Neither one of the volcanoes have erupted in the past 160,000 years. A new seismic swarm has started on 29 September and until now counts nearly 40,000 quakes. In addition, a slow inflation (swelling of the mountain) located southwest of the cone Chiles has been detected by scientists. Some of the seismic activity has the characteristics believed to represent fluid (gasses, water, magma) movements at depth, although most earthquakes are related to small rock fracturing events (which could be purely tectonic in nature and not necessarily related to magma). The volcano has only a short history of monitoring and not have any known eruption in the past 10,000 years. This makes it extremely difficult to asses how likely it is that it awakes in a near to medium future. However, Colombian and Ecuadorian scientists take the situation very seriously and have started to prepare hazard maps for various kind of possible eruption scenarios. A special bulletin of IGEPN also states that the recorded deformation has increased in recent days. This bulletin concluded that the observed monitoring parameters are compatible with the scenario of a magma intrusion that could lead to a sudden, potentially large, phreatic or even magmatic eruption, even on a short timescale (weeks). Whether an eruption will actually occur or not is impossible to predict. colombiareports.co/colombia-border-volcano-can-erupt-couple-days/ volcanodiscovery/cerro-negro-de-mayasquer/news/48540/Cerro-Negro-de-Mayasquer-volcano-Colombia-magnitude-58-earthquake-alert-level-raised.html
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 09:11:23 +0000