One of my co-workers hear a radio report that said that within the next 1,000 years there would be a new volcano in Victoria, Australia. Further to that a few years ago, a newspaper report said that the locations of the volcanos in Australia had been plotted by time and location - showing that they got younger as they moved south. The next area for an eruption was in the Bass Strait area.
Any info on this would be welcome.

rocky Dave Gerecke

Dear Dave,

It may be so that if you plot the ages and locations of recent volcanism in Australia on a graph, you come up with the next one being in 1000 years. However, no volcanologist would bet very much on that being particularly exact. For one thing, most geologic dates have an uncertainty of 10-20% at best, so your straight line might not be all that straight. For another thing, there is enough variability in natural systems that even if the last few eruptions were evenly spaced in location and time, that doesn't mean the next one will be. I'm afraid I don't have good precise information on these matters, but the people who do would probably be very happy to give you more data. Try contacting the organizers of the Long Lava Flow conference, soon to be held at James Cook University: http://www.jcu.edu.au/dept/Earth/I/lavaflow.html

Scott Rowland, University of Hawaii 

Other Categories        Other Questions

To VolcanoWorld