Event Details

"How big was that huge volcanic eruption which happened 90 thousand years ago?"

“How big was that huge volcanic eruption which happened 90 thousand years ago?"

The Aso-4 eruption, which happened in Japan about 90 thousand years ago, was certainly massive, producing an ash cloud that stretched for thousands of kilometers. But was it a 'super eruption'? To figure this out, we have to infer the total volume of erupted mass from a small number of poorly-preserved records, mostly the thicknesses of ash layers from ocean cores. We'd like a 95% confidence interval as well. This seems like an opportunity to blend modern Machine Learning methods with physical insights, to see what happens. Our method combined a multi-resolution basis function expansion, pseudo-observations, L1 penalty, numerical integration, and a 'wild bootstrap'. Anyhow, it turns out that, as far as we can tell, Aso-4 was not quite 'super'.

Joint work with Professor Sir Steve Sparks, Professor Willy Aspinall, and Dr Sue Mahony.