Volcanologist Interview Preparation Guide

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Volcanologists are professionals who study volcanoes, whether dormant, active or extinct. They study these volcanoes to determine when volcanoes erupt, how it happens and why eruption occurs

The word "volcano" comes from the Roman God of Fire, Vulcanus. Also the small volcanic island of Vulcano in the Eolian Islands off Sicily, was called after that god. Apparently, this island was highly active in Ancient times and people believed its crater was the chimney of the Vulcanus' forge, where the hot lava and ash coming out from the crater were the visible evidence of his activity to forge weapons for the other gods.
On Hawai'i, the people attributed volcanic activity to the beautiful, but capricious and at times destructive goddess Pele, who loved fire and hated water.

An active volcano is a volcano that has had at least one eruption during the past 10,000 years. An active volcano might be erupting or dormant.

An erupting volcano is an active volcano that is having an eruption...

A dormant volcano is an active volcano that is not erupting, but supposed to erupt again.

An extinct volcano has not had an eruption for at least 10,000 years and is not expected to erupt again in a comparable time scale of the future.

Volcanoes are usually less dangerous than other natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes.

But there is no good answer if you don't limit it into a specific context: which volcano? dangerous to what - people, property, etc.? during which type of activity? at which location?

Volcanoes have a serious of hazards (e.g. lava flows, ash fall, pyroclastic flows, climate changes on a global scale) that relate into different dangers or risks. The risks when visiting an active volcano depend on which risk zones of the volcano are visited and for how long.

In the United States I have worked mostly on the Cascades volcanoes, such as Rainier, St. Helens, Medicine Lake caldera, Newberry Caldera, and South Sister. Also, I have worked at Long Valley caldera in California and a little bit on Kilauea in Hawaii. In other parts of the world, I have worked on Mount Erebus in Antarctica and Misti volcano in Peru.

Probably the most dangerous for me personally would have to have been Erebus or St. Helens. I have worked on both volcanoes when there was a high possibility for eruptions occurring. The most dangerous volcano for the surrounding population is easily Misti volcano.

My first volcanology job was with the US Geological Survey.

Seeing the area that had been devastated by Mount St. Helens and watching the lava dome grow in the crater over the next couple years was an amazing experience. I think any earth scientist who had the opportunity to be there was instantly converted to volcanology.

The best part is working in some really beautiful areas that are constantly changing. Usually geologists are studying landscapes that took thousands or millions of years to form, and out here in Hawaii we can see drastic changes from day to day. So volcanoes are very powerful places to work. An active volcano almost feels like a living entity.

I like the unpredictability of events and the challenge of setting up experiments to study those events. You have to be flexible to take advantage of whatever is going on at the moment. If there is an a`a flow, then you are studying `a`a flows – if there is a large skylight into an active lava tube, then you are studying lava tubes, etc. Working at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has been a real highlight, especially the people I have gotten to know through working in the field on common problems.

The weird one that I remember was working in Hawaii. We were working on an older lava flow that had lava tubes. We went in to explore one lava tube, a beautiful lava tube that was nice and tall, so I didn't get claustrophobic.

I really love traveling and working on volcanoes, I have to admit.

Classification of the world's most dangerous volcanoes is subject to debate. Below are listed some of the most dangerous volcanoes due to their explosive history and proximity to large population centres.

The classic symmetrical volcano cone shape is one of the most impressive sights in nature. Of the world's 1500 active volcanoes a few stand out as being exceptionally beautiful.

Mt Fuji is Japan is renowned for its beauty. There are several other volcanoes which have an even more beautiful shape.

Kronotsky volcano in Kamchatka is even more beautiful than Fuji, and Mayon volcano in Philippines is one of the most spectacular in its shape.

Large volcanic eruptions can cause global climate change and even be responsible for mass extinctions.

Major eruptions in Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia have a disproportional effect on global climate, due to the low troposphere elevation at these latitudes, and the ease of dispersal of ash, aerosol, and gas.

Most mass extinctions during the last 500 million years coincide with eruptions of large igneous provinces. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction was synchronous with the Deccan flood volcanism.

There is a positive feedback between glacial variability and atmospheric CO2 concentrations: deglaciation increases volcanic eruptions, raises atmospheric
CO2, and causes more deglaciation. Conversely, waning volcanic activity during an interglacial could lead to a reduction in CO2 and the onset of an ice age.

The answer to this complex topic is the heart of the science of volcanology and its ultimate challenge.

While there is no easy and short answer, this is the essence: you combine knowledge of the volcano's specific past behaviour with all available observation of its present state, and this allows you to make a long-term and a short term prediction:
1) You study the volcano's eruptive behaviour in the past and ideally, you also try to find out wether there were any signs of change before its eruptions. Such changes might be: unusual seismic activity (i.e. earthquakes at the volcano), visible or otherwise detectable deformation of the ground (i.e. opening of cracks, swelling of the whole mountain etc.), changes in composition and temperature of fumarolic gases and so on.

2) Then you monitor the volcano's behaviour in the present, looking for such changes.
Based on the knowledge of the volcano's past, you can make a long-term prediction (example: sooner or later, Mount Rainier is going to erupt again, although nobody knows exactly when, but chances are almost certain high that this might happen within the next few centuries). The short-term prediction is possible when there are signs of change, and the more is known about the volcano and the more data are available about its present state, the more precise such predictions.

In the work that I have done I collect many types of information. I take samples of the deposits to understand the past eruptions of the volcano and also I have been involved in many projects to monitor volcanoes. Typically monitoring includes installing instruments for detecting earthquakes and also very subtle uplift or sagging of the ground surface.

Around 3 years.

Well, I was working for the U.S.G.S. in Tacoma, Washington at an office devoted to studying glaciers when Mt. St. Helens erupted in May 1980. Up until then, I had absolutely no idea that I ever wanted to be a volcanologist, but the eruption of Mt. St. Helens changed the course of a lot of people's lives, and I was one of them. I went down to St. Helens the weekend after the big eruption and volunteered to help. There was chaos after the eruption, and they needed people to answer phones in this makeshift office. Eventually, I moved down there and worked for the newly created Cascades Volcano Observatory part-time while I went to graduate school. Then I was transferred to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, and I've been here ever since.

A lot of things seem funnier in retrospect than they did when they were happening. I remember being caught in a cloud of steam and sulfur dioxide on the rim of Pu`u `O`o crater with another geologist. We couldn't see more than a few feet in front of us, and the fume was terrible, even wearing gas masks. We were stumbling around and arguing about which way we should go which is hard to do wearing a gas mask because it’s like trying to talk with someone’s hand across your mouth. Then I heard this muffled shriek from my partner, who had almost stepped off the rim into the crater. We finally found our way out of the whiteout, but if anyone could have seen us in our identical flight suits and gas masks feeling our way through a cloud of gas you would have thought it was a scene from The Three Stooges--except that there were only two of us, because you were somewhere else that day.

I always knew I wanted to be a scientist in Hawai`i, but I didn’t know what kind until college. My high school only offered physics, biology, and chemistry and I started college thinking I wanted to be an oceanographer. The college required a year each of physics, biology, chemistry, AND geology before taking any oceanography courses. I took geology first and liked it so well that I switched majors immediately. My post bachelor’s degrees were in geophysics and my initial contact with volcanology was through the USGS applying various surface geophysical methods to study subsurface lava. That interest kind of morphed into general volcanology so that now I attempt integrated studies using geophysics (as well as geology) to study volcanological phenomena.

The worst thing was completely bureaucratic – the agonizing uncertainty of the RIF in 1995 within the USGS Geologic Division (eds. note: in 1995, about 500 employees from the Geologic Division of the USGS, or 20% of it’s workforce, lost their jobs).

The worst thing I've experienced on the job was working with the media at Mount St. Helens. I did not enjoy that. A particularly bad experience involved the one explosive eruption that I experienced, in March of 1982. Because of the explosion, media folks from the major networks flew up from San Francisco. They were really pushy and really obnoxious. And all the scientists were stressed, and I was working in a different building than they were. So I was having trouble getting information from the scientists, and I was being pushed by the media. I didn't like it. So I decided to go back to school and get my Ph.D. so I could do something on the volcano other than work with the media!

The size of volcanic eruptions is determined by the amount of lava emitted. The largest eruption over the past 2 centuries was Tambora in Indonesia in 1815.

☛ Laki fissure, Iceland 1783
☛ Tambora, Indonesia 1815
☛ Cosiguina, Nicaragua 1835
☛ Askja, Iceland 1875
☛ Krakatau, Indonesia 1883
☛ Tarawera, New Zealand 1886
☛ Santa Maria, Guatemala 1902
☛ Ksudach, Kamchatka 1907
☛ Katmai, Alaska, USA 1912
☛ Agung, Indonesia 1963
☛ St. Helens, USA 1980
☛ El Chichón, Mexico 1982
☛ Pinatubo, Philippines 1991
☛ Chaiten, Chile 2008

Well, it wasn't weird in the sense of being supernatural, but it was very strange at the time because I'd never seen anything like it. A high-fountaining episode at Pu`u `O`o had ended several hours before, and we were about to fly back to the observatory. Then we saw these cracks starting to open in the ground on the uprift side of the cone. We went to look, and the cracks were continuing to open ahead of us, so we followed along, with the ground splitting open at about the same pace that we were walking. This went on for several hundred meters.