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‘Extinct’ Volcanoes May Not Be as Dead as We Thought

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A new study proposes a slightly scary idea: what if “extinct” volcanoes aren’t actually extinct, but just waiting? Slowly building a magma stockpile over time so they can one day reawaken and explode with the fury they haven’t exhibited in centuries?

That’s the conclusion of volcanologists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who published their findings in Science Advances, after examining the Methana volcano in Greece. Scientists reconstructed roughly 700,000 years of its history using zircon crystals, microscopic minerals that form in magma chambers and act as little timestamps of volcanic history. They suspect that just because a volcano has been quiet for decades or even centuries, it doesn’t mean it’s dead. It might just be gathering........

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