[HN Gopher] Large magma bodies found beneath dormant volcanoes
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Large magma bodies found beneath dormant volcanoes
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 90 points
Date : 2025-02-10 00:49 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| >The team found that all of the volcanoes, including dormant
| ones, have persistent and large magma bodies.
|
| I always thought dormant merely means asleep - as in not
| _currently_ active, but may wake up at any time. This is
| different from extinct volcanoes, which would actually be
| expected not to erupt. Crater lake in particular has well
| established hydrothermal activity, which strongly suggests there
| is still something going on below and it may erupt again in the
| future. Any geologists can explain what the surprising thing here
| is besides the apparent difficulty to distinguish dormant and
| extinct?
| echelon wrote:
| This is pop-sci journalists once again ruining the message by
| either not understanding the paper or by dumbing it down to the
| point it becomes lazy and counter-factual. I think it's mostly
| the former, because there definitely exists a way to "explain
| it like I'm five" without telling mistruths.
|
| This pop-sci garbage has me hardcore Gell-Mann amnesia-ing [1]
| the rest of the journalism industry.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Active/dormant/extinct are not ternary since even "active"
| volcanoes don't erupt all the time.
|
| Active and extinct are more like endpoints with most volcanoes
| falling into some degree of dormancy, usually indexed by how
| long it has been since last eruption.
|
| The surprising thing is there doesn't seem to be correlation
| between time since last eruption, and size/shallowness of a
| magma chamber. That essentially removes one of the signals that
| vulcanologists were hoping would help inform predictions of the
| timing of the next eruption.
|
| > I always thought dormant merely means asleep - as in not
| currently active, but may wake up at any time.
|
| There is a lot of hope that dormant volcanoes don't wake up at
| "any" time, but rather at predictable times. And the farther in
| advance we can make an accurate prediction, the better. So a
| lot of volcano research inclines toward "can this help us
| improve our predictions?"
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ...the long-standing belief that active volcanoes have large
| magma bodies that are expelled during eruptions...
|
| I'm not a geologist, and my current "knowledge" of volcanology is
| mostly from the GeologyHub YouTube channel - but that is
| completely contrary to my understanding. If a serious magma
| chamber is _emptied_ during an eruption, then the volcano above
| it (and some of the surrounding area) _will_ collapse into the
| empty chamber. Because there 's no way in hell that an empty
| magma chamber could support the weight of its own roof.
|
| The vast majority of volcanic eruptions - even VEI 5 ones, like
| Mount St. Helens in 1980 - do not work like that. The magma
| chamber is still there, after. It's probably shrunk a _bit_ -
| volcanologists measure ground-level uplift and subsidence in
| centimeters, to monitor that - and is a bit depleted of volatiles
| (volcanic gasses, which can act a bit like the fizz in a shaken
| bottle of soda). That 's it.
| metalman wrote:
| the amount of data concerning the earths internal structure is
| growing in leaps and bounds. The ability to discern between rock
| types, water, oil, gas, faults and fractures, and molten and semi
| molten rocks is becoming much more precise. The fun part is that
| siesmologists use the earths own movements and resulting siesmic
| and acoustical waves to build the picture, though the scale is
| intimidating, beyond human capacity to know in any fine
| detail.Add in ground penetrating radar and experiments useing
| known explosive charges, placed in precise locations, and the
| fine resolution just gets better. Bet the whole geology field is
| having fun.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Echoing what other commenters have said, I can't square the
| supposedly surprised scientists with what I thought I already
| knew about volcanoes. Can anybody figure out where the
| miscommunication occurred?
|
| Matching my layman understanding, Wikipedia says that an
| _extinct_ volcano is one that no longer has a magma supply, but
| that dormant ones may unexpectedly become active. The article on
| the other hand speaks of dormant volcanoes supposedly being
| understood to have "empty" magma chambers, which structurally
| makes no sense, and should very clearly differentiate them from
| active volcanoes. Wikipedia says that the demarcation between
| dormant and active is so wishy washy that the term dormant is
| basically obsolete in the scientific literature. So what gives?
