Given that there has been some recent interest in Uturuncu in the media, when

As my last few blogs have been a bit heavy on the science, I thought I'd write something a bit lighter.  So here are some pretty pictures of the fieldwork for master's project, when I went to Pantelleria to measure the CO₂ degassing that was occurring there.


Favare Grande, a fumarole on Pantelleria.

In the first part of this look at magma chambers, I talked about some of the processes that dominate what goes on beneath an active volcano.  The twin actions of fractionation and assimilation were what preoccupied the early researchers, however more recently we've realised things are a little more complicated than that.  In this part I want to take a closer look at some of those intricacies.

This post is the first of a new series I plan to write, on the techniques used to study and monitor volcanoes.  The reason science is the best method we have of investigating the world around us is not so much what we know, but how we know it.  I thought I'd start with a technique that always amazes me; we can measure centimetres of ground deformation over an area of many square kilometres, from an altitude of 800 km.  Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, InSAR for short.