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Analyze The Essay 'What Makes A Volcano Hazardous?'

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Analyze The Essay 'What Makes A Volcano Hazardous?'
What makes a volcano hazardous? (40 marks)

Within this essay, I will evaluate the features of volcanoes that define how hazardous they can be. Secondly I will discuss how ‘hazardous’ can be characterized in different forms such as, the effect a county physically, socially and economically as well as within both spacial and temporal constructs and how the perspective of hazardous can effect the perspective of how hazardous a volcano is.

When looking what makes a volcano hazardous we have to look at what perspective hazardous is defined within as well as the scale in which you are looking at, to a single farm whose crops and income was destroyed within the 3rd pyroclastic flow within soufriere hills, the volcano was hazardous to your
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Development of Magma plume volcano chains

Fig 2. Shows the development of a magma plume, such as the one that has created the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, which contains over 80 undersea volcanoes and is over 5,800km in size, the constant rising plume and the lack of additional material as seen in Fig 1. means that the volcano normally produce nonexplosive eruptions. A example of a regular volcanic eruption caused by a ‘Hawaiian’ Volcano is Kīlauea which has been continuously erupting since January 1983, and has causes no loss of life.

Looking at the proprieties of the magma explains why eruptions along subduction plate boundaries product more ‘hazardous’ eruptions, and this is one of the reasons that a volcano becomes more hazards because the more viscous a material is the more pressure build up will occur within the volcano, causing more explosive eruptions. Explosive eruptions are normally most damaging to human life with all the top 20 most deadly volcanoes being a explosive type of eruption.

However, this doesn’t explain why volcanoes within the same spacial confinements don’t produce the same type of eruptions consistently, to explain this we have to look at how time can affect a volcanoes’

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