In most cases, we know when a volcano is going to erupt. Well, sort of. While we can't predict the precise moment an eruption will begin, volcanoes often show signs that they're "waking up." Typically, those signs come from changes in the volcano itself, as well as from changes within the topmost layers of Earth's crust. But new research, spearheaded by teams from Imperial College London and the University of Bristol, suggests we should be looking deeper — up to 12.5 miles (20 km) underground — at different eruption cues that might help us improve our predictions.
"We looked at volcanoes around the world and dug deeper than previous studies that focused on shallow underground chambers where magma is stored before eruptions," Catherine Booth, a research associate in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, said in a statement. "We focused on understanding magma source reservoirs deep beneath our feet, where extreme heat melts solid rocks into magma at depths of around 10 to 20 kilometers."
