One of the most damaging volcanic eruptions from 2021 was the event on La Palma in the Canary Islands. The eruption lasted for months and ended up burying a significant part of the communities that had built up on its slopes. Thankfully, it was an eruption that didn't end up taking lives, but the damage was estimated to be at least $1 billion. As it turns out, the eruption itself compared to others was relatively small, but the human impact was much larger.
A new study in Nature by Riccardo Civico and others has given us high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) of the La Palma eruption. These models were built from over 12,000 images to create a map that has a resolution of 0.2 millimetres per pixel (below). That's 0.007 inches per pixel, or roughly the size of two sheets of paper stacked together on edge. Now that is ...
