The floor is magma

Volcanic eruptions are adventures with the unexpected. Join our team of volcanologists from the University of East Anglia as they use an exciting new display of floor lights (magma disco!) to demonstrate how magmas move and the challenges populations face when volcanoes threaten disaster. Come and see us to imagine an eruption!

Tuesday 14 & Wednesday 15 February
10.30am–4pm
Free, drop-in
All ages

We are constructing a floor of lights that will recreate the subsurface rumblings and movements of recent eruptions (in St Vincent and in Hawai’i) and allow you to imagine what is like having to decide when to evacuate during a volcanic crisis.

As well as this we will have a display of the rocks and materials that volcanoes create and invite you to predict the ‘eruption’ of our own Party Popper volcano.

This will be the global debut of the ‘Volcano Imaginarium’ a public engagement tool funded by the Royal Society, that we will take to London in the summer and plan to share with Caribbean communities too.

About the project

This is part of a public engagement collaboration between volcanologists at the Universities of East Anglia and Oxford. We are working together on several projects but two of them are ‘Curating Crises’ and now the Volcano Imaginarium. You may already have heard of Volcanoes Top Trumps!

The School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia has several different volcanologists-in-residence who work on many problems related to volcanic eruptions. To improve societal responses to eruptions we also need to work across several disciplines, and so we have a proud history of collaborating not only with physical scientists but also researchers working in the social sciences and humanities too.  This exhibit showcases that thinking!