On this rainy Monday morning ... Let's hop in the Wayback Machine and head to the year 2009. Back in May of that year, we spent a lot of time worrying about a lot of shaking going on in northwestern Saudi Arabia. The earthquakes were centered under a known volcanic field called Harrat Lunayyir and based on the behavior of the seismicity, reports from on the cracks in the ground, sulfur odors and "whooshing noises" and the location of the activity - in an area with an eruption as recently as ~1000 AD, many of us thought another eruption of the field was coming. Well, nothing came - the seismicity died away and no eruption came.
As it turns out, a new study by John Pallister (USGS) and others in Nature Geosciences supports the idea that the activity at Harrat Lunayyir was an eruption that couldn't quite make it to ...
