Professor Jenni Barclay (Professor of Volcanology at the University of East Anglia) will give the ESE Departmental Seminar on 14 October, “Unrest, eruptions and impacts: insights into volcanic behaviour from the historical eruptions of La Soufrière St Vincent”.
Join us online on by clicking “Livestream” on the seminar page at 12pm.
Volcanic eruptions usually generate multiple hazards. These have varied, and sometimes intense, impacts on the populations living near them. In tectonic settings like the Eastern Caribbean, volcanoes are capable of generating a multitude of eruptive styles, often on the timescale of an individual eruption, as evidenced by the 2020-2021 eruption of La Soufrière St. Vincent. Destruction can be amplified by the influence of the subtropical climate, or instabilities from juvenile topography and seismic activity. Thus, faced with a volcanic eruption, local populations and decision-makers have to deal with compound uncertainties. Using La Soufrière St. Vincent, this talk explores how activity from the recent and historical past can be used to understand the critical controls on volcanic behaviour. It also explores the extent to which understanding volcanic risk from the perspective of impacted populations creates opportunities for us to ask new and interesting scientific questions of these systems.
Biography
Jenni Barclay is a Professor of Volcanology at the University of East Anglia.
She is interested in all aspects of disaster risk reduction in volcanic settings. This currently includes research on active volcanic systems in the Caribbean and South America, on the following topics:
– equitable access to and sharing of hazard knowledge;
– volcanic processes and their monitoring;
– cultural and social responses to volcanic activity and their role in growing resilience;
– citizen science; and
– volcanoes and their multi-hazard environment.