Abstract

Volcano science has been deeply developing during last decades, from a branch of descriptive natural sciences to a highly multi-disciplinary, technologically advanced, quantitative sector of the geosciences. While the progress has been continuous and substantial, the volcanological community still lacks big scientific endeavors comparable in size and objectives to many that characterize other scientific fields. Examples include large infrastructures such as the LHC in Geneva for sub-atomic particle physics or the Hubble telescope for astrophysics, as well as deeply coordinated, highly funded, decadal projects such as the Human Genome Project for life sciences. Here we argue that a similar big science approach will increasingly concern volcano science, and briefly describe three examples of developments in volcanology requiring such an approach, and that we believe will characterize the current decade (2020–2030): the Krafla Magma Testbed initiative; the development of a Global Volcano Simulator; and the emerging relevance of big data in volcano science.

Highlights

  • IntroductionObserving System (www.epos-eu.org), representing the platform for EU-level data accessibility and sharing in solid Earth, and the frame within which European geoscientists discuss and implement common development strategies; and other EU-level investments, facilitated through EPOS, aimed at transverse, transnational access to resources such as advanced laboratories, observatories, data collections, and computational centers, and of which Eurovolc (www.eurovolc.eu) represents a valuable example

  • Volcano science has deeply evolved during last decades

  • As from that easy forecast, approaches based on statistics and probabilities have become progressively more widespread in volcanology: a search in the Web of Science shows that the number of entries responding to “volcano” and “probability” more than doubles from the first to the second decade of this century

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Summary

Introduction

Observing System (www.epos-eu.org), representing the platform for EU-level data accessibility and sharing in solid Earth, and the frame within which European geoscientists discuss and implement common development strategies; and other EU-level investments, facilitated through EPOS, aimed at transverse, transnational access to resources such as advanced laboratories, observatories, data collections, and computational centers, and of which Eurovolc (www.eurovolc.eu) represents a valuable example. The aim there, and here with this short paper, was that of identifying some major elements that may contribute significantly to shape volcanology in the years. Together with the contributions from many other colleagues in this volume, the objective is to present a picture of what volcano science may look like in 10 years . The perspective that we present here largely (but not exclusively) refers to examples from

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