Coordinating the emergency response to an erupting volcano is an all-hands-on-deck affair that leaves little time for extra work, such as answering boatloads of inquiries from researchers who want to collect rock samples. On the other hand, science done during eruptions provides essential data for understanding and forecasting future volcanic flare-ups.
To help balance these interests, scientists like , professor of earth and planetary sciences at 嘿嘿视频, are exploring how to prioritize public safety while maximizing the limited time and access for collecting data and samples. Cooper is a disciplinary leader in petrology/geochemistry for the (CONVERSE). Funded by the National Science Foundation, CONVERSE will improve cooperation between scientists at academic institutions and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the agency responsible for volcano monitoring and eruption response.
鈥淭he mandate of the USGS during an eruption is mitigation and response; they don鈥檛 have the bandwidth to handle every request for data and samples,鈥 Cooper said. Through CONVERSE, the global community of volcano scientists will coordinate research requests during eruptions and take some of the pressure off USGS personnel.
Broadening access
Another goal for CONVERSE is to increase the pool of researchers who participate in eruption science. In the past, scientists with existing connections to the USGS were typically the ones granted access to an ongoing eruption, an unintended consequence of the limited time available for evaluating requests, Cooper said. 鈥淧art of the mandate of CONVERSE is to broaden the diversity of the community response to include people at all career stages and people who don鈥檛 happen to know someone at a USGS observatory,鈥 she said.
To work out the best ways to achieve these goals, last year CONVERSE members conducted a virtual exercise based on a hypothetical eruption of Mount Hood in the Oregon Cascades. The scenario was a valuable practice run for the December 2020 eruption at Hawaii鈥檚 Kilauea volcano, she said. 鈥淭here was a real sense of engagement and interest among all parties, with the academic and USGS sides really working together,鈥 Cooper said. 鈥淭his can lead to a lot of science getting done that couldn鈥檛 be done in the past, and all that science will feed back into eruption forecasting and mitigation. I see it snowballing into something really exciting and productive in the long term.鈥
The group鈥檚 findings from the Mount Hood exercise and the Kilauea response were published recently in the American Geophysical Union鈥檚 .
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