermore, the cells of the liver communicate with each other to coordinate regeneration activity, which progresses from the center to the periphery of the missing liver lobes, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said.
"It's remarkable how we still don't understand many aspects of liver regeneration," said Illinois biochemistry professor Auinash ...
Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a new drug that could prevent Alzheimer's disease by modulating, rather than inhibiting, a key enzyme involved in forming amyloid plaques in the brain. The study, which will be published March 2 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), demonstrates that the drug is safe and effective in rodents and monkeys, paving the way for future clinical trials in humans.
A key pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease involves the formation of amyloid plaques composed of small protein fragments known as amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides. These peptides are generated ...
OAK BROOK, Ill. - Attendance at regular mammography screening substantially reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer, according to a large study of over half a million women, published in the journal Radiology. Researchers said women who skip even one scheduled mammography screening before a breast cancer diagnosis face a significantly higher risk of dying from the cancer.
Breast cancer screening with mammography has helped reduce disease-related deaths by enabling detection of cancer at earlier, more treatable stages. Despite mammography's well-established ...
Recently, research group led by Professor CHENG Lin from School of Microelectronics, University of science and technology of China has made significant achievements in the field of fully integrated isolated power chip design. They proposed a chip based on glass fan-out wafer-level package (FOWLP), achieving 46.5% peak transformation efficiency and 50mW/mm2 power density.
Compared with the traditional isolated power supply chip, this new design interconnects the receiving and transmitting chips through the micro transformer made of the rewiring layer, showing no need of additional transformer chips. In this way, it lowered the need ...
The pandemic has impacted significantly on people who suffer chronic pain. A study performed by the eHealth Lab, a research group affiliated with the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya's eHealth Center, has shown that 70% of the people with chronic pain have seen their condition worsen in terms of severity, frequency of episodes and interference in their daily activities.
A total of 502 patients took part in the study; 88% were women aged between 30 and 59, with long-duration chronic pain (mean duration, 7 years). Most participants (87.6%) had pain in more than one point; the most frequent locations were the abdomen, lower back and neck. The participants answered online surveys, designed in accordance with ...
Organometallic reagents are essential tools in synthetic chemistry. They work even better and more effectively in combination with alkali alkoxides. The exact nature of this effect has never been well understood. A team based in Switzerland has now performed a detailed study of the mechanism of reaction of aryl bromides with organo-magnesium reagents and lithium alkoxides. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a complex equilibrium of bimetallic intermediates plays a key role.
Substituted aromatic ring systems are an important class of building block for the synthesis of many products, including pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and ...
Recently, the Laboratory of Micro and Nano Engineering, School of Engineering Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has made important progress in the field of structural chirality detection research using vortex light and found that photon orbital angular momentum can efficiently detect the optical chiral signal of structures.
The achievement was published in an international well-known journal PNAS.
Chiral structures are widely found in nature, such as DNA double helix structures, plant tendrils and shells. In addition to observing the geometry of objects, their chirality can also be distinguished by the interaction of light with matter. For example, the detection of circular ...
Aqueous free-radical precipitation polymerization is one of the most useful methods to prepare the uniformly sized hydrogel microspheres (microgels), and an understanding of the polymerization mechanism is crucial to control the structure or physicochemical properties of microgels. However, the details of the mechanism of precipitation polymerization remain unclear.
Thus, first author Yuichiro Nishizawa, Prof. Daisuke Suzuki of the Graduate School of Textile Science & Technology, Shinshu University and Prof. Takayuki Uchihashi of Nagoya University set out to clarify the formation mechanism of microgels during precipitation polymerization by evaluating structural evolution and thermoresponsiveness of developing microgels during ...
The study examined the gender and affiliations of 1051 top-authors, those scientists with the most publications in 13 leading ecology and conservation journals. The results show that women and the Global South are barely represented on this list. "The overall list of top authors included only 11% women, while 75% of the articles were related to just five countries in the Global North," says Bea Maas, lead author from the University of Vienna. "This massive imbalance in scientific authorship is extremely concerning, especially in the field of ecology and conservation, ...
