Volcanic Rush
High-speed videos capture rocks flying at unheard-of rates
The fiery fountains of erupting volcanoes seem tailor-made for the Discovery Channel. But scientists, too, are interested in capturing footage of these natural spectacles, especially for what it can reveal about how superheated gas and rock blast out at up to supersonic speeds.
New high-speed videos from Italy’s Mount Stromboli show that its continual eruptions can belch stuff out more than twice as fast as scientists had thought. This surprising finding is bolstered by laboratory experiments that grind up rock and eject it at high pressure, in a sort of tabletop eruption. “We think we’re getting close to what’s going on in the throat and gut in a volcano,” says Donald Dingwell, a volcanologist at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich whose team has done much of the lab work.
The research suggests new ways to think about natural hazards, such as how far away people should stay from an eruption and how tiny ash fragments can be lofted kilometers high — potentially shutting down airspace, as the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull did in 2010.