Volcanoes and Wildfires: Myths, Risks and Climate Change

About this session

UBC Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. A volcanologist whose research spans planetary science, geophysics, and the surprising connections between deep Earth processes and surface climate.

In his own words

From Mark's career narrative, on becoming a scientist after undergraduate fieldwork on Galapagos volcanoes in 1989: “I left Galapagos having made a decision to be a scientist and, more importantly, with a deliberate sense of who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live my life.”

On how volcanoes store and erupt magma: “I viewed injections of magma into crustal reservoirs from the mantle akin to blowing up a balloon: whether the walls stretch and break to drive fracture propagation and eruption at the surface, or deform viscously such that injections are stored to form plutons, depends on the time scale for pressurization compared to the time scale for the relaxation of the driving elastic stresses. This theory has been… used widely for 20 years to understand not just how magma is stored in the crust or erupted at the surface, but also to understand the frequency and sizes of eruptions and the surface deformations around active volcanoes that signal deadly unrest.”

On volcanoes and climate — the heart of this session: “We discovered a powerful new feedback in the climate system that has stimulated a next generation of global climate models aimed at capturing volcanic effects… our work was the first to show that while volcanism can affect climate change, climate change can affect the intensity of volcanic effects on climate.” And on forecasting: “We had given the precarious science of eruption forecasting something with which to work.” Since arriving at UBC's Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences in 2004, he has won three teaching awards for undergraduate education, including the UBC Killam Teaching Prize.