Volcanic hazards in French overseas territories

Active volcanoes from the french overseas territories are permanently monitored by volcanological and seismological observatories under the responsibility of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, in association with local universities and regional and departmental authorities, using numerous on-land instruments and techniques. These volcanoes are listed here after:

-        Soufrière in Guadeloupe Island (Lesser Antilles)

-        Montagne Pelée in Martinique Island (Lesser Antilles)

-        Piton de la Fournaise in La Réunion Island (Indian Ocean)

-        Mayotte volcanic system in Mayotte Island (Indian Ocean)

The non-permanent, mobile equipement acquired within Marmor will allow geophysical measurements to be made in the offshore domain. Hydrophones deployed in the water column will also certainly improve our understanding of the volcanic processes : see review by Dziak et al, 2011, and update here below by Bazin et al (2022) :  

"Since these first observations (e.g. Dziak et al, 2011), the use of hydroacoustic arrays to monitor underwater volcanoes has developed and expanded. For instance, Axial Seamount, the most active submarine volcano in the NE Pacific (e.g. Chadwick et al., 2016), now hosts the world's first underwater volcano observatory, at a node of the OOI (Ocean Observatories Initiative, www.oceanobservatories.org) regional cabled array (RCA). Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBS) and hydrophones have also sometimes detected water-borne acoustic phases associated with submarine eruptions, but either related to explosions or implosions during lava flows emplacement on the seafloor. For instance, during the 2015 eruption at Axial Seamount, OOI seismometers detected tens of thousands of impulsive signals near the lava flows while they were being emplaced (Wilcock et al., 2016; Caplan‐Auerbach et al., 2017; Le Saout et al., 2020). Moreover, Chadwick et al., 2016 observed numerous explosion pits on the 2015 lava flow field and, hence, regarded the impulsive signals as resulting from steam bursts as lava drained out of individual lava lobes beneath a solidified crust. Similar signals were also recorded along the East‐Pacific Rise at 9°50′N (Tan et al., 2016) and on the Gakkel ridge (Schlindwein et al., 2005; Schlindwein and Riedel, 2010) suggesting that these types of impulsive sounds may be common during submarine eruptions.”