A huge volcanic eruption in Iceland emitted on average three times as much of a toxic gas as all European industry combined, a new study has revealed.
Bárðarbunga eruption. Credit: John Stevenson.
Discharge of lava from the eruption at Bárðarbunga volcano, starting in August 2014, released a huge mass – up to 120,000 tonnes per day – of sulphur dioxide gas. You can watch a video of the eruption here.
These emissions can cause acid rain and respiratory problems.
Dr Anja Schmidt, a COMET Associate from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, who led the study, said: “The eruption discharged lava at a rate of more than 200 cubic metres per second, which is equivalent to filling five Olympic-sized swimming pools in a minute. Six months later, when the eruption ended, it had produced enough lava to cover an area the size of Manhattan.
“In the study, we were concerned with the quantity of sulphur dioxide emissions, with numbers that are equally astonishing: in the beginning, the eruption emitted about eight times more sulphur dioxide per day than is emitted from all man-made sources in Europe per day.”
The eruption last year was the biggest in Iceland for more than 200 years. It released a river of lava across northern Iceland, and lasted for six months.
The team, which also included COMET members Tamsin Mather, Elisa Carboni and Don Grainger from the University of Oxford, used data from satellite sensors to map sulphur dioxide pollution from the eruption. These were reproduced by computer simulations of the spreading gas cloud.
As well as being given off by volcanoes, sulphur dioxide is also produced by burning fossil fuels and industrial processes such as smelting. Man-made sulphur dioxide production has been falling since 1990, and was recorded at 12,000 tonnes per day in 2010.
Further information
The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Active faults and the devastating earthquakes they can trigger do not respect political borders. Whilst the recent earthquakes in Nepal did most damage to the mountain kingdom itself, hundreds of people were also killed or injured in neighbouring China, India and Bangladesh.
The region’s history tells a similar story – the three countries’ earthquake records over the last 500 years are intertwined by shared proximity to the Himalayan mountain belt and its underlying megathrust fault.
Ways of improving resilience to earthquake hazard also need to transcend political boundaries, bringing together scientists and policymakers from the affected countries to share knowledge, experience and ideas.
This principle has led to the Earthquakes without Frontiers (EwF) partnership – a diverse group of natural and social scientists from around the UK. Led by James Jackson of both COMET and the University of Cambridge, EwF is a 5-year initiative funded by NERC and ESRC (the Natural Environment and Economic and Social Research Councils) under the Improving Resilience to Natural Hazards programme.
As well as COMET, the partnership includes researchers from Cambridge, Durham, Hull, Leeds, Northumbria and Oxford Universities, the British Geological Survey, the Overseas Development Institute and Durham’s Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience.
The project focuses on three broad regions – China, the Himalayan mountain front (Nepal and Northern India) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) – with the key objective of furthering knowledge on earthquakes and landslides in the continental interiors.
Much of this involves using remotely sensed data which complements the project’s cross-border approach. EwF scientists use digital topography and multispectral and optical imagery to research landslide hazard and map active faults, alongside satellite radar to measure the warping of the Earth’s crust and steady interseismic motions as faults build up stress before the next seismic event.
All of this contributes to a wider programme of social and natural scientific research with scientists in the partner countries, as well as being used to run workshops and training events for young international scientists.
Crucially, this knowledge exchange extends to countries dealing with similar hazards – the same types of fault that threaten vast regions in China also cause earthquakes in Italy, and lessons learnt about Iranian faults can inform work on hazard in Kazakhstan and vice versa. As such, EwF brings together scientists from many countries to share knowledge and experience across an even wider network, culminating in the annual EwF partnership meetings, the most recent of which was held in Kathmandu in April 2015.
When a huge Mw7.8 earthquake struck Nepal on the 25th April, it came as a double blow to all within EwF. Nepal is not only one of our focus areas, but many of the UK team also had been in Kathmandu just one week before the earthquake, working and living alongside Nepali colleagues and friends.
The International Charter for Space and Major Disasters was invoked just 3 hours after the earthquake, and over the following few days, space agencies hurriedly tasked their satellites to acquire new imagery over Nepal. We all felt strongly that we should put our combined experience to good use in the immediate aftermath of the Nepal earthquake, and dashed to obtain satellite imagery of the area. In the weeks since we have been working to analyse this imagery in order to aid both disaster relief efforts and hazard re-evaluation.
