Publications

Lava lakes experience filling, circulation, and often drainage depending upon the style of activity and location of the vent. Features formed by these processes have proved difficult to document due to dangerous conditions during the eruption, inaccessibility, and destruction of features during lake drainage. Kilauea Iki lava lake, Kilauea, Hawai'i, preserves many such features, because...

Soil temperature and moisture are important factors that control many ecosystem processes. However, interactions between soil thermal and hydrological processes are not adequately understood in cold regions, where the frozen soil, fire disturbance, and soil drainage play important roles in controlling interactions among these processes. These interactions were investigated with a new...

During volcanic eruptions, volcanic ash transport and dispersion models (VATDs) are used to forecast the location and movement of ash clouds over hours to days in order to define hazards to aircraft and to communities downwind. Those models use input parameters, called “eruption source parameters”, such as plume height H, mass eruption rate Ṁ, duration D, and the mass fraction m63 of...

The northwest rift zone (NWRZ) eruption took place at Newberry Volcano ~7000 years ago after the volcano was mantled by tephra from the catastrophic eruption that destroyed Mount Mazama and produced the Crater Lake caldera. The NWRZ eruption produced multiple lava flows from a variety of vents including cinder cones, spatter vents, and fissures, possibly in more than one episode...

We analyze mass-flow tsunami generation for selected areas within the Aleutian arc of Alaska using results from numerical simulation of hypothetical but plausible mass-flow sources such as submarine landslides and volcanic debris avalanches. The Aleutian arc consists of a chain of volcanic mountains, volcanic islands, and submarine canyons, surrounded by a low-relief continental shelf...

Diffuse CO2 efflux near the Ukinrek Maars, two small volcanic craters that formed in 1977 in a remote part of the Alaska Peninsula, was investigated using accumulation chamber measurements. High CO2 efflux, in many places exceeding 1000 g m−2 d−1, was found in conspicuous zones of plant damage or kill that cover 30,000–50,000 m2 in area. Total diffuse CO2 emission was estimated at 21–44...

Ground surface displacement (GSD) in large calderas is often interpreted as resulting from magma intrusion at depth. Recent advances in geodetic measurements of GSD, notably interferometric synthetic aperture radar, reveal complex and multifaceted deformation patterns that often require complex source models to explain the observed GSD. Although hydrothermal fluids have been discussed as...

No abstract available

The late Wisconsin Missoula floods are Earth's largest known discharges of fresh water. They carved Washington's Channeled Scabland--made famous by J H. Bretz's writings in the 1920s to 1950s--and deposited sporadic huge gravel bars in the Scab-lands and Columbia valley. Since the late 1970s the great floods have been shown to number several score and to have been released as gigantic...

Volcanic-ash clouds are a known hazard to aviation, requiring that aircraft be warned away from ash-contaminated airspace. The exposure of aviation to potential hazards from volcanoes in the United States is significant. In support of existing interagency operations to detect and track volcanic-ash clouds, the United States has prepared a National Volcanic Ash Operations Plan for...

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) has been used to detect relative water level changes in wetlands. We developed an innovative method to integrate InSAR and satellite radar altimetry for measuring absolute or geocentric water level changes and applied the methodology to remote areas of swamp forest in coastal Louisiana. Coherence analysis of InSAR pairs suggested that the...

During one week (28 March–4 April 1982), three powerful explosive eruptions (VEI 5) of El Chichón Volcano caused the worst volcanic disaster in Mexico's recorded history. Pyroclastic flows and surges obliterated nine villages, killing about 2,000 people, and ashfalls downwind posed socio–economic hardships for many thousands of inhabitants of the States of Chiapas and Tabasco. The...