Role and impacts of the geoblogosphere (July Accretionary Wedge)

Not that kind of impact! Courtesy NASA/Don Davis.

David Bressan over at History of Geology poses the questions du mois: How can geoblogging impact society and "real geology"? Should and can we promote the "geoblogosphere"? Are blogs private “business” or public affairs? Are institutions undervaluing the possibilities given by this new method of communication?

To avoid a really long post in response to all of the questions - though they're certainly worthy of dicussion! - I'm going to stick to one, and talk about how I see geology blogs impacting society and non-virtual geology.

When I first started this blog, I'm sure I wasn't thinking that I would be reaching a very wide audience - I was mostly aiming for the geology graduate student who was looking for advice and maybe a little commiserating once in a while. The volcanology part seemed logical, since that's what I wanted to study, and the blog itself was a good way to hone my writing skills. But after a little while poking around the existing geology blogs, I became aware that we were reaching a wider audience, and not just a scientific one. People who may not even have taken a geology class were finding the geoblogosphere and starting to interact with the bloggers - commenting, asking questions, looking for information. Looking for education.

The geoblogosphere is a fantastic way for a person who doesn't have access to continuing education, or who never had an opportunity to take a geology class in high school or college, to learn a little bit about the Earth. Not only do they get to read what we as geologists find interesting, but they can ask us to talk about what they find interesting - through emails, comments, requests for posts, etc. It's a step toward breaking down the idea that scientists are somehow elitist and removed from society. I don't want people to think of us like that; we're not from another planet, after all, even if we sometimes study them.

I don't think geoblogging is only breaking down barriers between Earth and space scientists and the non-scientist public, either. Personally, I've found that geoblogging has opened up a whole new social and professional group to me - one that I never would have been able to build from the "traditional" routine of academic collaboration and conferences. I hope that someday I'll be able to collaborate with my fellow geobloggers and broaden the impact and usefulness of my work. And I think that's a worthy goal for E&S scientists as a whole: not to only bury themselves in a narrow area of research, but to remember that acquiring new knowledge depends on a foundation drawn from many disciplines.

In the past, collaboration depended on the post office, the telephone, and face-to-face meetings; the final products of our research on conference schedules and journal editors. With email and blogging, we now have an even faster and more powerful way to share our work with each other and the public. Though it certainly will not - and should never - replace the systems that have developed over centuries of research, I think geoblogging is a wonderful way to supplement them.  

Perception of volcanic hazards in Iceland

The eruption may be subsiding a bit, but there is still a lot of discussion (and arguing) centered around the Eyafyallajökull event. It's not entirely surprising; most people in Europe don't have to deal with active volcanoes, and the last time an Icelandic one caused widespread trouble was in the 18th century. But what about the Icelandic response? One might assume, given the prevalence of volcanic and geothermal activity in Iceland, not to mention hazards caused by volcano-water interaction, that Icelanders might be better prepared than other Europeans to deal with natural hazards. But is that really the case?

In "Resident perception of volcanic hazards and evacuation procedures", published in 2009 in Natural Hazards and Earth Systems Science, Australian and Icelandic scientists set out to evaluate how Icelanders perceived risk and what their response would be to an evacuation drill for a jökulhlaup hazard. The study was conducted in March 2006 in the jökulhlaup hazard zone of Rangávallasýsla, a region immediately adjacent to the Mýrdalsjökull and Eyafyallajökull glaciers and the Katla volcano, which is notorious for producing jökulhlaups.

Figure 1 from Bird et al. (2009). The jökulhlaup hazard zone of Rangávallasýsla. The hazard zone is the maximum area that a  catastrophic jökulhlaup is expected to flood. Evacuation centers are represented by blue triangles.

The authors of the study used a combination of methods to assess the reactions of residents and emergency officials: they directly observed an evacuation drill, did face-to-face interviews with officials and residents, and distributed surveys to those involved in the drill. The authors also discuss the parameters of the drill:

If an eruption is imminent residents would be notified via a text message to their mobile phone. If residents do not have a registered mobile phone number a recorded message would call through to their landline. Upon receiving this message residents have 30 minutes to prepare to evacuate. However, if an eruption occurs without precursory activity, residents will be instructed to evacuate immediately. Before leaving, they are required to hang the evacuation sign outside their house to indicate that they have left. Certain residents in each region have volunteered to ‘sweep’ their local area to ensure their neighbours have left for the evacuation centres...

To test the proposed evacuation plan the ICP conducted a full scale evacuation exercise on 26 March 2006 in Rangávallasýsla. Approximately 1200 residents live within the hazard zone (K. Þorkelsson, personal communication, 2006) and for the purpose of fully testing the evacuation plan residents were not informed of the timing of the eruption scenario. Instead residents were instructed to go about their business as usual until they received an evacuation message (R. Ólafsson, personal communication, 2006). The mock eruption began at 10:55 local time (LT) and the first evacuation message was communicated to residents at 10:59 LT. Residents then had 30 minutes to complete the instructions on the hazard sign (Fig. 2) before evacuating their homes to their designated centre.

So what were the results of the evacuation drill and the study?

