Merging instrumental and observational understanding of volcanic unrest in the English-speaking Caribbean (1902-1945)

Merging instrumental and observational understanding of volcanic unrest in the English-speaking Caribbean (1902-1945)

Merging instrumental and observational understanding of volcanic unrest in the English-speaking Caribbean (1902-1945)

Lead Supervisor: Prof Jenni Barclay

Location: School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

Duration: 6 weeks

Suitable undergraduate degrees: Environmental Sciences, Geophysics, Geology, Geography or related disciplines

Project background

This interdisciplinary project aims to create a detailed account of the unrest, eruption and morphological change associated with the 1902 eruption of Soufriere, St Vincent and the volcanic unrest measured in the 1930s on Montserrat. Over the six weeks of the project the intern will:

(a) create a database of qualitative and quantitative measures of unrest described across a range of archive materials, and reconstruct the development of the instrumental (seismic) network in the Caribbean between these time periods.

(b) examine the original field notebooks of several key scientists that contain observations of morphological change and eyewitness accounts of eruption and unrest phenomena. Working with the project team they  will also come up with a schema to add these to the database in (a)

(c) use these data to compare observational (felt, seen, heard and smelt) data with instrumental data, to reconstruct the unrest and changes before and after the unrest to examine in the context of existing accounts.

These data will be of value to the NERC-AHRC project ‘Curating Crises’ and will add to our database of eruptions and unrest from 1890-2000 in this area. If time permits a further aim of the broader project is to share and convey this data with broader publics interested in Caribbean volcanism and disaster risk reduction. The database the intern creates will be publicly available and, there is an opportunity for the intern to work with the team to communicate their findings via our sharing website. We will offer training in this aspect too and involve the student in any consequent publications.

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