Volcanic Monitoring

One billion people currently live within 150 kilometers of active volcanoes. To safeguard human lives and prevent damage to infrastructure, such as supply chains, these people need ample warning when an eruption is imminent. Monitoring the flux of volatile species, like He, CO₂, CO, SO₂, H₂S and HCl, which are emitted by volcanoes, can help provide clues as to when an eruption might occur. Not only is it important to measure the amount of those gases, but their isotope composition is also an important parameter.

Noble gases are relatively rare elements on Earth and in most cases, their concentrations within samples is extremely low. As a result, isotope ratio analysis of these gases requires a high detection efficiency such as found with ultra-high vacuum mass spectrometers coupled to extremely sensitive detectors.

In this technical note, we present a comparison of our newly developed 10¹³ Ω Amplifiers and the current state-of-the-art 10¹² Ω amplifier technology for the analysis of ⁴⁰Ar/³⁶Ar.

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The Thermo Scientific Isotope Ratio Spectrometers can measure the isotope composition of the emitting CO₂ from the Earth's crust and provide you with CO₂ data, which can be another important indicator of impending volcanic activity.

The Thermo Scientific Helix SFT Noble Gas mass spectrometer makes highly precise measurements of helium isotopes. ³He/⁴He ratios within volcanic gases increase shortly before an eruption.