News and views comment on developments in monitoring submarine eruptions

What is it about?

Submarine eruptions are more difficult to observe than subaerial eruptions because they are mostly obscured by the water column from satellite-based remote-sensing instruments and difficult to predict in advance, making the installation of equipment difficult to plan. Four articles in Nature Geoscience show some progress. Watts et al. demonstrated the use of hydrophone records coupled with repeat bathymetry to work out the evolution of an explosive island-arc volcanic eruption. Eruptions of Axial Seamount on the Juan de Fuca Ridge tend to be more effusive. Submarine pressure measurements by Chadwick et al. revealed the uplift of the seabed prior to an eruption, which was characterised also with seismicity changes by Dziak et al. Caress et al. had previously mapped the area of the eruption with a sonar on an autonomous underwater vehicle; repeating that mapping revealed the volume distribution of the erupted lavas. The flow fronts of those lavas appear to have intermediate morphologic complexity between the crenulated fronts observed in pahoehoe lava fields and rounded fronts of a'a' lava fields.

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