New model of what lies beneath Ardnamurchan volcano

A research group led from Uppsala with Steffi Burchardt and Valentin Troll show in a new article in Scientific Reports that the well-known volcano Ardnamurchan has only one big magma chamber.

With structural information and modern software the group has visualized a 3D model of what lies approximately 1.5 km beneath the surface, and the results show that the source of the cone-sheet swarms is one elongated chamber rather than three successive chambers as was believed before.

“It came as somewhat of a surprise that there still is so much to learn from a volcano that so many geologists have studied for such a long time, especially since we used data that Richey and Thomas collected in 1930, which lay the foundation to the theory of three magma chambers”, says Steffi Burchardt, senior lecturer at Solid Earth Geology.

Read the article here

Watch a video of Steffi explaining the inside of a volcano

Watch a video of the 3D model