The seismic movements in the 3 months prior to the eruption in El Hierro occurred in La Palma in "just 24 hours"

EL ESCORIAL, July 28. (EUROPE PRESS) –

The director of the Central Geophysical Observatory of the National Geographic Institute (IGN), carmen lopez, has underlined this Thursday the “anomalous” speed of succession of seismic movements that took place before the eruption and that made the volcano of La Palma so catastrophic. “What happened in the 3 months prior to the eruption of the island of El Hierro, in La Palma emerged in just 24 hours“, he pointed out.

This is how López explained it during his speech at the presentation ‘Seismic and geodetic monitoring of the eruption’, in the course ‘The eruption of La Palma: science and technology in emergency management’which has been held within the framework of the Summer Courses of the Complutense University in El Escorial, where the speaker has highlighted some milestones prior to the eruption in La Palma that were key to its subsequent outcome.

In this sense, the volcanologist and researcher has highlighted that what they initially thought were “small earthquakes”, the next day they reached “the maximum acceleration in 24 seismic movements” that they had seen. In addition, these movements were recorded ten kilometers closer to the surface than those previously detected. “This scared us because the magma was looking for escape routes much faster“, has said.

At this point, according to Carmen López, the alerts had already been launched. “We facilitated and simplified all possible data to facilitate the work of civil protection“, he recounted, while reporting that, from that moment, they transferred modeled scenarios of the island with the different possibilities of the eruptions so that civil protection could prepare evacuation plans.

PEVOLCA

Likewise, the director of the Central Geophysical Observatory of the IGN has recalled that, at this point, PEVOLCA was activated — the special plan for civil protection and emergency care due to volcanic risk in the autonomous community of the Canary Islands — which brought together more than 800 people involved in the emergency summarized in different scientific committees.

In this sense, Carmen López has valued the emergency management work that was achieved with PEVOLCA, “mainly thanks to the role played by the Government of the Canary Islands“, he added.

THE WORK OF THE IGN

During the talk, the speaker discussed different points in reference to the work carried out by the IGN that was of “vital importance” for the resolution of the eruption of the La Palma volcano.

Among other functions, López has highlighted geology, seismology and geodesy as the “three main techniques” without which volcanic activity could not be known. As for geology, he has highlighted that it is the study that allows them “knowing what has happened, knowing what the earth is going to do in the future” since geological processes are “extremely slow”.

Similarly, he has emphasized seismology. As he has developed, earthquakes warn that there is a situation of super pressure and that marks the place where an eruption is likely to occur. “They mark where the rock fractures due to the overpressurization of the magma that looks for a hole to advance“, has said.

Finally, as he has narrated, geodesy is the third of these main techniques. With it, they calculate the deformations that arise below the earth’s crust where the magma accumulates. “We have satellites that scan the variations on the earth’s surface and we also obtain data with the GNSS network that offers exact coordinates. With this we obtain the data of the deformationLopez explained.

Thus, López has warned that it will not be easy to decide when the next eruption could be since “it is a very scattered statistic.” However, he has stated that the IGN is working to collect more data more precisely, with improvements such as the implementation of automatic seismic movement detectors. “The automatic ones will be the only ones that will be able to follow the activity in these events“, has added.