Earth's hot mantle is no match for molten rock, as it can make its way through the "highway of hell" to the overlying crust in a few months time, according to a news release.
Researchers at Columbia University studied the1963 eruption of Irazú volcano in Costa Rica, magma surged 22 miles for about two months from the mantle to the magma chamber, rather than previously believed thousands of years.
"The study is the latest to suggest that deep, hot magma can set off an eruption fairly quickly, potentially providing an extra tool for detecting an oncoming volcanic disaster," Columbia University said in a press release.
The findings were published in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Nature.
"If we had had seismic instruments in the area at the time we could have seen these deep magmas coming," said the study's lead author, Philipp Ruprecht, a volcanologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "We could have had an early warning of months, instead of days or weeks."
Irazú is measures 10,000 feet and covers about 200 square miles. This particular volcano erupts every 20 years or less, but the damage from the eruptions varies.
In 1963, the volcano erupted for two years, killed at leaset 20 people and covered homes with mud and ash. The last time Irazú erupted was in 1994, and little damage was reported.
"Irazú sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where oceanic crust is slowly sinking beneath the continents, producing some of earth's most spectacular fireworks," the University said. "Conventional wisdom holds that the mantle magma feeding those eruptions rises and lingers for long periods of time in a mixing chamber several miles below the volcano."
However, researchers believe the ash from Irazú's eruptions suggests that magma may have traveled from the volcano's upper mantle to cover more than 20 miles in a few months.
"There has to be a conduit from the mantle to the magma chamber," study co-author Terry Plank, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty, said in the news release. "We like to call it the highway from hell."
The researches provided the following statement about the collection of their data for the study:
Their evidence comes from crystals of the mineral olivine separated from the ashes of Irazú's 1963-1965 eruption, collected on a 2010 expedition to the volcano. As magma rising from the mantle cools, it forms crystals that preserve the conditions in which they formed. Unexpectedly, Irazú's crystals revealed spikes of nickel, a trace element found in the mantle. The spikes told the researchers that some of Irazú's erupted magma was so fresh the nickel had not had a chance to diffuse.
"The study provides one more piece of evidence that it's possible to get magma from the mantle to the surface in very short order," said John Pallister, who heads the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Volcano Disaster Assistance Program in Vancouver, Wash. "It tells us there's a potentially shorter time span we need to worry about."
