Supercomputers Uncover Massive Lava Lake Under Korean Island
Intel Xeon supercomputer aided in 3D modeling
Researchers in Zurich have uncovered a mysterious lava lake over a hundred miles below the Sea of Japan, according to this brief by Slashdot Media Contributing Editor Wylie Wong.
Scientists have discovered a large lake of lava under a small South Korean island, but they aren’t yet sure how it originated.
The reservoir of magma, located 31 miles underneath a small island named Ulleung in the Sea of Japan, is 186 miles wide and about 124 miles deep, according to a recent story in ScienceNode. ETH Zurich researchers Saule Simute and Andreas Fichtner identified the magma reservoir by taking seismic wave records of 58 earthquakes and running supercomputer simulations that produced 3D images of the crust and upper mantle in the area between South Korea and Japan.
They used two supercomputers in their research, including the Intel Xeon-based Piz Daint supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.
“What is new about our method is its ability to extract as much information as possible from the data – and this is why we manage to discover new aspects of Earth structure, such as this reservoir,” Fichtner said in the article. “However, the price to pay is enormous computational requirements.”
Fichtner, a professor at the ETH Institute of Geophysics, said the magma reservoir, named the Ulleung anomaly, is probably only partially molten rock.
These magma reservoirs are typically located near active volcanoes, but the Ulleung anomaly has no active volcano nearby. Because the 3D renderings from the simulations have its resolution limits, it is unclear if and how the magma reservoir connects to the Earth’s surface, the story said.
“The island’s extinct volcano (last eruption about 5,000 years ago), suggests a possible answer,” the story said.
Regardless, the researchers believe the island is not in any danger of the magma underneath. “Intuitively, we would think that there is little danger on human time scales,” Fichtner said in the story. Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
June 3, 2016 Wylie Wong, Slashdot Media Contributing Editor
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