Santorini Bulges as Magma Balloons Underneath - 0 views
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Santorini locals began to suspect last year that something was afoot with the volcano under their Greek island group
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Wine glasses occasionally vibrated and clinked in cafes, suggesting tiny tremors, and tour guides smelled strange gasses.
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satellite radar technology has revealed the source of the symptoms. A rush of molten rock swelled the magma chamber under the volcano by some 13 to 26 million cubic yards (10 to 20 million cubic meters)—about 15 times the volume of London's Olympic Stadium—between January 2011 and April 2012
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even forced parts of the island's surface to rise upward and outward by 3 to 5.5 inches (8 to 14 centimeters).
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volcano has been quiet for 60 years
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recent events don't indicate an imminent eruption
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the earthquake activity and the rate of bulging have both slowed right down in the last few months, it doesn't look as though the volcano is about to start to erupt, and it is quite likely that it could remain quiet for another few years or decades.
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don't know enough about the lifecycle of large volcanoes in between eruptions to be certain
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beginning in the January 2011 data, more than a thousand small quakes, most of them imperceptible
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confirmed a subtle rise in Santorini's surface level with satellite radar images and GPS receivers
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Catastrophic eruptions on Santorini, which produce mostly pumice rather than lava, appear to occur here about 20,000 years apart
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The last one, in 1950, oozed enough lava to cover a few tennis courts
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Despite its relative quiet, Santorini is an ideal location to learn more about processes like the magma chamber's rapid inflation
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While satellite evidence of swelling magma chambers has rarely been available for an active volcano, the processes the data represent may not be all that unusual
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some large volcanoes like Santorini and Yellowstone spend hundreds or thousands of years in a state of what you'd call dormancy
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they'll often have these little restless patches
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These types of phenomena are likely to be common, but you need the right instruments and technology to detect what are usually rather small changes in behavior."
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we aren't any closer to knowing if, or when, the next lava eruption might happen
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likening the recent swelling to someone blowing a big breath into an invisible balloon.
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don't know how small or big the balloon is, and we don't know whether just one more breath will be enough for it to pop or not