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I'm Dr. Thor Thordarsun. I'm a vulcanologist. In terms of research, its focused on volcanic
activity in Iceland, Hawaii and also in New Zealand.
The main purpose there is to understand how eruptions take place, how they behave and
what impact they have in the society in order to help us to mitigate hassles better in the
future. Well, there's no way we can stop a volcano from erupting.
That's - that's one, I'd like to keep that on the table because you know I don't think
we would ever be able to do that. But what we can do is actually to learn to live with
the volcanoes.
And by that I mean, is understand the potential impact they can have on communities and what
type of impact it has. And then think about how we can actually minimise those impacts
by preventative measures.
I work on a volcano called Askja which is in the center of Iceland. And I am interested
in what happens underneath the volcano, so where the melt comes from and what happens
to it before it erupts from the volcano.
The research that I do is important because it helps us to understand how the volcanoes
behave better.
And if you understand how often the volcano is going to erupt and what kind of thing it
will do, like producing an ash cloud that will disrupt the airspace, you can start to
plan for that kind of event and work out what the hazards are going to be and how you can
make your society much safer.
My PhD focuses on the topic of tephrochronology which involves identifying, correlating volcanic
ash layers across the North Atlantic region.
My research contributes a lot to the scientific community by providing a mechanism for dating
correlating events across a vast area.
For example, paleoclimate studies cities or for archaeological studies.
For the real world, and my work really focuses on identifying how many eruptions have occurred,
and how far they travel and therefore it adds in to hazard mitigation studies.