Conference: Community Research Prioritization for Volcanoes Across the Alaska-Aleutian Arc Workshop

Part 1: Volcanic eruptions create extreme and evolving hazards to nearby populations and commercial air traffic, with ~50-70 devastating events occurring worldwide each year. The Alaska-Aleutian arc, USA in particular poses high threats to a global aviation community due to its frequently active volcanoes (~2 eruptions and 6 unrest episodes per year) and its location beneath highly utilized North Pacific air routes.

One avenue to strengthen the volcanology community’s ability to respond when unrest begins is to have a thorough understanding of the timescales of subsurface processes (e.g., magma movement) that have led to different size and styles of eruption (e.g., plume height). This progress can be accomplished through the integration of multiple datasets (petrology, gas geochemistry, seismology, geodesy) with near-real-time observations of volcanic unrest.

Although significant advances have been made to understand the processes that fuel earthquakes and volcanic events in subduction zone centers over the past two decades, significant challenges remain with integrating different techniques for studying these systems (e.g., geophysics with petrology or gas emissions) as well as our ability to interpret the dense data streams collected during unrest events. To address these big picture needs, a three-day workshop will be held at the Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage, Alaska, to highlight specifically chosen datasets and questions that require attention by the broader volcanology community.

Part 2: Alaska is the most volcanically active region in the USA and one of the most active in the world. The high rate of volcanic activity, and along strike variations in subduction dynamics, provides an ideal laboratory to study the interplay between tectonic and volcanic processes. In May of 2025 a 3-day workshop will be hosted at the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO), a consortium of the USGS, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and State of Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys, aimed at disseminating the current state of knowledge for potentially active volcanoes in Alaska and identifying compelling research directions.

The high rates of volcanic activity in Alaska and the comprehensive data collected and archived by the Alaska Volcano Observatory make it the best place to study active volcanic processes at convergent-margin volcanoes in the United States. This is evidenced by several large-scale research efforts underway (PREEVENTS, AVERT) as well as proposed (CONVERSE, SZ4D) that see the benefit of studying the Alaska-Aleutian Arc.

In addition, Alaska is home to other volcanoes, including recently restless Mount Edgecumbe and the massive and poorly understood Wrangell volcanic field. This as a crucial time for introducing interested scientists to the datasets and questions that are the highest priority for advancing the science pertaining to these active systems. By selecting datasets that answer crucial gaps in our knowledge, the community can tackle outstanding questions in this field and identify new mechanisms to advance our understanding of the drivers and timescales of processes within subduction zones that broadly fall into two fields: 1) improving our spatial reconstruction of the sub-surface systems that feed volcanic eruptions and 2) progress towards the interpretation and processing of datasets collected during volcanic unrest.

Combining datasets allows for interdisciplinary, system-level questions to be asked and investigated, a crucial step to coordinating future efforts and resources, as well as centering science questions around solid, testable hypotheses.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.