Publications

Volcanoes are critical geologic hazards that challenge our ability to make long-term forecasts of their eruptive behaviors. They also have direct and indirect impacts on human lives and society. As is the case with many geologic phenomena, the time scales over which volcanoes evolve greatly exceed that of a human lifetime. On the other hand, the time scale over which a volcano can move...

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Acquiring spatially continuous ground-surface displacement fields from Terrestrial Laser Scanners (TLS) will allow better understanding of the physical processes governing landslide motion at detailed spatial and temporal scales. Problems arise, however, when estimating continuous displacement fields from TLS point-clouds because reflecting points from sequential scans of moving ground...

Landslides and rock avalanches triggered by the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake produced 257 landslide dams, mainly situated along the eastern boundary of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau where rivers descend approximately 3,000 m into the Sichuan Basin. The largest of these dams blocked the Tongkou River (a tributary of the Fujiang River) at Tangjiashan. The blockage, consisting of 2.04 × 107 m3 of...

Hydrogen isotope ratio, water content and Fe3 +/Fe2 + in coexisting amphibole and biotite phenocrysts in volcanic rocks can provide insight into shallow pre- and syn-eruptive magmatic processes such as vesiculation, and lava drainback with mixing into less devolatilized magma that erupts later in a volcanic sequence. We studied four ~ 35 ka and younger eruption sequences (i.e. Kings...

Carbon dioxide emissions and heat flow have been determined from the Ohaaki hydrothermal field, Taupo Volcanic Zone (TVZ), New Zealand following 20 a of production (116 MWe). Soil CO2 degassing was quantified with 2663 CO2 flux measurements using the accumulation chamber method, and 2563 soil temperatures were measured and converted to equivalent heat flow (W m−2) using published soil...

Porphyry-copper ore systems, the source of much of the world's copper and molybdenum, form when metal-bearing fluids are expelled from shallow, degassing magmas. On page 1613 of this issue, Weis et al. (1) demonstrate that self-organizing processes focus metal deposition. Specifically, their simulation studies indicate that ores develop as consequences of dynamic variations in rock...

The 1912 eruption of Novarupta was the largest of the 1900s (Fierstein and Hildreth 2001, Hildreth et al. 2003). A century later, fundamental questions remain regarding the source of the magma for that eruption. A previous seismic study of the Katmai area (Jolly et al. 2007) identified a single large area of anomalous structure in the subsurface centered beneath Katmai Pass (Figure 2)...

Multi-temporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is an effective tool to detect long-term seismotectonic motions by reducing the atmospheric artifacts, thereby providing more precise deformation signal. The commonly used approaches such as persistent scatterer InSAR (PSInSAR) and small baseline subset (SBAS) algorithms need to resolve the phase ambiguities in interferogram...

Effusion rate is a primary measurement used to judge the expected advance rate, length, and hazard potential of lava flows. At basaltic volcanoes, the rapid draining of lava stored in rootless shields and perched ponds can produce lava flows with much higher local effusion rates and advance velocities than would be expected based on the effusion rate at the vent. For several months in...

The Keanakākoʻi Tephra at Kīlauea Volcano has previously been interpreted by some as the product of a caldera-forming eruption in 1790 CE. Our study, however, finds stratigraphic and 14C evidence that the tephra instead results from numerous eruptions throughout a 300-year period between about 1500 and 1800. The stratigraphic evidence includes: (1) as many as six pure lithic ash beds...

Hydrocarbons released into the deep ocean are an inevitable consequence of natural seep, seafloor drilling, and leaking wellhead-to-collection-point pipelines. The Macondo 252 (Deepwater Horizon) well blowout of 2010 was even larger than the Ixtoc event in the Gulf of Campeche in 1979. History suggests it will not be the last accidental release, as deepwater drilling expands to meet an...