Timelapse volcanoes in Google’s Earth Engine

With the marvels of technology and the generosity of Google and NASA, we can now sit back and watch the back catalogue of volcanic eruptions using the magnificent Google Earth Timelapse of Landsat images. Here are just a few that I have picked out..

Enjoy, and do send more suggestions!

Anatahan, Marianas, erupted in 2005.  Anatahan Timelapse

Chaiten, Chile. Erupted in May 2008: look for the splash of ash.  Chaiten Timelapse

Miyakejima, Japan – a spectacular caldera-forming event in 2000.  Miyakejima Timelapse

Pinatubo, Philippines. Major eruption in 1991; thanks to Ron Schott for this.  Pinatubo Timelapse

Soufriere Hills Volcano, Montserrat. Erupting since 1995: watch the island grow.  Montserrat Timelapse

Lake Voui, Aoba volcano, Ambae island, Vanuatu, erupted in 2005-6.  Lake Voui Timelapse

Who should set the research agenda in Universities?

Universities are complex, organic institutions. Their heart is the academic hub of scholarship and research, sustained  by the ever-changing life-blood of students who come through to learn, to challenge, to grow, and ultimately to leave,  having left their mark on those who have taught them. The excitement of working in a University environment is the daily experience of being challenged to think in new ways to solve old problems. Teaching  forces you to develop a perspective on problems in a way that then allows you to explain them to students. In turn, this can bring new clarity to your research, giving you new ways to come at the problem, and new ways of seeing things. And then, of course, that new understanding feeds back into the teaching.

To support all of this activity, though, requires money, and a lot of it. Money for people, for buildings, and for the resources that underpin scholarship. To give an idea of scale, Oxford University receives about £1000 M in income every year. Of this billion pounds, less than 20% comes from student fees, while over £400 M arrives in external grants and contracts from research sponsors. Most of this money for research comes in the form of project grants: funding solicited by an investigator, or group of investigators, to solve a problem that they have defined. But of course, there is never enough project grant income to go around. Success rates for applications to the major funding bodies (research councils, charities) are often 20% or lower and, increasingly, it is difficult to find the funding  to replace, overhaul, or even just to maintain the essential services and facilities that everyone relies on to keep the research flowing. With this as a backdrop, and with the global competition for the best scholars and researchers, it is perhaps only natural for Universities to look to diversify their research income.

In the field of science, there is a great deal of high quality research that goes on that is pushing entirely at the ‘blue skies’ frontiers of knowledge. This curiosity-driven research is, perhaps, most likely to be funded by research councils or charities. But scientific research has also always been about solving problems, and about equipping people with the intellectual and other skills to solve ‘real world’ problems. Recent years have seen a huge growth in activities related to identifying and understanding the drivers behind global environmental change. And currently, there are great efforts to understand and to tackle the leading problems that will define the next twenty to thirty years of environmental research: the future of food, of energy, of biodiversity, and natural resources. So who should set the research agenda in this area? And should there be areas that are out of bounds? There are no easy answers, but would it be appropriate for students of Earth Sciences not to explore fully the questions of how natural resources form? Or not to be exposed to the global challenges of how to meet the unsustainable but growing demands for energy and materials that are still being driven by consumption in the developed world? At the heart of it, research in Universities remains in the hands of the researchers. It is they who set the research agenda, and find pathways to the solutions. If Universities have become more effective at facilitating researchers to seek external funding to support their research, is this necessarily a bad thing?

Today sees the formal opening, in Oxford, of the Shell Geoscience Laboratory. This partnership provides £5.9M funding for a small number of staff (a Professorship, and several post-doctoral researchers and graduate research students), and some core laboratory equipment. The sum of money involved (equivalent to ca. £1M/yr over about 5 years) is, indeed, significant in the context of a research group – but is both a tiny proportion of Oxford’s annual research income (< 0.25%), and a small fraction of current external funding received by Oxford for studies into Earth, the Environment and the Climate System: Oxford’s current research portfolio from the Natural Environment Research Council currently exceeds £60 M. This does not look like funding that is buying ‘influence over the research agenda‘.