| mapt wrote:
| I suspect it has something to do with the concept "magma
| chamber", as if there is a big, singular hole underneath each
| volcano, rather than a loose network of multiple layers of
| melted & semi-melted rock spread over tens of kilometers of
| crust depth, organized by geological strata, which periodically
| melts through an obstruction or solidifies into an obstruction.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Likely place for them to be
| Gracana wrote:
| The article follows the typical pop-sci presentation of
| "scientists are gobsmacked by thing that's obvious to laymen,"
| but of course it's really not like that. This is the abstract of
| the paper:
|
| _Quantitative estimates of magma storage are fundamental to
| evaluating volcanic dynamics and hazards. Yet our understanding
| of subvolcanic magmatic plumbing systems and their variability
| remains limited. There is ongoing debate regarding the
| ephemerality of shallow magma storage and its volume relative to
| eruptive output, and so whether an upper-crustal magma body could
| be a sign of imminent eruption. Here we present seismic imaging
| of subvolcanic magmatic systems along the Cascade Range arc from
| systematically modelling the three-dimensional scattered
| wavefield of teleseismic body waves. This reveals compelling
| evidence of low-seismic-velocity bodies indicative of partial
| melt between 5 and 15 km depth beneath most Cascade Range
| volcanoes. The magma reservoirs beneath these volcanoes vary in
| depth, size and complexity, but upper-crustal magma bodies are
| widespread, irrespective of the eruptive flux or time since the
| last eruption of the associated volcano. This indicates that
| large volumes of melts can persist at shallow depth throughout
| eruption cycles beneath large volcanoes._
| bregma wrote:
| It would probably benefit society as a whole if the abstracts
| of scientific papers (not their content) eschewed
| sesquipedalian loquaciousness.
|
| Here's the same abstract for the more nearly human.
| This paper presents evidence and analysis that shows large
| magma chambers can be found under all non-extinct volcanoes on
| the west coast of North America.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Many journals use a separate summary statement which
| describes the findings and significance in more ordinary
| terms (eLife is a good example). An abstract has a specific
| purpose and it is not quite meant for a public audience. It
| can also vary depending on the journal, with less specialized
| journals being written for broader audiences.
|
| (Although I will agree this one is a bit unnecessarily
| verbose)
| krisoft wrote:
| Idk. You can always just leave out details to make things
| simpler. I could rewrite your version of the abstract to
| "Scientist find magma under volcanoes." Much simpler! Leaves
| out a lot from yours, but so did yours leave out a lot from
| theirs.
|
| I think in this case it is important to consider the audience
| one is writing to. And the abstract is written to other
| geologist. They want to know what kind of evidence they have
| (purely computational? new field measurements? what kind of
| modality?)
|
| While for me this sentence[1] is hard to penetrate jargon,
| presumably for the intended audience it is packed full of
| information. Same as the sentence "we persist the setting in
| a local sqlite database using sqlalchemy ORM" means a lot
| more to some dev like me than "we save the setting". You can
| simplify it of course, but while you make it easier to
| understand to a lay audience it becomes less specific to the
| intended and specialist audience.
|
| 1: "seismic imaging of subvolcanic magmatic systems along the
| Cascade Range arc from systematically modelling the three-
| dimensional scattered wavefield of teleseismic body waves"
| 9dev wrote:
| This is a problem I expect to be fully and thoroughly solved
| by LLMs very soon; no longer should we have to concern
| ourselves with rephrasing things for different audiences than
| our peer groups. Scientists often aren't also great writers,
| and if they don't have to be, they can focus more on their
| actual area of expertise.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It boggles my mind that there are 100 products for AI
| summarization for every 1 that does filtering,
| classification, recommendation, clustering, etc.
|
| It seems some A.I. influencers can ask for a kilogram of
| antimatter and get it, but when the rest of use use Google,
| we get worthless A.I. summaries at the top of the page,
| like the one that told me to reset my network switch by (1)
| turning it off, and (2) then pressing the reset button for
| five seconds (does nothing because... no power!)
|
| This study shows the kind of results that the "rest of us"
| get
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/bbc_ai_news_accuracy
| /
| ruibiks wrote:
| Here is a good AI tool that you can use for free.
