UAF Researcher looks to make monitoring volcanoes easier

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Alaska has more than 130 volcanoes. Of those, 54 have been active in recorded history — about 260 years.

In fact, the U.S. Geological Survey says Alaska experiences one to two volcanic eruptions every year.

“We have a lot of people flying over the [Aleutian] arc, about, I believe, more than 50,000 a day,” said Darren Tan, graduate student researcher with the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. “And so it’s really paramount that we keep a good track of unrest at our Alaska volcanoes and seismicity or ground motion is one primary way that we do so.”

Tremors are underlying ground movements in volcanoes that could indicate the volcano is getting restless.

“They usually hint at some subsurface unrest that could be a fluid migration, magma-filled cracks kind of resonating, or even like a really small — but rapid fire — earthquakes,” Tan said. “It’s still being debated today what the mechanism behind tremor is, what we do know is that it’s indicative of some type of unrest or activity.”

Currently, the process to search for the indicators of tremors is done manually by Alaska Volcano Observatory seismologists and is quite time-consuming.

“Out of the 54 historically active volcanoes, 32 of them have a seismic network,” Tan said. “And that essentially means that they’re encircled by seismic instrumentation around the volcano, and because tremor is so subtle, we have a duty seismologist that goes into each of these 32 networks every day. And what we’re seeing here is three hours at one volcano, right? So you might imagine 32 different networks 24 hours a day. And that’s a lot of things to look at.”

Tan’s research has developed a program to look for these tremors.

“If we were to run this algorithm, to kind of automate that process and distill the data and just point our eye to the things that require additional attention, I think that’s one way that will really augment the duty role of AVO seismologists,” Tan said.

Tan’s research focused on Pavlov volcano, but the hope is to expand it to other Alaskan volcanoes.

“We’re definitely still running some tests, we’ve definitely gotten to work at Pavlov volcano, which is the one that I wrote about,” Tan said. “But they’re definitely ... efforts that are underway to kind of transfer this model to different volcanoes along the arc. Some of them that come to mind are Semisopochnoi volcano [and] Shishaldin volcano that erupted last year.”

Listen to the full discussion with Tan on In Depth Alaska.

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