Rice, UT researchers explore new models for measuring volcanic eruptions from debris

Geoscientists from Rice University and the University of Texas (UT) at Austin recently published an open-access study looking at the information about volcanic eruptions that can be derived from the study of nanoparticles.

While scientists had long hoped to use the microscopic bubbles created during eruptions and present even in ash to make discoveries regarding the conditions present during an eruption, such as heat and pressure levels, in the past they have been confounded by the lack of numerical models that adequately accounted for the observed results, according to a Rice University press release. The bubbles are created by dissolved water turning to gas under rapidly decreasing pressure conditions.

The team, which included Rice’s Sahand Hajimirza and Helge Gonnermann and UT Austin’s James Gardner, began by studying Plinian eruptions, named after the Roman author Pliny the Younger who first observed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79, according to the post. 

“Eruption intensity refers to the both the amount of magma that’s erupted and how quickly it comes out,” Hajimirza, a postdoctoral researcher and former Ph.D. student in Gonnermann’s lab at Rice’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, said in the release. “The typical intensity of Plinian eruptions ranges from about 10 million kilograms per second to 10 billion kilograms per second. That is equivalent to 5,000 to 5 million pickup trucks per second.”

The faster the eruption, the more bubbles that are formed, according to the post. In Plinian eruptions, the speed of the eruption creates a significant saturation of bubbles.

The new models, based on Hajimirza’s Ph.D. work, is taking into account other factors that will impact the formation of bubbles, such as the presence of magnetite crystals, according to the release. Much as bubbles from sooner on the bottom of a pot of boiling water, the presence of other substances could alter how quickly bubbles form during an eruption.