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Thursday, January 15, 2015

Italy:

The Very Useful Art of Assessing a Supervolcano Without Making it Erupt (Phys.Org)

The Vesuvius Observatory (OV), monitoring both Mt Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei, is the oldest volcanology observatory in the world. Here geologists, geophysicists, and physicists join forces in a unique environment to understand what's beneath these volcanoes.

A good example is the EU deep drilling project, which the OV sponsors. The idea is simple: you drill to a depth of 2.5 miles inside Campi Flegrei caldera to get sensitive scientific data and rock samples, and obtain geothermal energy from the heated volcanic complex.

Using attenuation tomography the scientists scan the deep Earth interior, looking at how and where the velocity of the waves is changed by the medium. They have established that there is no large magmatic chamber under Campi Flegrei between 0km and 4km depth – at least there wasn't during the last seismic crisis, which was between 1980 and 1984.

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