The Volcano-Seismic Clock of the South American Pacific Margin - A Possible First Link Between Natural Disasters Prevention and Expanding Earth

Abstract

A volcano-seismic correlation was for a long time suspected to occur on the Pacific margin of South America. Scalera (2008) using the data available in 2006 in the Smithsonian Institution Catalogue of the volcanic eruptions, has revealed evidence that earthquakes happened into the South-American Wadati-Benio zone – with magnitude greater than 8.4 –are associated to an enhanced rate of volcanic eruptions, but has been impossible to determine the causal chain between the two phenomena. After 2006, the effort of the Smithsonian Institution to improve our knowledge of this region has resulted in a greatly increased completeness of the catalogue, adding the new eruptions for the 2000- 2010 interval, but also an additional 50% of new entries in the list of the Andean volcanoes. The occurrence of the Chilean earthquake of Maule – 27 February 2010 (M=8.8); occurred at five decades from the 1960 quake – has been the occasion to rework all the data searching for additional clues able to indicate a preferred causal direction eruptions-earthquakes or earthquakes-eruptions – or from a third more general cause (e.g. a mantle movements) to both eruptions and earthquakes. This short note discusses the three above-said hypotheses and tries to establish if these results could be useful to the aims of the Civil Protection in the programs of prevention and/or forecasting of natural disasters.