Science 80 days blind in front of the volcano: "The same thing stops today ... which continues for five months"
Eruption on La Palma A volcano until Christmas?
Experts fear that the eruption will exceed the record of duration in the Canary Islands
The Cumbre Vieja volcano will soon be the longest on record on La Palma, after today it surpasses that of Tigalate, which lasted 82 days in 1646, and on Sunday it reaches the record of Tehuya, which was active for 84 days. in 1585. The good news, if confirmed, is that it is not only history that suggests that the current emergency should not last much longer, but also that the scientific data accompany it. If the trend continues, we could find ourselves a few weeks from the end of the eruption, although it is still too early to be able to assure it with certainty.
The President of the Government of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, announced it on Wednesday after speaking with the technicians: “They tell us that there may be scientific evidence that it will end this year;
three weeks left.
Hopefully it will be tomorrow when it ends, better than the day after,
"he confided.
The end will not be so sudden, unfortunately, but the measurements of the last few days would be compatible with the fact that the eruption stopped during the current month.
In any case, it would still take a few more weeks to confirm that the data return to its normal parameters and the volcano does not reappear.
In addition, the island would remain under emergency, because
the lava flows, still active today, will take months to cool down
and become a new landscape to which life can return.
"The activity is low and it seems that
the volcano could be starting the final phase, but there is always a trace of doubt
about what it can do or cannot do", assesses David Calvo, spokesman for the Volcanological Institute of the Canary Islands (Involcan). «You have to be calm and wait for these data to be confirmed. But yes, the activity is low, "he confirms.
“We are all waiting. Let's see if we are lucky and it will be over soon ”, he summarizes about the expectant atmosphere among the scientists working in the field. He warns, however, that this kind of process takes time: «The decline is very gradual, very little by little; In the short term, which is what we always manage,
it does not seem that, with the current trend, it will end this week
, far from it. Sulfur dioxide is still high and therefore the end of the eruption is not imminent. '
So could you stop before Christmas or the end of the year? Well, I think that's more of a longing than anything else. Between the time we stop seeing surface evidence and the eruption actually ends, there may be a disengagement of several weeks. Right now we are not seeing great activity in the cone, but
there are streams that are still quite active,
"he contrasts.
"Even though we
do not see out lava and not see out gas until all parameters back to zero we can not say that the eruption is over ,
" explains Calvo, and remember that, once the eruption is
over, still "
will it will take a long time for people to have a normal life again
.
The flows will stop advancing when the supply of magma stops, but will remain at hundreds of degrees of temperature for weeks or months, so that the affected areas will remain under the emergency.
A good indication, at the moment, is that "the deep seismicity has practically disappeared, and this indicates that the volcano has difficulties finding magma to bring to the surface," explains Calvo.
“There are people who are saying that it may end before the end of the year;
Obviously, it is not impossible, because everything is going down », says Manuel Regueiro, president of the College of Geologists.
«It is possible that yes,
that it is about to finish, as they say
, and maybe it won't even be at Christmas.
But they are all hypotheses, "he warns.
Sulfur dioxide
An important piece of information to understand the evolution of the volcano is the daily amount of sulfur dioxide in the plume. The exact figure has not been updated for days, but it is known that it still exceeds 1,000 tons, compared to 100 tons per day that would point to an immediate outcome. The other measurements, Regueiro reviews, accompany the idea that the end could be near. "The tremor is low, the elevation of the ground has dropped, the earthquakes in depth have dropped ...", he says. "That is to say,
all the signs point us towards the end
."
The earthquakes, for example, have gone from exceeding 300 a day in some days of November to the 32 that were registered yesterday (corresponding to Wednesday).
"We may be lucky that it is over," Regueiro advances, although he emphasizes that it is still too early: "
We still have a doubt ...
".
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