|
| https://cofyt.app for YouTube summaries, instant
| takeaways, and chat with video transcript.
|
| Don't complain, try it and come back here and give your
| feedback so that others can read.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's a better use case. I can skim a long document
| quickly but I can't quickly skim a 30 minute YouTube
| video. It's pretty fast though... Does YouTube already
| have a transcript that it's reading?
| ruibiks wrote:
| I'm not suggesting in any way that this replaces watching
| all YouTube videos but it could help you save some time
| with some types of video content and a co-pilot for
| others.
|
| You can try to ask it for things to your requirements,be
| descriptive.
|
| For example: - you can ask it to list topics or tags in
| that video.
|
| - you can ask it for specific timecodes/ Timestamps when
| topic X is mentioned
|
| - you can ask it to tell you what's happening in time
| blocks/Chunks of x minutes.
|
| be descriptive and ask for the format you want: lists,
| bullets, list with description, etc
|
| Thanks for the feedback.
| wpollock wrote:
| While I agree with you, note those directions may not be
| wrong. Many modern electronic devices do not completely
| power down when you turn them "off". Unplugging does
| (once the capacitors drain) but not necessarily using the
| power switch.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For this device that's wrong
|
| https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-lite-8-poe
|
| but I would say that device is poorly documented, you
| have to go to the forums to get all details, one of which
| is that you definitely don't want to hold down the reset
| button when it is off and then turn it on (holding the
| button down) because that will boot it up in TFTP mode
| which I guess loads the system software over the network.
|
| Mine wasn't lighting up any lights when I plugged
| ethernet cables into it, the reset button didn't do
| anything if the power was on or off. They RMAed it, I
| hope the next one works out better.
| skytwosea wrote:
| I disagree. This abstract is a mouthful, no doubt, but it's a
| highly information-dense mouthful, and it does its job well.
|
| Along the spectrum between intra-disciplinary academic
| communication on one end and public-sphere science
| communication on the other, the abstract is and should be
| just above the level of the paper it's abstracting. It's
| meant to be a technical summary for academics, and should not
| be dialed down for the sake of non-technical consumption.
| This one - speaking as a geologist with a long academic
| history - reads quite well, I think.
|
| In contrast, the sentence you propose should be the output of
| responsible and effective scientific communicators working
| closer to the public-sphere end of the spectrum, say, at the
| level of phys.org, here on hackernews, etc.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's squashing it too much. The angle that magma chambers
| could be diagnostic of eruption risk is what I think the
| public would find most interesting. The results seem to say
| that it isn't so.
| gus_massa wrote:
| That is what the press release from the university should
| have, but many of them add a lot of hype and distort the
| paper. Something like
|
| fake> _For fist time, scientists of $OUR_UNIVERSITY have seen
| Doors of Hell with their own eyes and are going to use it to
| replace Nuclear Power in 5 years and solve Climate Change and
| find the Atlantis._
|
| I'm exaggeration a little, but I've seen a few _horrible_
| cases https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fal
| se&qu...
| exe34 wrote:
| I wish they would have both. Personally when I'm reading
| something in my field, I want the specific details, but when
| I'm reading outside my field, I could use the dumbed down
| version.
| stevage wrote:
| Obviously that fails at actually being an abstract: it
| doesn't communicate what the novel research is, or anything
| about the methods.
|
| Journals aren't for lay people. It's the pop science articles
| that should do better.
|
| Also, honestly, this abstract was much more comprehensible
| than I expected.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Indeed - at no point does the article quote a geologist
| expressing surprise at the result. There are quotes saying, in
| effect, that new data overthrows or requires modification of a
| previously-held _conjecture_ , but that is not the same as
| surprise. Experts in a given field are usually well aware of
| how conjectural a hypothesis is, as that is where current
| research is focused.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've taken surprised scientists out of the title above.
| Thanks!
| irrational wrote:
| Scientists keep talking about the three sisters rising, so
| clearly there is action happening there. And St Helens keeps
| erupting, says clearly there is action happening there. It
| doesn't seem surprising that the other volcanoes in the area
| could also be potentially active.
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