It never ceases to amaze me how the media just loves to find bad in the good (or at least the interesting). I've seen a number of article or blog posts from newspapers that proclaim that Mt. Baker is Washington is "overdue" for an eruption, so naturally I was curious "how would they know that"? Well, that lead me down a path that, as we've seen before, becomes a lot like a game of telephone, where the message is convoluted along the way.
We'll start off with the science. Nature recently published a study by Dr. Mark Jellinek (UBC) and Dr. David Bercovici (Yale) that looked at the tremors associated with magma rising in a volcanic conduit before an eruption. This study was centered on whether these vibrations could be used to help predict when a volcanic might have an explosive eruption. It is based on a model that magma ...