If we wish to demand greater social responsibility from the major global institutions, would it not be better to focus, as ShareAction are doing, on the rather more significant interests that Universities in general, and the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) Pension Fund in particular, hold through their investment portfolios?  In 2012, USS alone held investments of £900 M in the ‘hydrocarbon’ sector, and over £500 M in the minerals and mining sectors. Wisely used, that looks like a lot of leverage.

Chaiten: anniversary of an eruption

May 1st marks the anniversary of the start of the first historical eruption of Chaiten, a small volcano in southern Chile, in 2008. A lot has been written on the eruption elsewhere, starting with Erik Klemetti’s eruptions blog which first reported on the event at the time. This is an opportunity to share some field photos, which I took during field visits to Chaiten in 2009. At the time of the eruption, Chaiten was not well known,  but it was recognised to be an old dome of obsidian lava, last thought to have erupted about ten thousand years previously. In fact, we now know that Chaiten has a long history of explosive eruptions of  rhyolite magma, and is probably one of the most prolific producers of rhyolite in southern Chile.

The snapshots illustrate some of the transient consequences of explosive, ash-rich eruptions for both people, and the environment; and some of the excitement of  trying to read the deposits before they have been washed away. Enjoy!

Further reading: there is a special issue of the Open Access journal ‘Andean Geology’ on the Chaiten eruption which will be published shortly. The current versions of the papers can be found ‘in press‘, and I shall update this once the journal issue is complete.

Ash and leaf litter

Prints in the ash

Impressions in ash

Ash in the undergrowth

“Chaiten will not die”

“We want to return to Chaiten, our little town”

Wood shavings

Chaiten bay, choked with pumice

Approaching Chaiten

Survey spot

Field volcanology

Evening glow

Acknowledgements: funding for fieldwork on Chaiten and elsewhere in southern Chile was provided by grants from NERC and the British Council. Field collaborators included Fabrizio Alfano, Constanza Bonadonna, Chuck Connor, Laura Connor and Seb Watt.

Earth Day – Thin Ice and the inside story of Climate Science

Earth Day, April 22nd, has been chosen as the day for the global launch of a new film on the science behind global environmental change ‘Thin Ice: the Inside Story of Climate Science‘.  This is an exciting project, as the filmmakers include Simon Lamb, who has had a successful career as an academic geologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and then at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; and David Sington, an experienced filmmaker from DOX productions, who originally trained in Natural Sciences. Simon Lamb and David Sington have previously collaborated on a number of documentary films, most notably Earth Story, which was a fabulous documentary on the story of Planet Earth which first aired in the UK in 1998. I still use the accompanying book ‘Earth Story: The Forces that have Shaped our Planet‘ as one of the introductory readings for first year Earth Science students.

For the next 36 hours or so, you can watch Thin Ice live, and for free, online at http://thiniceclimate.org/watch-the-film.

Update.

Having had a chance to see a live screening of Thin Ice, here are my first impressions. ‘Thin Ice’ is a personal journey of discovery  for the filmmaker, Simon Lamb. He has the ambition of trying to understand what climate scientists do, and how they can be confident that global climate is changing. The result is a film that is visually attractive, and that captures in a charming and disarming way the way that science is done. Although there is a narrative, the story mainly unfolds as individual scientists tell the viewers a little bit about the questions they are trying to answer, and how they go about it – whether by collecting ancient samples of ice (bits of the ‘frozen history of climate’); or by rooting back through archives of past measurements of the weather; or by running computer simulations of past, present and future climate. The ‘laboratory’ shifts from snow pits in Antarctica and the heaving deck of a ship in the Southern Ocean, to the physics and computing laboratories of Potsdam and Oxford. This is not a film that really answers the question of why global warming is happening, but it is instead an account of how scientists gather the evidence to try and understand the workings of the climate system. Above all, it is a lovely film about science, by scientists.

What do you wish that you had learned in Graduate School?

In the UK, the landscape of graduate doctoral training (for the PhD, or DPhil degree) in the field of environmental research is about to be radically reshaped.  The main funding agency for PhD training, the Natural Environment Research Council, is currently running a competition for Universities and other Research Organisations to run coordinated doctoral training programmes from next year (October 2014), built around the idea of  training future environmental scientists in cohorts within a multidisciplinary environment.  This differs from current practice in the UK, where funding for doctoral training from NERC is allocated to individual departments on an annual basis, based on an algorithm that takes into account elements such as grant income.

