Transcript:

music; ambience Kilauea gas

“Within the large Kilauea caldera you have another smaller crater, and within this crater is where the active gas vent is. And from this hole we have a lot of gas coming out, this is really nasty stuff. It's carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and a lot of steam, as well.”

The inner workings of a volcano sound a bit like an engine. Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. David Fee is a graduate student studying Kilauea’s infrasounds, those sounds that fall below the range of human hearing. The recording we’re listening to has been sped up so that we can hear the low frequency sounds of what scientists are calling a gas piston.

“And what happens is the gas builds up, the lava level rises, then you release the gas, and it goes down again. Thus it’s called the gas piston. You know, at the bottom at some level there's lava. And then we have a lava crust down at the bottom, or a lava lake of some sort, that's bubbling, releasing all this gas which is producing the infrasound. Then we have a big gas-filled chamber of some unknown dimension. By looking at the infrasound, we're trying to figure out the dimensions of the gas-filled chamber, figuring out exactly where the lava level is, maybe how it changes over time, how much gas is coming out.”

This information will give scientists a more complete understanding of the dynamics of volcanoes and could lead to a better way to predict eruptions.

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Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

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