How far are volcanologists from volcanoes?

Abstract

Volcanoes are not randomly located on Earth, neither are volcanologists. We explored the physical distance between volcanologists and volcanoes by considering two categories of volcanoes: all volcanoes with a confirmed eruption in the Holocene and volcanoes that erupted in the past 50 years (1974-2024). We computed the distance between these volcanoes and the affiliation addresses from volcanologists, defined here as authors having published in the main volcanology journals. We then investigated the dependence of this distance on further bibliometric parameters, such as the journal published in or the author position. Affiliations were extracted from articles published since 1980 in four of the main English-speaking volcanology-focused journals in the Scopus database. Around 27% of volcanologists are based within 100 km of a Holocene volcano, compared to 14% of the world population. More than 85% of volcanologists are within 1000 km of a Holocene volcano, but 48% need to travel over 1000 km to visit a volcano that erupted in the past 50 years. We tested whether distance to the nearest volcano correlates with author position. We observed that researchers working nearer volcanoes tend to lead articles with more co-authors, which is robustly supported by statistical tests. We also found that authors in further positions tend to be based nearer recently active volcanoes, though this correlation is less significant. Using keywords to identify each article's studied volcano, we performed single volcano analysis for the 25 most frequently studied volcanoes in the dataset. We observed significant differences in the distance from authors to the target volcano. For instance, we obtained median author-volcano distances of 9 km for Campi Flegrei and 11,735 km for Merapi. Our analyses also permitted a very simplistic estimate of the carbon footprint from fieldwork travel, yielding CO $_2^{}$ equivalent emissions of about 1 ton per travelling author, with an order of magnitude uncertainty. The database presented is very rich and could serve future efforts in science strategy, equality, diversity and inclusivity, outreach, and sustainability.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00445-025-01849-6.