Basaltic magma rising from deep within the Earth can crystallise, degas, and fragment in ways that current models fail to capture because they assume these processes happen instantly. The DisEqm project tackles a fundamental gap: the timescales for crystal growth and gas exsolution are often longer than the ascent time of the magma, meaning disequilibrium—not equilibrium—is the norm during eruptions. This matters because eruption style—whether explosive and ash-rich or effusive and gas-rich—determines the hazard, from disrupting airspace to harming crops and public health. The UK’s National Risk Register already lists an Icelandic eruption as one of its four highest-priority civil emergencies. If the project succeeds, it will produce a new numerical modelling framework grounded in real experimental data from synchrotron X-ray imaging and high-pressure, high-temperature rheometry. That framework could transform eruption forecasting, allowing scientists to predict not just whether an eruption will happen, but how it will behave—and therefore what its impacts on climate, aviation, and agriculture will be.
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Basaltic volcanism is the most common form of volcanism in the solar system. On Earth, eruptions can impact global and regional climate, and threaten populations living in their shadow, through a combination of ash, gas and lava emissions. The specific risk to the UK from an Icelandic eruption is recognized as one of the four 'highest priority risks' in the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies. The impact of an eruption is determined by both intensity and style, ranging from explosive and ash-rich (impacting on air-space access and climate) to effusive and gas-rich (affecting public health and crops/livestock locally and distally). Understanding these eruptive styles, and their evolution in time and space is key to forecasting the impacts of eruptions. Eruption style is controlled by the degree of coupling between gas and magma during magma ascent, with strong coupling leading to enhanced fragmentation and ash production. This coupling is controlled by the interplay and feedback among several non-linear processes: multi-phase magma viscosity evolution, crystallisation, gas exsolution, permeability, magma ascent velocity and fragmentation within a dynamic magma plumbing system. Such non-linearity produces complex behaviour. Understanding the processes controlling eruptive style is therefore critical for volcanology and eruption forecasting. A crucial limitation of previous work is that it has been predicated almost exclusively on the assumption of equilibrium between melt, crystals and volatiles. In other words, the volcanology community has conventionally assumed that the processes of magma degassing and solidification/crystallisation occur nearly instantaneously in response to depressurisation during magma ascent and eruption. However, it is now recognised that the timescales required to achieve equilibrium for both crystal growth and volatile exsolution are similar to or longer than ascent times for erupting basaltic magmas, and therefore disequilibria are ubiquitous. Disequilibrium processes are therefore a key missing link preventing quantitative modelling and understanding of volcanic processes, and their impacts. The core aim of the NERC-NSF DisEqm project is to create an empirically-constrained quantitative description of disequilibrium processes in basaltic volcanism, and to apply this to address key volcanological problems through a new numerical modelling framework In order to meet this aim, we bring together a world-leading team to perform experiments using new, ground-breaking synchrotron X-ray imaging and rheometric techniques to visualise and quantify crystallisation, degassing and multiphase, HPHT (high-pressure, high-temperature) viscosity evolution, revolutionising the fields of HPHT experimental petrology and HPHT rheometry. Geochemical constraints will be achieved by applying state of the art petrological analytical techniques to samples produced both on the beamline and in benchtop quench experiments. We will perform large-scale fluid dynamics simulations to inform and validate the 3D numerical modelling, and we will constrain fragmentation and eruption column processes with empirical field studies. Results will be integrated into a state-of-the-art numerical model, and applied to impact-focussed case studies for Icelandic, US and Italian basaltic eruptions. In conclusion, our project will produce a paradigm shift in our understanding of disequilibrium processes during magma ascent and our capacity for modelling basaltic eruption phenomena, creating a step-change in our ability to forecast and quantify the impacts of basaltic eruptions.
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