Sunday, October 05, 2025

New tool helps forecast volcano slope collapses and tsunamis

Christelle Wauthier, associate professor in geosciences, led development of models that can help guard vulnerable communities

Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For people living near volcanoes, danger goes well beyond lava flows and clouds of ash. Some explosive eruptions can lead to dramatic collapses of the sides of a volcano, like those at Mount St. Helens, Washington, and Anak Krakatau, Indonesia. The latter triggered tsunamis blamed for most deaths from its historic eruptions in 1883.

But the science and exact triggers behind such catastrophes remain largely unknown. To help scientists forecast collapse of volcano sides, also known as flanks or slopes, Christelle Wauthier, associate professor in Penn State’s Department of Geosciences and computational sciences hub director in the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, has led the development of new models that can gauge a volcano’s stability.

The models, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, can help local authorities and communities by evaluating the potential for collapse long before ground may give way entirely and suddenly.

“The input of magma below the volcano puts the crust under a tremendous amount of pressure — much stronger than water pressure,” Wauthier said. “It’s exerting huge force on the rocks that can help destabilize the volcano and lead to collapse. But we don’t really know the exact conditions that would favor instability, and evaluating the triggering factors is quite complex.”

Drawing in part from real-world examples of slip of volcano slopes — including sites in Hawaii that experienced collapse — Wauthier and her research partners developed a way to predict how slopes would respond to rising magma under varying conditions. Magma is the molten rock that becomes lava once it emerges onto Earth’s surface. They also evaluated where sliding of the surface would be more or less likely, in line with expected changes in stability.

Their new models build on prior knowledge of magma location. Magma rising under a volcano can force slippage on existing faults — fractured areas where two blocks of rock can move relative to each other. Slippage in these spots can lead eventually to collapse.

“If you have an idea of which area of the volcano is more susceptible to collapse, you could place ground-based sensors such as seismometers or GPS to monitor a risky flank on a minute-to-minute or hour-to-hour basis well before a collapse happens,” said Wauthier, who is also a faculty affiliate of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.

To help make predictions, the research team focused on fault dips, or the angle of a fault or rock fracture relative to the horizontal surface. Researchers found ground more likely to give way on slopes with shallow fault dips under the surface — specifically if magma opens the crust under the volcano summit. Like side-by-side stacks of blocks on a playground slide, more vertical fault dips on steeper flanks also are prone to instability, the researchers said.

They noted that topography has a sizable impact on predictions of ground movement, a factor that is often neglected in other studies.

“This fundamental research can have useful applications to better assess specific collapse hazards and areas of the volcano that are more susceptible to instability,” Wauthier said. “Over the long term, pushing this type of research could help volcano-adjacent communities by giving them time to prepare and evacuate ahead of a collapse if need be.”

Historically, she said, collapses caused by volcanic activity have been especially menacing to human life. When Mount St. Helens erupted in May 1980, its collapse removed the cap of its magma reservoir, resulting in an even bigger, more violent explosive eruption. In all, 57 people died in the Mount St. Helens eruption; 27 bridges and nearly 200 homes were destroyed.

A century earlier, the August 1883 eruption of Anak Krakatau — another instance of volcanic collapse — led to more than 36,000 deaths and ruined dozens of villages. Waves from tsunamis were recorded at more than 100 feet high.

Following the volcano's collapse and eruption in December 2018, more than 400 people died amid a massive tsunami. Wauthier and colleagues also studied that event, finding the mountainside had been slipping for years.

“These collapses can be very, very dangerous,” said Wauthier, whose research focuses on mitigating natural hazards from volcanoes, landslides and earthquakes, among others.

She said the most explosive volcanoes form along subduction arcs, where one tectonic plate is being subducted or buried beneath another. Many subduction-zone volcanoes are situated along coastlines, including in Indonesia and along the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Volcanoes in Hawaii, too, can be unstable in places, although they’re not as explosive as those in subduction areas, Wauthier said.

Follow-up research may focus on strengthening the model calculations and testing the models under other varying conditions, she said.

The other contributors to the study are Judit Gonzalez-Santana, a former graduate student and postdoctoral scholar within Wauthier’s group in geosciences at Penn State; Jay Sui Tung, an assistant professor in geophysics at Texas Tech University; and Timothy Masterlark, a professor of geology and geological engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Supporting the study were a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant awarded to Wauthier from the U.S. National Science Foundation; a NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology grant issued through the Science Mission Directorate’s Earth Science Division to Gonzalez-Santana; and a Penn State Institute for Computation and Data Sciences seed grant awarded to Wauthier and Reuben Kraft, a professor of mechanical engineering.