Figure 1: Satellite radar interferogram of the 25 April 2015 Mw7.8 Nepal Earthquake. The coloured fringes represent contours of ground motion towards the satellite, at intervals of 8.5 cm. Image credit: Pablo Gonzalez, University of Leeds, EwF, LiCS; SAR data provided by the European Space Agency
EwF researchers, along with colleagues at the University of Leeds, used data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1A satellite to measure how the ground was permanently warped by the earthquake. This was greatly assisted by COMET’s new automated processing facility, designed to cope with the vast amount of data from the Sentinel-1 satellites, which helped to produce some of the first radar interferograms of the Nepal earthquake. These mapped how the ground was warped along a 170 km stretch of the fault, moving by up to ~1.4 m near Kathmandu.
We are now modelling the data to understand how the fault slipped at depth, establish the relationship with the large Mw 7.3 aftershock on the 12th May, and gauge how these events may have stressed the surrounding regions, making them more likely to fail in future.
At the same time, EwF scientists at Durham University and the British Geological Survey have been using high-resolution optical and multispectral imagery to map landslides in the region. We have identified around 3,600 landslides that were either triggered or reactivated by the earthquake, using the maps to show where rivers are likely to be dammed and roads blocked. This has also highlighted the need to plan for the monsoon season which may reactivate or trigger even more deadly landslides.
Figure 2: Landslide map. Colour scale shows landslide intensity, with blue ~ 1 landslide/km2 and red ~29 landslides/km2. ( http://ewf.nerc.ac.uk/2015/05/28/nepal-updated-28-may-landslide-inventory-following-25-april-nepal-earthquake/) Image credit: University of Durham, EwF, BGS. Satellite data have been provided via the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters and freely available online viewers: WorldView @ Digital Globe; USGS LandSat8; Bhuvan RS2; Astrium Imagery; Google Crisis. Vector data: OSM. Digital Elevation Model: ASTER
Over the coming months, EwF researchers will continue to work on these topics as well as the many more questions raised by the Nepal earthquake. We hope that the lessons learned from this terrible event will bring us one step closer to improving resilience to future earthquakes, not just for Nepal and the countries across its borders, but for all earthquake-prone countries.
In 2013, a MW7.7 earthquake struck Balochistan, caused a huge surface offset and triggered a small tsunami in the Arabian Sea.
The apparently strange fault behaviour attracted the attention of scientists worldwide and discussion is still ongoing.
This an interesting case for paleoseismologists, not only because of the cascading earthquake effects, but also because of the surface rupture distribution, from which we might learn some important lessons.
COMET student Yu Zhou and his colleagues from Oxford University have published a new paper on this event, arguing that it might be not as unusual as it seems. Their research is based on the analysis of Pleiades stereo satellite imagery, which has proven to be a very useful data source.
This is extremely important to the aviation industry, civil defence organisations and those in peril from volcanic ash fall, using remote sensing techniques to monitor volcanic clouds and return information on their properties.
The paper presents the complex refractive index of volcanic ash at 450.0 nm, 546.7 nm and 650.0 nm from eruptions of Aso (Japan), Grímsvötn (Iceland), Chaitén (Chile), Etna (Italy), Eyjafjallajökull (Iceland), Tongariro (New Zealand), Askja (Iceland), Nisyros (Greece), Okmok (Alaska), Augustine (Alaska) and Spurr (Alaska).
COMET Research Associate Dr Paola Crippa, from the University of Newcastle, has been awarded a prestigious L’Oréal-UNESCO National For Women In Science Fellowship.
This programme encourages greater participation of women in science across the globe by promoting and rewarding outstanding female postdoctoral researchers.
One of five winners, Paola was selected by a jury of eminent scientists, chaired by Professor Pratibha Gai who was L’Oréal’s International Laureate in 2013.
Her research, focusing on particulate matter transportation and implications for human health, integrates model results with satellite data to more accurately predict population exposure to harmful concentrations of particulate matter.
