Large magma bodies found beneath dormant volcanoes
phys.org
phys.org
I always thought dormant merely means asleep - as in not currently active, but may wake up at any time. This is different from extinct volcanoes, which would actually be expected not to erupt. Crater lake in particular has well established hydrothermal activity, which strongly suggests there is still something going on below and it may erupt again in the future. Any geologists can explain what the surprising thing here is besides the apparent difficulty to distinguish dormant and extinct?
This pop-sci garbage has me hardcore Gell-Mann amnesia-ing [1] the rest of the journalism industry.
> counter-factual
I bring this up because one common way a message is misinterpreted is that words are overloaded. So people read a thing, understand it with one definition of words, but the intended definition is different. Because knowledge is often passed through a game of telephone[1] context is often lost or degraded, making it harder to decode the intended meanings.
Probably worth mentioning that there is no lower bound in complexity for a lie, but the is for truth. Worse, no real "truth" exists, it is just ever approaching something that is "more correct" with exponentially increasing complexity.
I often wonder if we've just advanced so far that we can no longer make sense of things with first or second order approximations. That it's just so difficult to find sufficient approximations that we break down. Our desire to have answers is stronger than our desire to understand. I suspect this is a great filter if there are any. It makes sense for any evolved creature to hit this point, as we definitely know computational complexity increases dramatically with respect to higher order terms.
Active and extinct are more like endpoints with most volcanoes falling into some degree of dormancy, usually indexed by how long it has been since last eruption.
The surprising thing is there doesn’t seem to be correlation between time since last eruption, and size/shallowness of a magma chamber. That essentially removes one of the signals that vulcanologists were hoping would help inform predictions of the timing of the next eruption.
> I always thought dormant merely means asleep - as in not currently active, but may wake up at any time.
There is a lot of hope that dormant volcanoes don’t wake up at “any” time, but rather at predictable times. And the farther in advance we can make an accurate prediction, the better. So a lot of volcano research inclines toward “can this help us improve our predictions?”
I'm not a geologist, and my current "knowledge" of volcanology is mostly from the GeologyHub YouTube channel - but that is completely contrary to my understanding. If a serious magma chamber is emptied during an eruption, then the volcano above it (and some of the surrounding area) will collapse into the empty chamber. Because there's no way in hell that an empty magma chamber could support the weight of its own roof.
The vast majority of volcanic eruptions - even VEI 5 ones, like Mount St. Helens in 1980 - do not work like that. The magma chamber is still there, after. It's probably shrunk a bit - volcanologists measure ground-level uplift and subsidence in centimeters, to monitor that - and is a bit depleted of volatiles (volcanic gasses, which can act a bit like the fizz in a shaken bottle of soda). That's it.
Quantitative estimates of magma storage are fundamental to evaluating volcanic dynamics and hazards. Yet our understanding of subvolcanic magmatic plumbing systems and their variability remains limited. There is ongoing debate regarding the ephemerality of shallow magma storage and its volume relative to eruptive output, and so whether an upper-crustal magma body could be a sign of imminent eruption. Here we present seismic imaging of subvolcanic magmatic systems along the Cascade Range arc from systematically modelling the three-dimensional scattered wavefield of teleseismic body waves. This reveals compelling evidence of low-seismic-velocity bodies indicative of partial melt between 5 and 15 km depth beneath most Cascade Range volcanoes. The magma reservoirs beneath these volcanoes vary in depth, size and complexity, but upper-crustal magma bodies are widespread, irrespective of the eruptive flux or time since the last eruption of the associated volcano. This indicates that large volumes of melts can persist at shallow depth throughout eruption cycles beneath large volcanoes.
Here's the same abstract for the more nearly human.
This paper presents evidence and analysis that shows large magma chambers can be found under all non-extinct volcanoes on the west coast of North America.(Although I will agree this one is a bit unnecessarily verbose)
I think in this case it is important to consider the audience one is writing to. And the abstract is written to other geologist. They want to know what kind of evidence they have (purely computational? new field measurements? what kind of modality?)
While for me this sentence[1] is hard to penetrate jargon, presumably for the intended audience it is packed full of information. Same as the sentence "we persist the setting in a local sqlite database using sqlalchemy ORM" means a lot more to some dev like me than "we save the setting". You can simplify it of course, but while you make it easier to understand to a lay audience it becomes less specific to the intended and specialist audience.
1: "seismic imaging of subvolcanic magmatic systems along the Cascade Range arc from systematically modelling the three-dimensional scattered wavefield of teleseismic body waves"
It seems some A.I. influencers can ask for a kilogram of antimatter and get it, but when the rest of use use Google, we get worthless A.I. summaries at the top of the page, like the one that told me to reset my network switch by (1) turning it off, and (2) then pressing the reset button for five seconds (does nothing because... no power!)
This study shows the kind of results that the "rest of us" get
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/bbc_ai_news_accuracy/
https://cofyt.app for YouTube summaries, instant takeaways, and chat with video transcript.
Don't complain, try it and come back here and give your feedback so that others can read.
You can try to ask it for things to your requirements,be descriptive.
For example: - you can ask it to list topics or tags in that video.
- you can ask it for specific timecodes/ Timestamps when topic X is mentioned
- you can ask it to tell you what's happening in time blocks/Chunks of x minutes.
be descriptive and ask for the format you want: lists, bullets, list with description, etc
Thanks for the feedback.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-lite-8-poe
but I would say that device is poorly documented, you have to go to the forums to get all details, one of which is that you definitely don't want to hold down the reset button when it is off and then turn it on (holding the button down) because that will boot it up in TFTP mode which I guess loads the system software over the network.
Mine wasn't lighting up any lights when I plugged ethernet cables into it, the reset button didn't do anything if the power was on or off. They RMAed it, I hope the next one works out better.
Along the spectrum between intra-disciplinary academic communication on one end and public-sphere science communication on the other, the abstract is and should be just above the level of the paper it's abstracting. It's meant to be a technical summary for academics, and should not be dialed down for the sake of non-technical consumption. This one - speaking as a geologist with a long academic history - reads quite well, I think.
In contrast, the sentence you propose should be the output of responsible and effective scientific communicators working closer to the public-sphere end of the spectrum, say, at the level of phys.org, here on hackernews, etc.
fake> For fist time, scientists of $OUR_UNIVERSITY have seen Doors of Hell with their own eyes and are going to use it to replace Nuclear Power in 5 years and solve Climate Change and find the Atlantis.
I'm exaggeration a little, but I've seen a few horrible cases https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Journals aren't for lay people. It's the pop science articles that should do better.
Also, honestly, this abstract was much more comprehensible than I expected.
Matching my layman understanding, Wikipedia says that an extinct volcano is one that no longer has a magma supply, but that dormant ones may unexpectedly become active. The article on the other hand speaks of dormant volcanoes supposedly being understood to have "empty" magma chambers, which structurally makes no sense, and should very clearly differentiate them from active volcanoes. Wikipedia says that the demarcation between dormant and active is so wishy washy that the term dormant is basically obsolete in the scientific literature. So what gives?