Those who have already seen this coming always emerge after a shocking crisis: those who are already popularly known Captains are a successor. There are people who advertise a lot of things and it is easy for them to fix one. Then, those who have complete information and quality data to predict what will happen. However, in January, a team of experts from Spanish and international scientific institutes published a study that, now read, draws attention to its success. He said magma was erupting through cracks in the southern part of La Palma Island and that a volcano was reactivating in search of a lettuce under Cumbre Vijay.

Anyone had clear clues. In October 2017, there was an earthquake of 122 small mini earthquakes, the first signal since Tenaguna turned off in 1971. Then, in 2018, another 79 earthquakes. But now, according to the account, something strange is happening Jose Fernandez, Responsible for the Remote Sensing Laboratory of the Institute of Geosciences (IGEO), supported by CSIC and the University of Compliance. “They didn’t find the morphology, which seemed strange to us after the groups, and we wanted to analyze it in other ways,” he explains. The strange thing was that there was an earthquake, not a definite swelling, but a low, which indicates the pressure of the magma beneath the crust.

“We found that the reactivation process should be between 2009 and 2010. After studying evolution until 2020, we found that it is accelerating.”

Jose Fernandes, Institute of Geosciences

They used data from satellites, as they do now in times of crisis Read If the soil swells in the next decades. “We found that the reactivation process should be between 2009 and 2010, and after studying evolution until 2020, we found that it is accelerating,” he says. Their data indicate that small amounts of magma accumulate at depths of 8 to 10 km, interacting with reservoirs and increasing pressure in the area. But that is not enough: to reactivate, several other parameters need to be deployed. “We wanted to see if everything could be linked to geochemical abnormalities and gas, indicating that this is a volcanic process,” the scientist recalls.

“It all matched,” Fernandes sums up, “it matched the gas defects, it matched the geochemistry, it matched the geodesy.” Combining the surface morphology pattern, they observed that the region began to move from 2008 to 2020, and a transformation occurred in the Aridine Valley where the 1949 eruption occurred. 1936 earthquake. At this point, the eruption occurred about eleven years after reactivation began.

An important detail that Fernandez ins: In the Canary Islands, only 20% of the revival ends in the explosion, in 2004 and 2005 in Tenerife. “This study allowed us to understand why this is happening in La Palma and not in El Hierro or Tenerife,” says the IGEO researcher. In your analysis, Published in Scientific reports Together with researchers from Spanish, American, Italian and Canadian universities, a very detailed X-ray of the island was obtained: the northern region is the oldest, formed by volcanic activity, and the south is younger and more turbulent. There was magma that took advantage of unbroken fractures from 1949 (yesterday, on a geographical basis).

Fernandez recalls studying “not affected, it went unnoticed” because it was published in the midst of a tsunami of Kovid infections after Christmas. But they also informed the National Geographic Institute (IGN) and the Volcanological Institute (Involcan) in the Canary Islands. Fernandes believes: “His work will help us to know what the next activation will be like.” You need very long-term monitoring. He points out one great advantage of these investigations: “First we can do a study from end to end, so we’re going to improve our knowledge of the volcano in the Canary Islands”.

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