A Cornell-led research team has discovered that Mount Etna’s past eruptions occurred at drastically different speeds, with some building over weeks and others happening in hours. Scientists traced this variation to volcanic gases like carbon dioxide and water, potentially improving eruption prediction.
Researchers reconstructed two major eruptions from Mount Etna in Italy, finding that magma followed different routes and moved toward the surface at different speeds. Esteban Gazel, the Charles N. Mellowes Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering, explained that a volcano’s explosiveness depends on how easily its magma flows and the amount of volatile material trapped inside. “Imagine a bottle of soda. If you open that bottle without agitating it, you can drink it, but if you shake it up, all the bubbles get separated really fast, and you have an explosion,” Gazel said. “Volcanoes work in a similar way, and my lab is trying to quantify these processes.”
The study focused on two key volcanic volatiles: water and carbon dioxide. While water was long considered the primary driver of eruptions, Gazel’s group previously demonstrated in 2023 that carbon dioxide can also trigger explosive activity. They utilized a technique involving Raman spectroscopy to examine crystals formed within magma and measure microscopic gas bubbles—approximately 1 to 10% the thickness of a human hair. Former postdoctoral researcher Maxim Gavrilenko explained, “That technique gives us the density of CO2, and using a state equation we can transform that density into pressure, and pressure can be transformed into depth. Then we apply those techniques to these explosive eruptions.” The findings were published in *Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems*.
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