What's under a volcano, and how do we know?
by Kathy Cashman
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A major challenge in volcanology is knowing what lies beneath a volcano: Where is the magma? What are its chemical and physical properties? How, when and how fast does it migrate to the surface to erupt? Addressing these questions requires us to combine insights from physical measurements of what’s beneath the Earth’s surface with chemical measurements of erupted lava and pumice. Additional insights come from cores drilled into cooling and solidifying lava lakes in Hawaii. Dr. Cashman will review all of these approaches and resulting implications for (1) detection and evolution of magma in the subsurface, (2) eruption triggers and (3) controls on eruption style and duration.
About the speaker
Kathy Cashman is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oregon and the University of Bristol who has studied volcanoes on all seven continents to learn how they erupt and why eruption styles vary. From 1980 to 1982, she was the Public Information Scientist at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington, and has worked with all of the volcano observatories in the U.S. Prior to coming to University of Oregon, she was a Fulbright scholar studying igneous petrology in New Zealand, and was on the faculty at Princeton University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Cashman is also a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Academia Europaea.