At Penn State, researchers are solving real problems that impact the health, safety and quality of life of people across the commonwealth, the nation and around the world.

For decades, federal support for research has fueled innovation that makes our country safer, our industries more competitive and our economy stronger. Recent federal funding cuts threaten this progress.

Learn more about the implications of federal funding cuts to our future at Research or Regress.

Journal

Journal of Geophysical Research Solid Earth

DOI

10.1029/2024JB030627

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The Effect of Edifice Slope, Failure Surface Geometry, and Magma Intrusion Depth on the Development of Flank Instability at Volcanoes

Lighting the way for electric vehicles by using streetlamps as chargers

By using existing infrastructure, researchers created a scalable model for cost-effective EV charging

Penn State

image:
A team of Penn State researchers created a scalable framework to develop, analyze and evaluate using streetlights as a low-cost, equitable EV charging option.
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Credit: Provided by XB Hu/Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Electric vehicles (EVs) can have lower fuel costs and reduce emissions relative to cars that use gasoline, but they are only a practical option if drivers have convenient ways to charge them. For people who live in multi-unit dwellings or in urban areas, access to charging infrastructure may be particularly limited, which in turn limits EV adoption.

To address this issue, a team of researchers at Penn State created a scalable framework to develop, analyze and evaluate using streetlights as a low-cost, equitable EV charging option. They then installed 23 streetlight charging units in Kansas City, Missouri, and tested their framework. The researchers found that streetlight charging stations, compared to traditional EV charging stations, were more cost- and time-effective, had fewer negative environmental impacts, and were more convenient and accessible.

Their results were published in the Journal of Urban Planning and Development, which is overseen by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

“The motivation for this work comes from the fact that many apartment and multi-unit dwelling residents, particularly in urban and downtown areas, lack access to dedicated home EV chargers, since they don’t have the privilege of owning a garage,” said Xianbiao “XB” Hu, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Fortunately, streetlight poles are already powered and typically owned by municipalities, making them relatively easy to work with. Their placement — often near on-street parking and in high-traffic areas — makes them well-positioned to serve both local residents and visitors.”

Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the researchers partnered with the Kansas City, the non-profit organization Metro Energy Center, local utilities companies and the National Renewable Energy Lab to retrofit existing streetlights to function as EV chargers. They then established a three-pronged framework — focused on demand, feasibility and benefits — for other communities to use to develop streetlight EV chargers.

“The scalability was a huge part of what makes this framework important,” said corresponding author Yang “Chris” Song, who was a doctoral student at Penn State at the time of the research and is now a data scientist at ElectroTempo. “Creating something that works not just in one specific city but that can be adopted by many communities easily is critical for increasing EV use across the country.”

To determine demand, the researchers looked at factors including land use, station density, points of interest nearby, and traffic volume and then used the data to train artificial intelligence models to make demand predictions based on these factors.

“We also took into account equity, which here means the proactive engagement with the community to ensure fair and inclusive distribution of the streetlight charging benefits across diverse neighborhoods,” Song said.

The researchers used the demand and equity analyses to select 23 streetlights and installed EV charging stations. They collected data from the stations for one year.

Compared to traditional EV charging ports, they found that these stations were much cheaper to install, since the infrastructure already existed. They also found that the streetlight chargers offered significantly faster charging speeds, likely because they draw power from dedicated municipal electrical lines and face less competition from multiple vehicles charging simultaneously, unlike clustered commercial stations, according to Yuyan “Annie” Pan, a postdoctoral researcher working with Hu. The streetlight charging stations also benefited the environment, since there were gasoline savings and greenhouse gas reductions by using locations where cars were already parking.

“We found that using streetlights for EV charging offers an innovative and equitable approach to expanding charging infrastructure and promoting sustainable electrification,” Pan said.

For next steps, the researchers said they would like to build on their models to incorporate more detailed socio-economic data and weather information. Incorporating socio-economic factors will help identify communities with limited EV access or adoption potential, ensuring more equitable infrastructure deployment. Weather data is also critical, as extreme temperatures can affect battery performance, travel frequency and overall energy demand.

Tianjia Yang, a postdoctoral researcher, and Yuxin Ding, a doctoral candidate, both of whom are affiliated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, are co-authors on the paper.

The U.S. Department of Energy supported this work.

At Penn State, researchers are solving real problems that impact the health, safety and quality of life of people across the commonwealth, the nation and around the world.

Learn more about the implications of federal funding cuts to our future at Research or Regress.

The researchers found that streetlight charging stations, compared to traditional EV charging stations, were more cost- and time-effective, had fewer negative environmental impacts, and were more convenient and accessible.

Credit

Provided by XB Hu/Penn State