[Rockhounds] Songs of Undersea Volcanoes

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to
the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine
volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you
would be hard-pressed to find anyone more enchanted by them — and more
stubbornly determined to study them — than Jackie Caplan-Auerbach
<https://geology.wwu.edu/people/caplanj>.

A volcanologist at Western Washington University, Caplan-Auerbach is also a
seismologist, someone who uses the jiggles of earthquakes to understand
geophysics. And it just so happens that active volcanoes are prodigious
earthquake producers; they make as much seismic noise as they can muster.
For Caplan-Auerbach, that noise is music to her scientific ears — data that
can be used to learn about the internal workings of our planet.

Listening to these volcanic songs isn’t just about satiating an isolated
scientific curiosity. When a submarine volcano in the South Pacific named
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai catastrophically exploded in January 2022
<https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-unravel-how-the-tonga-volcano-caused-worldwide-tsunamis-20220413/>,
it produced a devastating regional tsunami, caused the atmosphere to thrum
like the surface of a drum, and buried the Kingdom of Tonga’s main island
in ash. Caplan-Auerbach and her colleagues hope that by studying the
soundtrack of such violent eruptions, they can learn enough about the
physics behind the paroxysms to ease the impacts of future volcanic
disasters.

*Quanta Magazine *caught up with Caplan-Auerbach to discuss her journey
into geophysics and what it’s like to study the melodies of these magmatic
mountains. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/she-decodes-quakes-from-undersea-volcanoes-and-taylor-swift-20231108/