The move to a programme of Doctoral Training Partnerships, where partnerships will be between both academic and research ‘producers’ and non-academic ‘users’ of NERC-funded science and scientists, offers an opportunity to embed some completely new aspects of training into PhD and DPhil programmes.

Looking back on your own graduate training, what  do you wish that you had learned about, been exposed to, or been encouraged to think about while  in Graduate School, rather than having to catch up later?  Here are a few examples of my own [thinking back to a PhD many years ago], just to get started..

1. How to write: for journals, for the media, for the public.

2. How to work collaboratively.

3. How to write a fundable research proposal, and how to manage the research, researchers and other aspects once funded.

4. How scientific research translates into the ‘real world’: who uses it, why and how.

Conference report – EGU highlights, Day 4

Large international science conferences are extraordinary events. For a week at a time, scientists emerge from their offices and laboratories and join a throng of thousands, negotiating their way through tens of thousands of presentations across multiple parallel sessions. For many of those attending, the scale of the event is less important, though, than the opportunity the meeting presents for smaller clusters of researchers to come together to talk about problems of common interest. This week, the European Geosciences Union General Assembly has been taking place in Vienna; a city that seems to me at least to have one of the best integrated public transport systems in the world. With 13,500 abstracts and 11,000 delegates this year, this is one of the major annual Geoscience meetings worldwide, and it attracts people from across the world. This week, I was one of the convenors of a specialist session on volcanic ash; a session that in the end began in the depths of the volcanic conduit, and ended with the spread of volcanic through the atmosphere. This meeting within-a-conference worked really well: the 45 presentations brought together a mix of specialists from disciplinary backgrounds as diverse as applied mathematics, atmospheric physics, meteorology, geophysics and volcanology and from universities, government agencies and volcano observatories for a whole day of discussion.

This sort of forum offers both a very quick way to ‘catch up’ in areas where one might already be a specialist; and to fill in important gaps in knowledge and understanding in other areas. More importantly, it allows people to network; to gain a keener understanding of ‘how things work’, and of the underlying assumptions and other constraints that influence the way that the science is developing. In my own session, the overwhelming challenges ultimately relate to two themes: scale or size, and accessibility. Size, because both in the volcanic conduit and in the atmosphere, the properties and behaviour both of the magma and of the ash cloud relate intimately to the nature, properties and behaviour of materials at the micron or sub-micron scale. Accessibility, because neither the flowing magma within the conduit nor the transient volcanic ash cloud are particularly easy to sample directly while ‘live’. Instead, researchers rely on using  remote-sensing measurements (e.g. seismicity, ground- or satellite-based 0bservations) to gather real-time data, along with with simulation (experimental and computational), and finally inference and validation from analysis of eruptive products, where any are preserved, in order to piece together a story. It would be hard to bring together a similarly diverse group of specialists in a forum other than a large conference without considerable effort, which is perhaps one explanation of why the General Assembly format is both attractive and successful.

Professor John Barry Dawson, 1932-2013

I learnt this week the sad news of the death of Barry Dawson, Emeritus Professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. I had the great fortune to accompany Barry into the field in 1988, while I was still studying for a PhD, and had the pleasure of spending many enjoyable moments with him subsequently, whether in the field, at meetings, or just in passing. This seems like an appropriate time to reflect briefly on our first meeting.

Barry Dawson in 1988

In the summer of 1988, Barry heard that a volcano that he had first climbed in about 1960 was erupting again, and he was eager to to put together a team for a field visit. This was no ordinary volcano, though: Oldoinyo Lengai, in the northern part of the Tanzanian Rift Valley, is the only known active volcano to erupt lavas of molten sodium carbonate (or carbonatite). With emergency funding in place from the Royal Society, Barry and I, along with Harry Pinkerton and Gill Norton, set off for Tanzania. This was my first visit both to Africa, and to an erupting volcano. I remember Barry’s delight in regaling us with his reminiscences of his life in Tanzania as a Geologist for the (then) Tanganyika Geological Survey in the early 1960′s.  This job had seen him map the ‘Monduli’ region of Tanzania, and had first taken him to the summit of this enigmatic volcano – and his first paper in Nature.

Barry, always eager to pass on his knowledge and enthusiasm.

