In a development that could ultimately make life safer for some of the estimated 500 million people worldwide who live on or near volcanoes, an international collaboration of scientists has developed an instrument to monitor Earth's geology from space. People know they're living on a volcano, but it's a tropical jungle. That's where spaceborne monitoring helps.
Most geologists track changes over years.
If there's an eruption in progress, or say a Mount Saint Helens starts to heat up, then we want data as quickly as we can get it. The idea is to reconstruct a volcano's past with an eye toward predicting its future. Ramsey will present his research May 21 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. Ramsey has successfully used his computer model to study recently active volcanic domes in northern California. It's very interesting, but there's no real way to walk across this stuff and actually take samples and see what's going on.