Monday 17th February, 4-5pm, Fry Building LG.02 (Lower Ground Floor Lecture Theatre) followed by a wine reception in the Staff Common Room.
Title: Predicting the next apocalyptic volcanic super-eruption
Abstract:
Hazards tend to be summarized in terms of their frequency/magnitude curve. For explosive volcanic eruptions, a super-eruption at the top end of the magnitude range is large enough to return us to a “pre-civilisation state”, but even a large eruption poses a serious hazard for a country. Inferring the global frequency/magnitude curve from the volcanic record is complicated, because the record is unreliable going back more than a few hundred years. In this talk I will look at the maths of the
frequency/magnitude curve, show and discuss the curve we fitted for large explosive volcanic eruptions,
and describe the response of the media to our results.
