Study Reveals Violent Volcanic Past Of Indonesia’s Sumatra

Researchers have documented six major volcanic eruptions in Sumatra over the past 35,000 years – most similar in intensity to Washington’s Mount St. Helens in 1980.

AsianScientist (May 17, 2012) – The early April earthquake of magnitude 8.6 that shook Sumatra was a grim reminder of the devastating earthquakes and tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people in 2004 and 2005.

Now a new study published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research shows that the residents of that region are at risk from yet another potentially deadly natural phenomenon – major volcanic eruptions.

Researchers from Oregon State University and their Indonesian collaborators have documented six major volcanic eruptions in Sumatra over the past 35,000 years – most equaling or surpassing in explosive intensity the eruption of Washington’s Mount St. Helens in 1980.

“Sumatra has a number of active and potentially explosive volcanoes and many show evidence of recent activity,” said lead author Morgan Salisbury. “Most of the eruptions are small, so little attention has been paid to the potential for a catastrophic eruption.”

Until this study, little was known about Sumatra’s volcanic history – in part because few western scientists have been allowed access to the region.

The most visible evidence of recent volcanic activity among the estimated 33 to 35 potentially active volcanoes are their steep-sided cones and lack of vegetation, indicating at least some minor eruptive processes.

But in 2007, an OSU expedition was permitted into the region, also the first research ship from the United States allowed into Indonesia/Sumatran waters in nearly 30 years.

Together with their Indonesian colleagues, the OSU researchers set out to explore the earthquake history of the region by studying sediment cores from the Indian Ocean.

While searching the deep-sea sediment cores for “turbidites” – coarse gravel deposits that can act as a signature for earthquakes – they noticed unmistakable evidence of volcanic ash and began conducting a parallel investigation into the region’s volcanic history.

“The ash was located only in certain cores, so the activity was localized,” said Adam Kent, a professor of geosciences at OSU and an author on the study. “Yet the eruptions still were capable of spreading the ash for 300 kilometers or more, which gave us an indication of how powerful the explosive activity might have been.”

Salisbury and his colleagues found evidence of six major eruptions and estimated them to be at least from 3.0 to 5.0 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Mount St. Helens, by comparison, was 5.0.

The Indian Ocean region is certainly known to have a violent volcanic history. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa between Sumatra and Java is perhaps the most violent volcanic explosion in recorded history, measuring 6.0 on the VEI and generating what many scientists believe to have been one of the loudest noises ever heard on Earth.

Sumatra’s own Toba volcano exploded about 74,000 years ago, generating a major lake that looks like “a giant doughnut” in the middle of Sumatra, said Jason Patton, a co-author of the study.

Kent said the next step in the research is to work with scientists from the region to collect ash and volcanic rock from the island’s volcanoes, and then match their chemical signature to the ash they discovered in the sediment cores.

“Each volcano has a subtly different fingerprint,” Kent said, “so if we can get the terrestrial data, we should be able to link the six major eruptions to individual volcanoes to determine the ones that provide the greatest risk factors.”

The article can be found at: Salisbury MJ et al. (2012) Deep-sea ash layers reveal evidence for large, late Pleistocene and Holocene explosive activity from Sumatra, Indonesia.

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Source: CEOAS.
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