Word: volcanologists
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...makes an eruption unlikely, the corroded state of the mountain could make a landslide even more devastating. Mount St. Helens, after all, had been baking for 100 years after its last blast; Mount Rainier has cooked for 500. "It's only a matter of time," says Dan Miller, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), "before those towns near Rainier are buried...
...morning of Jan. 14, Stanley Williams, a U.S. volcanologist from Arizona State University, led a team of nine other scientists to the 13,680- ft. summit. Williams stayed on the rim and watched as two colleagues clambered down ropes toward the volcano's inner cone -- Nestor Garcia, a Colombian, to set up a temperature probe; Igor Menyailov, a Russian, to sample gases coming out of vents. Williams and Menyailov, who had taught himself English by listening to Elvis Presley records, had been friends since they first met in 1982 on a volcano watch in Nicaragua. "Igor was excited because...
...main tools of the volcanologist include seismometers, which record the swarms of tiny earthquakes that occur as the magma rises. Chemical sensors, mounted on airplanes, can detect increases in sulfur-dioxide emissions, indicating that magma has reached the surface. In addition, the physical swelling of mountain slopes, well documented at Mount St. Helens, is a sign of explosive potential. Laser-based devices can pick up minute bulges that are about the width of a nickel and still invisible to the naked eye. In Japan researchers have set up video cameras to monitor the shape and color of fumes...
...come from overlooked, long dormant volcanoes. To monitor a volcano requires identifying it beforehand; as recently as 1981, Pinatubo was not even included in the worldwide registry of volcanoes maintained by the Smithsonian Institution. "When a nice little hill covered with lush vegetation finally wakes up," observes Smithsonian volcanologist Tom Simkin, "it's going to cause a lot of damage." Fortunately, scientists were able to see that some nice little hills in the Philippines and Japan were turning nasty while people still had time to get away...
...impoverished area of southeastern Mexico, where the Zoque Indians scratch out a living by farming the volcano's slopes, it erupted with much less fury than Mount St. Helens and gave off only a fourth to a sixth as much debris as its Yankee rival. But as Volcanologist Wendell Duffield of the U.S. Geological Survey notes, "At Mount St. Helens the barrel of the cannon was pointed laterally. At El Chichón it was pointed straight up." The result: the Mexican volcano injected much more dust, ash and sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where the particles would...