Is smoke a fair indication of imminent major volcanic activity?If so,please indicate time scale and extent of likely damage. If not are there any reliable precictive indications?

rocky Neville

Hi Neville,

First thing, volcanologists try to "smoke" to refer to the product of fires, and "fume" or "vapor" to refer to what is coming out of a volcano. Depending on the volcano this can be an indicator of impending activity, however, there are probably hundreds of volcanoes that are fuming all the time without having any current or soon-to-occur activity. In almost all these cases this fume is just steam from rain or snow that has seeped into the volcano far enough to encounter got rocks.

Experts are able to tell a lot by the color of the fume. White usually means it is mainly steam whereas when the plume starts to turn brown or blue there may be other (volcano-derived) gases present, and if the plume starts to look grey or black it may also be including some ash.

For some volcanoes any of these plumes do indicate impending activity. If even only a steam plume is noticed on a volcano that has never had such a plume before, then perhaps there is magma moving upwards within the volcano and you need to worry about it. It could turn out that maybe there was just an extra-heavy rainstorm or snowfall, however. As you can see, much of volcanic prediction relies on recognizing patterns and comparing them to past patterns. It is very important to realize that what may be an important sign at one volcano might not mean anything in particular at another.

Sincerely,

Scott Rowland 

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