NSF awards UNM’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department with grant to establish new geohazards center
October 31, 2022 - Steve Carr
The National Science Foundation has awarded The University of New Mexico’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) a two-year, $500,000 grant to establish the CONVERSE Center, a project that will set up the foundation for a new national center focused on understanding the fundamental processes that result in hazardous volcanic eruptions.
A potential step-change in understanding volcanic processes will be achieved by collecting key data and samples right at the start of volcanic unrest and during an eruption. This information will inform scientists, in real-time, of the eruption pre-cursors and progression that will feed into quantitative physical and chemical models of volcanoes.
The CONVERSE Center or CONverging on Volcanic ERuption Science with Equity is one of only four such centers currently supported by this funding program and the only one addressing volcanic hazards. The CONVERSE Center will work in collaboration with scientists and institutions from around the world: Central and South America, Iceland and the Canary Islands, New Zealand, Indonesia and Singapore.
“The overarching ambition of the center is to optimize the scientific return from responses of the scientific community to volcanic unrest in order to improve the fundamental understanding of volcanoes,” said UNM EPS Professor and lead Principal Investigator Tobias Fischer. “This understanding will aid in producing accurate forecasts of future hazardous volcanic eruptions.”
At UNM, the CONVERSE Center also involves Yolanda Lin from the UNM Department of Geography and Matthew Fricke from the UNM School of Engineering’s Computer Science department. Other UNM CONVERSE Center collaborators include Cari Hushman from Education and Melanie Moses and Mueen Abdulla, also from Computer Science. The Center is co-led by Bruce Houghton from University of Hawaii, Manoa (co-PI) and volcano and social scientists from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Penn State and the University of Washington.
Read more in the UNM Newsroom
