Will there ever be an active volcano in Texas?
What makes a volcano become dormant?
How do you become a volcanologist and what college has that degree plan?
Can you get to the center of the earth by falling into a volcano?
Tonya
Hi Tonya,
Here are some answers to your volcano questions. I hope they
will be helpful.
Will there ever be an active volcano in Texas?
Well, you know us scientists, we never like to say "never". I think it is
probably quite unlikely that there will be any volcanic eruptions in Texas
for a long time. The main problem is that Texas is very far from any of
the sources of magma that we currently know of. These sources are either
at the places where two tectonic plates collide or spread apart, or at
what is called a hotspot (such as here in Hawai'i). There are fields of
small volcanoes out in the middle of "nowhere" at other places, and these
are somewhat poorly understood. A number of these are in Arizona and New
Mexico. There are descriptions of these volcanoes and volcano fields in a
book called Volcanoes of North America by Chuck Wood and Jurgen
Keinle.
What makes a volcano become dormant?
This is a good question and one that we've commented on before here on
VolcanoWorld. The main problem is knowing whether the volcano really is
dormant or not. The average period between some volcanoes is hundreds of
years and for some it is tens of thousands of years and for others it is a
few months. Many times a volcano erupts that everybody thought was
dormant or even extinct. For these reasons it is not a good to strictly
try and categorize a volcano as dormant. On the other hand, volcanoes do
eventually die. This is usually cause by the supply of magma from below
being cut off. Perhaps (as is the case in Hawai'i where the volcanoes are
moving over the hotspot on a tectonic plate) movement of the plate carries
the volcano too far away from the magma source.
How do you become a volcanologist and what college has that degree plan?
I don't know of any colleges that have a specific degree in volcanology.
What you do is get a degree in geology first, and then in graduate school
you specialize in volcanology. Some people also get their first degree in
chemistry or physics and then in graduate school you specialize in
volcanology.
Can you get to the center of the earth by falling into a volcano?
no
Sincerely,
Scott Rowland, University of Hawaii
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