A study of the world’s most active volcano leads to a surprising discovery

The world’s most active volcanoes appear to be filled with water, according to the scientists who analyzed the violent volcano in hopes of finding evidence that would allow experts to learn more about how volcanoes work.

Sheveluch volcano, located in northeastern Russia, is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. The volcano in the remote Kamchatka region has erupted on a large scale more than 40 times in the past 10,000 years.

The last major eruption occurred in 1964 when a Sheveluch eruption was so powerful that it created a new crater.

Sheveluch is still exploding continuously, albeit on a small scale, for an amazing 20 years. As such, it is one of the most active volcanoes on the planet.

Researchers hoping to discover what makes a volcano so active were surprised to learn that water plays a major role.

Scientists from Washington University in St. Louis, near the volcano, analyzed small nodules of primordial magma that erupted from the volcano.

“The minerals in these nodules retain fingerprints of what was happening early in the evolution of magma, deep in the Earth’s crust,” said graduate student Andrea Goltz, who was the lead author of the study.

According to research published in Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, the magma analyzed indicates that conditions inside Sheveluch volcano comprise between 10% to 14% of the water weight.

Most volcanoes, for reference, contain less than 1% water. Scientists were particularly interested in a mineral called amphibole. Amphibole acts as a good indicator of water content at a known temperature.

The chemical made up of amphibole tells scientists how much water is found deep under a sheveloch.

Michael Krauchinsky, Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis said: “When you convert the chemistry of these two minerals, amphibole and olivine, into temperatures and water contents as we did in this paper, the results were remarkable in terms of the amount of water and the decrease.” The temperature we record. ”

“The only way to get primitive and pure materials at lower temperatures is to add lots and lots of water,” he added.

He continued: “Adding water to rocks has the same effect as adding salt to ice, by doing so, you lower the melting point.”

Source: Express