When hundreds of volcanologists gathered in Geneva last July for the world’s largest volcanology conference, Italy’s Instituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) drew particular attention. INGV was presenting results from five years of very close range observations of Stromboli, one of the Mediterranean’s most monitored volcanoes. Its frequent small eruptions make it both a natural laboratory for vulcanologists and a constant safety concern for the island’s roughly 500 residents and thousands of tourists.
The last three years of close observations were made possible by a portable observatory called the Setup for the Kinematic Acquisition of Explosive Eruptions, or SKATE. The suitcase-sized system is packed with tech that captures eruptions at hundreds of frames per second, synchronously recording their roar and their heat.
Filming and analyzing an explosive eruption up close for hours, while capturing data about its heat, sound, and motion, has historically been tricky and dangerous. But that’s the data scientists need to understand how eruptions work and evolve over time. SKATE makes that process both safer and simpler by autonomously recording synchronized streams of observatory data and minimizing the time researchers need to spend on a volcano’s slopes.
“Explosive eruptions are extremely fast processes with particles the size of a truck or a grain of dust that can travel from a few meters per second to supersonic speeds,” says Jacopo Taddeucci, a senior researcher at INGV. “You need cameras shooting hundreds of frames per second and instruments that can see, hear, and feel the eruption at once to understand cause and effect.”
Aside from Stromboli, SKATE has been tested on the nearby Mount Etna, as well as on Guatemala’s Fuego and Santiaguito volcanoes. Worldwide, 500 million people live near active volcanoes, many of which are ] without any monitoring system. INGV is now planning deployments on other volcanoes, including Mount Yasur in Vanuatu, known as the “Lighthouse of the Pacific” for its near continuous eruptions featuring rhythmic bursts of incandescent lava and gas.
SKATE’s Innovative Volcanology Technology
SKATE was assembled by Technology Equipment Engineering Solutions (TEES), an Italian manufacturer of custom scientific instruments and Dewesoft, a Slovenian company specializing in high-speed data acquisition and measurement systems. The two companies followed INGV’s specifications to pack an entire observatory into a rigid polypropylene shell on a €50,000 (about US $58,000) budget.
SKATE is the streamlined successor to an earlier INGV prototype known as FAMoUS (Fast Multiparametric Setup), which first proved the value of combining high-speed, thermal, and acoustic sensors. But it also came with serious drawbacks: It was heavy and bulky, took a long time to install on site, and required manual triggering, which forced researchers to spend hours in hazardous zones to capture only a handful of sequences.
SKATE is more portable and easier to deploy than its predecessor, a system called FAMoUS. Piergiorgio Scarlato and Jacopo Taddeucci
Inside SKATE, a waterproof PC coordinates a thermal camera recording at 32 frames per second, and a high-speed camera that records bursts of footage when it detects sudden temperature spikes. Continuous 4K video capture would, in fact, quickly swamp SKATE’s data storage, as a single day of 4K recording would require 100 times as much memory as SKATE has.
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