May 22, 2013

Volcanologists who monitor eruptions of Alaskan volcanoes are scrambling to cope with US federal budget cuts - even as the Pavlof volcano, 1,000 kilometers southwest of Alaska's biggest city, Anchorage, spouts a towering ash plume that is threatening plane flights.

Funding cutbacks at the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO), which has staff in Anchorage and Fairbanks, have halted real-time monitoring of at least four of the state’s volcanoes. Seismic stations that would normally listen for imminent eruptions have stopped working, a casualty of deferred maintenance and repair.

“There comes a time when you can’t do more with less,” says Jeff Freymueller, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). “We’re well into the realm of doing less with less.” He is one of several UAF researchers who work remotely for the Anchorage AVO office. But on 18 May, the observatory ran out of money to pay for most of those scientists.

“I’ve been with the AVO for 25 years, and our current budget situation is the most dire that I’ve ever seen,” says John Power, lead scientist at the Anchorage observatory.

The AVO is a cooperative programme between the US Geological Survey (USGS), headquartered in Reston, Virginia; the UAF’s Geophysical Institute; and the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, based in Fairbanks. The AVO's budget this year is a little more than US$4 million, down from nearly $8 million in 2007. The shrinkage is partly because of smaller federal budgets overall, partly because of additional flat cuts known as sequestration, which came into effect in March, and partly because of the phasing out of congressional 'earmarks', which lawmakers once used to funnel money into their preferred programmes.

http://www.nature.com/news/financial-blow-for-alaskan-volcano-monitoring-1.13041