Big Eruptions
Big volcanoes wake up fast
As seen from space, the caldera of Santorini, Greece, appears as several islands surrounding the now-drowned center blasted out in a mammoth eruption around 1600 B.C.
Long-slumbering volcanoes can jolt to life faster than students drinking Red Bull, a new study suggests. Studies of millennia-old rocks that erupted at Santorini, Greece, show that the chemical composition of its magma changed just a few decades before the volcano blew its top around 1600 B.C. That blast came after 18,000 years of relative calm. "All this happens at a very late stage relative to this long period of repose," says Tim Druitt, a volcanologist at the Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France. "There's kind of a rapid wake up." Druitt and his colleagues describe the awakening in the Feb. 2 Nature. Santorini's Bronze Age eruption is one of the most famous in history. When the volcano blew, it sent a tsunami racing across the eastern Mediterranean that wiped out dozens of coastal towns. So much magma erupted that Santorini collapsed to form a lagoon. (Some scientists argue this is the source of the legend of Atlantis.) What was left of the volcano's caldera forms the islands surrounding the lagoon, which is now dotted by a small peak created by more recent volcanic activity.
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