MAGMA: Magma Accommodation and Ground Movement Analysis

MAGMA will transform how we capture the complex geology beneath volcanoes within the numerical models of volcano ground movement that are used in eruption threat assessment; this will help drive significant improvements in forecasting eruptions, helping keep people safe and secure.

Over 800 million people live near volcanoes. To keep people safe and secure, we need to reliably forecast when volcanic eruptions may occur and what their potential size, style, and hazards will be. However, because the geology and plumbing system dynamics beneath each volcano is unique, all volcanoes behaves differently, making it difficult to reliably forecast eruptions.

As magma intrudes through the crust and accumulates, it often pushes up the overlying rock and Earth's surface. Ground movements at active volcanoes thus often herald eruption. We therefore monitor the surface elevation of volcanoes, using satellites and ground-based tools, to look for tell-tale ground movements related to magma build-up. Using sophisticated numerical models, we can estimate the amount and location of magma required to drive measured ground movement. These estimates of magma bodies provide crucial inputs for eruption forecasts as they constrain how close magma may be to the surface, its volume and pressure, and how fast it is moving.

A key flaw of many ground movement models is that they assume the rocks through which magma moves are simple and have no internal structure or compositional variation. Yet we know rocks vary physically and chemically at all scales, and how they deform changes in space and time. Critically, ground movement models that include more realistic geology (e.g. layering) show that, incorporating even small degrees of complexity can change estimated magma body properties by orders of magnitude. Such changes in magma body estimates may be the difference between forecasting an eruption or not.

Reliably using ground movement to forecast volcano eruption onset, size, style, and...