Abstract
Volcanic eruptions differ enormously in their size and impacts, ranging from quiet lava flow effusions along the volcano flanks to colossal events with the potential to affect our entire civilization. Knowledge of the time and size distribution of volcanic eruptions is of obvious relevance for understanding the dynamics and behavior of the Earth system, as well as for defining global volcanic risk. From the analysis of recent global databases of volcanic eruptions extending back to more than 2 million years, I show here that the return times of eruptions with similar magnitude follow an exponential distribution. The associated relative frequency of eruptions with different magnitude displays a power law, scale-invariant distribution over at least six orders of magnitude. These results suggest that similar mechanisms subtend to explosive eruptions from small to colossal, raising concerns on the theoretical possibility to predict the magnitude and impact of impending volcanic eruptions.
Highlights
Cataclysmic eruptions are, rare events, less rare than the impact from a large celestial body, the latter representing the only other natural event thought to be capable of comparable destruction[1,2]
The difficulty to obtain a quantitative description of the time-size distribution of volcanic eruptions stems from a number of factors: i) the attempts to construct global volcanic databases are only recent[7,8]; ii) such databases reveal a striking deterioration of information with age[9,10,11,12]; and iii) with increasing size and rareness of eruptions, the required catalogue completeness extends back to millions of years[8,9,10,11]
I reconstruct the global time-size distribution of volcanic eruptions on Earth, starting from the two existing large databases constituted by the Global Volcanism Project (GVP) Holocene eruptions database of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Large Magnitude Explosive Volcanic Eruptions (LaMEVE) database realized in the frame of the VOGRIPA project
Summary
Cataclysmic eruptions are, rare events, less rare than the impact from a large celestial body, the latter representing the only other natural event thought to be capable of comparable destruction[1,2]. I reconstruct the global time-size distribution of volcanic eruptions on Earth, starting from the two existing large databases constituted by the Global Volcanism Project (GVP) Holocene eruptions database of the Smithsonian Institution (http://volcano.si.edu), and the Large Magnitude Explosive Volcanic Eruptions (LaMEVE) database realized in the frame of the VOGRIPA project (http://www.bgs.ac.uk/vogripa). These databases, extensively analyzed elsewhere[8,9,10,11,12,13], do not include ocean floor-forming eruptions and flood basalt eruptions, that are excluded from the present analysis. Stationary behavior of Earth at the global scale in relation to volcanic eruption occurrence during last few million years is usually assumed[11,17]
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