LIKE good poker players, volcanoes give away few tells, tending to hide how they will spew their contents until the last minute.
Measure the swelling, though, and you might get a hint. So says Falk Amelung at the University of Miami, Florida, and colleagues, who used satellite radar imagery to monitor two bulges on the flank of Mauna Loa in Hawaii between 2002 and 2005.
After building a computer model of the volcano, they realised that the only possible cause was magma filling up fractures inside the volcano鈥檚 south-west rift zone. Amelung expects the magma pressure will first trigger an earthquake, then an eruption. 鈥淲e now have a good idea where the next eruption is most likely to occur,鈥� he says.
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The technique could be used to forecast eruptions on similar volcanoes, such as Mount Etna in Italy and Piton de la Fournaise in the Indian Ocean.
