Featured Lendület Researcher: Réka Lukács

Volcanic activity in Hungary and its surroundings has been very diverse over the past twenty million years, which is why the region can be considered a natural laboratory. Research in Hungary can greatly contribute to answering fundamental questions in volcanology. In other words, why and how volcanoes work.

Réka Lukács

The primary goal of the MTA–HUN-REN CSFK Momentum Pannonian Volcano Research Group, led by Lukács, is to better understand the processes that lead to volcanic eruptions – and to explore how studying volcanic rocks can benefit society.

The cornerstones of understanding volcanoes

“Understanding volcanic activity is important for several reasons. It poses a significant natural hazard, but it is also associated with many useful raw materials. They provide a life-giving and liveable environment, and volcanoes are attractive natural assets and tourist destinations,” said Lukács. “Currently,

approximately ten percent of the world’s eight billion population lives in volcanic danger, meaning they live within 100 kilometres of a volcano capable of dangerous eruptions.

These include volcanoes that have been dormant for so long that we cannot be sure whether they will become active again. The people living there have no knowledge of when the last eruption occurred, nor whether these volcanoes are capable of erupting again. They do not even monitor all volcanoes regularly, even though one of the cornerstones of understanding volcanoes is continuous instrumental observation and analysis of past activity formations. Our research focuses mainly on the second cornerstone, and we conduct our petrological and volcanological studies primarily in the Carpathian Basin.”

By analysing the formations of previous volcanic eruptions, the members of the research group strive to extract as much information as possible from them using scientific tools in order to answer the most fundamental questions of volcanology: Why and how often do volcanic eruptions occur, what causes them, and what are their signs? How will potential volcanic eruptions unfold, and how dangerous could it be for society and the people living in the areas?

Refining the models

Since there are currently no active volcanoes in the Carpathian Basin, the research team is studying rocks formed in the distant past in an effort to uncover the processes that once took place in magma chambers and fundamentally determined the functioning of volcanoes. According to our current knowledge, the magma reservoir is a complex system that covers the entire crust of the Earth under volcanoes, and even the deeper parts of the lithosphere. The research of Lukács and her colleagues has also revealed that these magma reservoir systems can exist for hundreds of thousands of years, even under long-dormant volcanoes. A high-resolution analysis of the appearance and chemical composition of crystals in volcanic rocks can reveal what happens at depths that cannot be reached by other means. How does magma crystallise, and why does the magma reservoir remain intact for so long? What types of magma make it up, and how do they mix with each other? How do volatile phases behave in these processes? Finally, what happens immediately before volcanic eruptions, and what processes lead to the formation of a magma mass capable of fuelling a volcanic eruption from a magma state that is physically incapable of erupting? Such knowledge gained helps refine models that predict volcanic eruptions.

Transylvania, Northern Hungary, California

Lukács’s work in the Momentum Research Group is based on research she began more than ten years ago in the MTA–ELTE and then the HUN-REN–ELTE Volcanology Research Group. Their research area is the Carpathian-Pannonian region, which includes the volcanic arc in the foothills of the Carpathians. Part of this arc is Csomád, which has been in the spotlight in recent years as the site of the most recent volcanic eruption in our region. “Csomád and the nearby basalt volcanic area are important research areas for us, as it is still not entirely clear what processes led to the last volcanic eruption here and what determined its characteristics,” said Lukács. “We are also investigating the relationship between the two volcanic areas using a number of innovative methods. For example, we are conducting geophysical investigations in collaboration with researchers from the Czech Academy of Sciences to map the subsurface magma reservoir without the need for deep drilling.”

Another area of research for the team is northern Hungary, where Europe’s largest volcanic eruptions of the past 20 million years took place. During these eruptions, more than a hundred cubic kilometres of magma may have reached the surface, causing large caldera collapses. Lukács explained that the formations of these large volcanic eruptions are partly known from the surface, but a significant part of them are below the surface, as the region has undergone significant subsidence over the past millions of years. Their research will therefore focus on the subsurface rocks that have become known during previous drilling. “In the 1960s and later, many structural researchers carried out deep drilling in Hungary. These brought large quantities of drill cores to the surface, which helped us to understand the structure and composition of the shallow crust beneath the surface. Now, using new, modern tools, we will examine volcanic formations that are up to a thousand metres thick in some places. We expect that this will enable us to

reconstruct the little-known volcanic history of our region and even explore related usable mineral resources.”

The Momentum research will not be limited to our region: for example, the research group is collaborating with researchers from the US Geological Survey (USGS) to study a volcanic area in California, Mammoth Mountain, which was active 50-100 thousand years ago and has many similarities to Csomád. Magma degassing recently occurred at Mammoth Mountain, and the carbon dioxide gas that reached the surface caused forest destruction over a significant area. Their research aims to find out how the magma chamber works beneath this long-dormant volcanic complex, what processes caused the volcanic eruptions a few tens of thousands of years ago, and whether there is a connection with the volcanism that occurred nearby a few centuries ago.

In addition to their scientific work, the members of the Momentum Research Group want to place great emphasis on social relations, especially on the active dissemination of scientific knowledge and the assessment of the natural values of volcanic heritage.