Professor Mike Burton will deliver the ESE Departmental Seminar on Thursday the 12th of October 2023: “Insights into magmatic processes during the 2021 Tajogaite, La Palma eruption”.
Join us in room G41 – RSM Building – on Thursday 12th of October 2023 at 12h15.
Abstract
The 2021 eruption of Tajogaite on la Palma offered an unprecedented opportunity to quantify the volatile inventory of magmas feeding volcanism in the Canary Island archipelago and to examine eruption dynamics. We applied multiple techniques to measure gas compositions and fluxes, allowing the quantification of the original CO2 abundance in the magma. Tracking the SO2 flux evolution using satellite-based approaches over the course of the eruption revealed a clear exponential decay pattern which allowed the end of the eruption to be forecasted. The approaches and lessons learned from this eruption open new potential for improved eruption forecasting in the future.
About the speaker
Prof Mike Burton is Chair in Volcanology at the University of Manchester. He took his BSc in Chemical Physics at the University of Sussex, followed by a PhD in Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a PDRA in volcanology, also based in Cambridge. This initial work was focussed on remote sensing magmatic gas measurements with open-path Fourier transform infrared spectrometers. In 2000, he joined the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in the Etna Observatory, where he led the gas geochemistry group till 2008, when he moved to INGV Pisa. In 2013 he was awarded an ERC grant to study global volcanic CO2 emissions, and in 2015 joined Manchester as Chair in Volcanology.
If you can’t be there in person, please contact us and we can send you a Teams link.