We trundled across the rift valley in a ten-tonne truck, and set up camp at the base of the volcano. This was luxurious field work, with a team of guides, cooks and porters from an outfit, which is still going, called Dorobo Safaris.

Half way up..

Getting to the top was a challenge, even with a safari team to carry most of the equipment, but it was certainly worth it: to see, first, sunrise over Kilimanjaro, and then to arrive at the rim of the active crater, shrouded in mist but with the full cacophony of an eruption in progress coming up from somewhere beneath us. Eventually, the clouds lifted, and we were treated to a display from the coolest (literally) and most fluid lavas ever seen on Earth. The next few days are a blur, but included Barry plane-tabling to produce a map of the active vents of the summit crater; impromptu tutorials on the alkaline igneous rocks (of which Oldoinyo Lengai is built), and many hours watching the astonishing eruptive display of this bizarre volcano. And once it was too dark to stay in the field, we would retreat back to the camp site which, in hindsight was perilously located within the main crater, to enjoy a wee dram and a story or two with Barry.

Early morning shadow across the active crater of Oldoinyo Lengai, November 1988.

A curious little spatter cone of carbonatite lava, within the active crater of Oldoinyo Lengai.

Five days later, we stumbled and slid our way back down the slopes, and took the dusty track back into Arusha. Arriving at the hotel to find that there was neither running water, nor food, wasn’t the slightest nuisance to Barry, who settled us all down in the bar to quench our thirst with beer.

View of Oldoinyo Lengai from base camp, with Barry Dawson, Celia Nyamweru and Gill Norton, November 1988.

Since that first field expedition, our paths crossed on many occasions. Barry was not only delightful company, he was hugely generous with his time, his expertise and his rock collection – a collection which must be one of the most important collections of both rocks from the mantle, as well as the East African Rift. I shall never forget the way he would always begin a conversation with ‘Now, David, let me tell you… ‘; my only regret is that I didn’t have time to go for a beer with him on my last fleeting visit to Edinburgh.

—

Below, I have reproduced the formal citation that I put together for Barry’s nomination for the Collins Medal of the Mineralogical Society, which he was awarded in 2012. This hopefully captures a small snapshot of his academic contributions.

Barry Dawson was a petrologist and mineralogist who devoted his career to further the understanding of igneous rocks.  Over the fifty years of a highly productive career, Barry Dawson made a series of lasting contributions to studies of the mineralogy, mineral chemistry, petrology and geochemistry of the parts of the mantle sampled by volcanic rocks; and to the nature of the melts and magmas involved in continental magmatism.  His work significantly developed the fields of kimberlite and carbonatite magmatism and improved our understanding of the nature of the subcontinental mantle.

Barry Dawson’s career began with a PhD at the newly formed Centre for African Studies in Leeds (1956-1960).  Here, he began his work on kimberlite magmas and their xenoliths, which culminated in the publication twenty years later of the influential monograph ‘Kimberlites and their xenoliths’ (Dawson, 1980).  Amongst his major contributions here were his recognition of wet, pegmatitic rock samples from the upper mantle (the Mica-Amphibole-Rutile-Ilmenite-Diopside or MARID suite); and the discovery of diamond in garnet lherzolite nodules (Dawson and Smith, 1975).  After completing his PhD, Barry worked for as a geologist for the Tanganyika Geological Survey, where he discovered the erupting sodium carbonate lavas of the volcano of Oldoinyo Lengai – aspects of which he continued to work on ever since. Barry returned to the United Kingdom in 1964, where he was lecturer at St Andrews and later Professor in the Universities of Sheffield (from 1978) and Edinburgh (from 1990).  Over the course of his career, Barry published prolifically, and gave his time and samples generously to support the developing careers of his students and other scientists.  He was a fount of knowledge on East African magmatism, and in his retirement, Barry completed an important synthesis on this, published in 2008, as a Geological Society of London Memoir titled ‘the Gregory Rift Valley and Recent volcanoes of northern Tanzania’.

Barry’s notable achievements were recognized by a number of awards: he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1973; was Hallimond Lecturer of the Mineralogical Society in 1980/1, and was awarded the inaugural Norman L Bowen Award of the American Geophysical Union in 1987 for his outstanding contributions to volcanology, geochemistry and petrology. In 2012, he was awarded the Collins Medal of the Mineralogical Society for his career-long contributions to the field.

Full curriculum vitae