Paola will not only benefit from financial support for her research, but also a raft of career and life enhancing experiences such as media training, personal impact coaching, speaking opportunities, networking events and access to senior mentors and role models.
Congratulations to COMET’s James Jackson who has received a CBE for his services to environmental science.
As well as being Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge, James was one of the founding members of COMET and has been a major contributor to its ongoing success.
James has pioneered the combination of earthquake source seismology, geomorphology, space geodesy and remote sensing to examine how the continents are deforming, looking at scales that range from single earthquakes to the vast continental areas of active plate movement such as Africa, Iran and the Aegean.
He is also currently leading the Earthquakes without Frontiers (EwF) project, which brings together Earth and social scientists, science communicators, policy makers and local and regional organisations to increase resilience to earthquakes in countries across Asia.
Following the devastating earthquakes earlier this year, the EwF team has been working with colleagues in Nepal with a view to improving resilience to future earthquakes, not just in Nepal and neighbouring countries, but also for earthquake-prone nations across the globe.
COMET Director Tim Wright said “James has had a huge influence on many of us as a scientist, teacher, and colleague, and I congratulate him on this latest award ”.
Earlier this month, James also received the Wollaston Medal, the highest award given by the Geological Society.
Well done James from all at COMET, we wish you continued success.
Notes: Professor James Jackson is Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge and also a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). You can read more about James and his work here.
On 25 April, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, claiming over 8,000 lives and affecting millions of people.
Images from ESA’s Sentinel-1A satellite clearly showed the effects of the earthquake, including the maximum land deformation only 17km from Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu. This explains the extremely high damage to the area.
Nepal earthquake April 2015. Credit: Copernicus data (2015)/ESA/Norut/PPO.labs/COMET–ESA SEOM INSARAP study
By combining Sentinel-1A imagery from before and after the quake, COMET scientists have been able to interpret the rainbow-coloured interference patterns in the image (known as an interferogram), and interpret them as changes on the ground. COMET scientists have also been analysing the 12 May aftershock. You can read more here.
COMET scientists have been closely involved with international efforts to analyse satellite data from the recent Nepal earthquake.
Combining two Sentinel-1A radar scans from 17 and 29 April 2015, this interferogram shows changes on the ground that occurred during the 25 April earthquake that struck Nepal. An overall area of 120×100 km has moved – half of that uplifted and the other half, north of Kathmandu subsided. Vertical accuracy is a few cm. Credit: Copernicus data (2015)/ESA/Norut/PPO.labs/COMET–ESA SEOM INSARAP study
You can read more about the Sentinel-1A interferogram on the ESA website.
Links to some of the broader media coverage of our work can be found below.
On 22nd April Calbuco volcano, Chile, erupted for the first time since 1972 with very little warning. Plumes of volcanic ash reached heights of 16 km on the 22nd and up to 17 km in a second, longer eruption that began in the early hours of 23rd April.
Several thousand people were evacuated from villages closest to Calbuco , and ash fell over an area extending from the west coast of Chile to the east coast of Argentina, and grounded air traffic in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina.
COMET scientists have been using satellite data to analyse the event, in terms of both the emissions and changes to the shape of the volcano itself. You can read more about the event here.
Data, spherical source elastic half space model and residuals for recent deformation at Calbuco [Bagnardi].
COMET Director Tim Wright has been selected as the 2015 Rosentiel Award Recipient by the University of Miami (UM) in recognition of his research into deformation of the Earth’s crust in response to tectonic forces.
The Rosenstiel Award honours scientists who, in the past decade, have made significant and growing impacts in their field. Tim’s major achievements include the discovery of a continental rifting event in Ethiopia’s Afar region, one of the few places on Earth where a mid-ocean ridge comes ashore.
He was also one of the first scientists to measure how plate boundary zones deform, solely relying on satellite observations using a technique called satellite radar interferometry.
Tim presented the 2015 Rosenstiel Award Lecture, “Witnessing the Birth of Africa’s New Ocean” at the UM Rosenstiel School auditorium on Friday 3 April.
![Figure 4. Data, spherical source elastic half space model and residuals for recent deformation at Calbuco [Bagnardi].](http://tempcomet.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Figure-4.-Spherical-source-Calbuco.png)