PREDICTING when the world’s most dangerous volcanoes are about to erupt just got easier. It seems that one type of eruption can be triggered by heavy rain, so simply watching the weather forecast could help save lives.
The type of eruption in question is a “dome collapse”. This is the most dangerous form of volcanic eruption, having caused more than 70 per cent of volcano-related deaths over the past century.
“They tend to be big, violent eruptions,” says John Murray, a volcanologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes. The Mount St Helens eruption on 18 May 1980, for example, sent a cloud of 520 million…
