ICDS News

ICDS associate director part of team that identifies warning signs ahead of 2018 volcanic erruption

Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared on Penn State News.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences Associate Director Christelle Wauthier is part of a team of researchers that recently published findings of satellite data that showed the mountainside of the Anak Krakatu volcano was slipping for years and accelerated before the eruption in 2018.

The powerful eruption produced a tsunami that killed hundreds and injured thousands on a nearby Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. This new information could have potentially offered a warning sign of the collapse.

Wauthier, who is also an ICDS co-hire and associate professor of geosciences in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, worked with other scientists to track ground movements — or surface deformation —  using radar satellites sensitive enough to spot subtle changes. The technique they used is called Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), and it was used to create highly accurate maps of the changes over time.

The work required the use of ICDS’ Roar supercomputer cluster due to needing to analyze large amounts of data.

“Integrating hundreds of radar images requires a great deal of computational power,” Wauthier said. “It’s a lot of data storage and data processing and it takes some time and resources.”

The changes occur when there is a weakness under a volcano. The volcano grows larger as it erupts over time, and eventually it reaches a threshold where there is too much weight for the weakness or fault to support, which leads to a collapse.

“The whole chunk of the volcano that collapsed was already moving — like a slow landslide,” Wauthier said. “And, so, it’s very important to be able to look at the temporal evolution of that deformation, because if you have an acceleration, it can lead to a collapse. Our data shows that, basically, there was a precursor to the collapse.”

She also added there are also other ways to track deformation such as ground-based GPS instruments, but those resources are just as limited in locations like Anak Krakatau.

“If you have a sudden acceleration of slip, it might be the sign that you will have a collapse happening,” Wauthier said. “Whether it’s this volcano or others susceptible to collapse worldwide, if you don’t have ground-based data in real time, maybe having near-real-time InSAR processing can help researchers be on the lookout for any significant acceleration in slip.”

Wauthier worked with Young Cheol Kim, lead author and doctoral candidate at Penn State, and Thomas R. Walter, professor at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, who contributed efforts to the study.

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