In just the past week, Indonesia has endured back-to-back natural disasters: A deadly magnitude-7.5 earthquake on Saturday that triggered a tsunami and a volcanic eruption…
In just the past week, Indonesia has endured back-to-back natural disasters: A deadly magnitude-7.5 earthquake on Saturday that triggered a tsunami and a volcanic eruption of Mount Soputan on Wednesday. Both occurred on Sulawesi island.
Are these geological upheavals related? Experts say it’s possible but unlikely.
“It could be that this earthquake triggered the eruption, but we have seen an increase in volcanic activity since July and this began surging on Monday,” said Kasbani, the head of Indonesia’s volcanology and geology disaster mitigation agency.
“Yet we can’t say there a direct link, as the mountain is quite far away,” said Kasbani, who uses one name
Another expert, volcanologist Janine Krippner of Concord University, said that “for an earthquake to trigger an eruption this quickly we think (the volcano) has to be in critical condition – about ready to go anyway, so it is hard to say for certain. At this point a link between the two events is only speculation.
“The reality of Indonesia is that there are many large earthquakes and many eruptions, so the two are bound to occur in the same region at times,” she added.
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Krippner added that the activity at Soputan has been increasing since August, so authorities were already aware of it prior to this eruption.
Danny Hillman Natawidjaja, a geologist with Indonesia’s Institute of Science, said there wasn’t enough data to make a link. “In principle, the seismic waves from the earthquake could increase pressure in the volcano’s magma chamber and could cause an eruption. We don’t know for sure.”
Experimental volcanologist Robin George Andrews, writing in Forbes, was more definitive: “The earthquake almost certainly didn’t trigger the volcanic eruption; it was gearing up for something for several weeks now. There have been a handful of cases where major earthquakes have taken place shortly before volcanic eruptions, but there’s not enough concrete evidence to definitely link the two yet.”
Nazli Ismail, a geophysicist at Indonesia’s University of Syiah Kuala, said the Soputan volcano eruption isn’t surprising as Indonesia sits on the seismically active Pacific “Ring of Fire,” and Soputan is one of the most active volcanoes on the island.
Contributing: The Associated Press