• Many residents did not receive notice of the evacuation, but about 65% of the local population still registered at evacuation centers. Some of the reasons cited by the remaining 35% for their non-participation included lack of communication from officials, reluctance to leave their livestock, or that they were simply not interested in the drill. The response from those who did participate, however, was overwhelmingly in favor of the drill.
• 71% of evacuation participants were able to correctly describe the evacuation procedures they were supposed to follow during the drill, and 94% were able to define what a jökulhlaup was (and knew that it was the major hazard associated with an eruption of Katla).
• Many of the residents of towns on higher ground stated that they would remain in their homes rather than evacuate, citing that it was safer there than on roads and that they thought the flood stage of the glacial drainage would be too low to reach them.
• Many of those surveyed - especially farmers - did not think that 30 minutes was enough time to prepare for an evacuation, since they had livestock to care for in addition to dealing with their homes and families.
• "None of the participants from the 18–30 year age group and very few from the 31–50 year age group could correctly describe a brief volcanic history of Katla." Some residents who had family members who had seen the 1918 Katla eruption had knowledge of what Katla was capable of, but this has apparently not been passed down to their children.

This paints an interesting picture. Most of the residents, even if they didn't participate in the drill or completely understand the potential hazards associated with an eruption of Katla, were still very well informed about what they should do in an emergency. Many evacuated even though they didn't receive a direct message from emergency officials (mostly because of community volunteers who helped spread the word of the drill). But it is troubling that a large number of people living near Katla (and Eyafyallajökull) knew very little about the past activity of the volcanoes. This is often the case when volcanic disasters have passed partially or completely out of living memory, but given that volcanic activity is extremely common in Iceland, it's not particularly reassuring. The authors suggest that a lack of outreach by public officials may be the cause for this:

Our participants are aware of jökulhlaup, tephra, lightning and rock fall hazards but they have not been provided with enough information to enable them to make an informed decision on whether to evacuate or take shelter in place and how to best protect their livestock.

Finally, the authors comment on some of the underlying problems with the evacuation itself, most having to do with communication issues (again):

Results from our study highlighted problems associated with communication during the evacuation exercise and the possible need to find alternative modes which do not rely so heavily on technology. In light of this, scientists and emergency management officials should collaborate with media agencies and the public in order to promote the use of media resources and, to ensure hazard information is accurately distributed in an understandable form. Furthermore, the importance of the sweepers’ role during an evacuation should be emphasised as they may provide the only communication link between emergency management and farming communities. Recent public meetings which involved residents in risk mitigation efforts are a positive step toward empowering residents with evacuation procedures and preparedness strategies.

What's the bottom line? It's an interesting one: people near this volcanic center in Iceland seemed to be fairly well informed about what they should do in an evacuation. But they weren't necessarily as knowledgeable about the hazards that necessitate the evacuations, even though they live very close to an active (and now erupting) volcanic center. (Given the recent eruptions, I suspect that a follow-up study would show a distinct change in this observation. If anyone comes up with one, I'd be interested to see it.) This study does emphasize again the importance of good communication between scientists, emergency officials and the public; in an emergency, if people are better informed about hazards and what they should do to avoid them, evacuations will run more smoothly and officials will waste less time dealing with confusion and misinformation.

Bird, D., Gisladottir, G., & Dominey-Howes, D. (2009). Resident perception of volcanic hazards and evacuation procedures Natural Hazards and Earth System Science, 9 (1), 251-266 DOI: 10.5194/nhess-9-251-2009

Accretionary Wedge # 23: What are you working on?

The latest installment of the Accretionary Wedge is being hosted by Ed at Geology Happens, and here's the question of interest:

This AW is to share your latest discovery with all of us. Please let us in on your thoughts about your current work. What you are finding, what you are looking for. Any problems? Anything working out well?

My current work is a bit varied for a volcanologist, I'll have to admit. I'm busy mapping features on the Santiaguito lava domes after our trip down there last month - lots of time on Arc, which for once is behaving itself. But I'm also working with the samples I collected from fumaroles on that trip, looking for alteration minerals. This is requiring me to learn quite a bit about clay minerals, and how to prepare samples and run them on an X-ray diffractometer (XRD). I haven't done lab work since undergrad, and that was mineral separations for argon dating; clay prep is a bit easier, but takes longer, so I've only run one sample so far.

The results? Well, mostly the XRD seems to be picking up volcanic glass (from ash), because it's showing the same pattern that you might get just from running the glass slide. A smear slide did produce some interesting peaks, but I haven't had a chance to evaluate them yet (and unlike our clay mineralogist, I don't have d-spacings memorized!) This is only one sample, however, and I have high hopes for the rest. If the XRD angle doesn't work, I'll probably be spending some time (and money) on the dentistry school's scanning electron microscope (SEM), looking at particle morphology.

On the theoretical front, I'm getting ready to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory this summer, and learn how to use a finite element heat and mass transfer code called FEHM. The code is designed to model heat and fluid flow in hydrothermal systems - magmatic in particular - and I'm hoping to be able to apply it to modeling the hydrothermal system in a lava dome. Not Santiaguito - the domes there are too complex to model directly - but hopefully by the end of my research, I'll have developed a new generic model that will help explain how water moves through lava domes. This is no small task, and the thought of learning both the code itself and the thermodynamics behind it is fairly daunting. My committee seems to think I can do it, though, and I trust them - but it's going to be an enormous investment of time and effort. Then again, what PhD isn't?

So that's the skinny on the short and long term. This is the first real chance I've had to dig into some data, and exciting things are ahead!