04 February, 2014
Bulletin of Volcanology has just published a paper by Ph.D. candidate Wenbin Xu with the title "The 2007-8 volcanic eruption on Jebel at Tair island (Red Sea) observed by satellite radar and optical images". In this paper Wenbin studies a volcanic eruption that started on the small Tair island in September 2007 and destroyed a Yemeni military station and caused several casualties. No geophysical instrumentation was on the island and very few direct observations of the activity. Therefore, most of the knowledge about the eruption was derived from satellite images. Using a variety of techniques, Wenbin estimated the area and the volume of the erupted products, the evolution of the lava flow during the eruption, the geometry of the feeder dike from co-eruptive InSAR data, and the post-eruption lava flow movements. One of the surprises was that the feeder dike had a north-easterly strike, i.e. perpendicular to the Red Sea rift, which indicates that the stress field within the Tair volcanic edifice is both decoupled from the regional stress field and is temporarily variable. The paper can be found here: