Question: Have you ever been near a volcanic eruption,if you have where?

Natasha Dowey answered on 4 Mar 2019: last edited 4 Mar 2019 2:12 pm

I haven’t- and the reason is that the types of volcano I studied are incredibly explosive, and when they erupt it is difficult to observe them from a safe distance!
Volcanologists don’t have to observe ongoing eruptions to learn about volcanoes- they can study explosive volcanoes by looking at the rocks formed by their eruptions. Even though these rocks may record eruptions that happened thousands of years ago, they can tell us about the nature of the volcano and what may happen if it were to erupt again. I’ve attached some photos of rocks formed by explosive eruptions- you can see that they contain a lot of white ash, chunks of white rock called pumice (bubbled magma rock), and chunks of dark grey rock from the vent of the volcano, called lithics. The way this material is arranged in a cliff face can tell us how the eruption happened- whether there was a phase of pumice fall from an umbrella cloud above the volcano, which blanketed the landscape, whether there was an explosive episode where the vent of the volcano was destroyed, whether there was a phase of “pyroclastic density current” activity where deadly hot clouds of ash, gas and rock moved rapidly downhill away from the vent.
I would be really interested to see an eruption in progress, particularly an explosive eruption, but I can watch videos to see the dynamics of how they work: https://www.lambdafilms.co.uk/video-production/glowing-cloud/