Is it really necessary to treat pyroclastic flows and surges separately?
So far this summary has been aimed exclusively at Montserrat residents and the present eruption. But scientists worldwide are of course studying a great variety of both modern and ancient pyroclastic flows and surges. When they look at enormous examples, produced by volcanic explosions that continued for hours or longer, it becomes clear that you cannot neatly divide the products thundering down the sides of volcanoes and outwards across the surrounding region neatly into pyroclastic flows and surges. When you decipher (by features of the preserved volcanic sediments) what happened at a given point within the chaos of the collapsing prolonged eruptive columns, it appears that you could theoretically say that flows and surges were endlessly alternating at that point, depending on small changes to and fro of the speed and ratio of air to solid fragments (dust to rocks) there. Therefore leaders in this field of research now tend to ban the terms pyroclastic flow and pyroclastic surge from
So far this summary has been aimed exclusively at Montserrat residents and the present eruption. But scientists worldwide are of course studying a great variety of both modern and ancient pyroclastic flows and surges. When they look at enormous examples, produced by volcanic explosions that continued for hours or longer, it becomes clear that you cannot neatly divide the products thundering down the sides of volcanoes and outwards across the surrounding region neatly into pyroclastic flows and surges. When you decipher (by features of the preserved volcanic sediments) what happened at a given point within the chaos of the collapsing prolonged eruptive columns, it appears that you could theoretically say that flows and surges were endlessly alternating at that point, depending on small changes to and fro of the speed and ratio of air to solid fragments (dust to rocks) there. Therefore leaders in this field of research now tend to ban the terms pyroclastic flow and pyroclastic surge from
