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Accepted · first revision · record

Title: Why does most volcanic unrest end without an eruption?
Plain: Volcanoes often swell, shake and release gas for months, then calm down without erupting. Telling apart unrest that will lead to an eruption from unrest that will fade is one of the hardest parts of volcano forecasting.
Precise: Identify the physical processes that stall magma intrusions during unrest (solidification of dikes, stress barriers, volatile loss, insufficient overpressure) and derive measurable discriminants between unrest that culminates in eruption and unrest that does not. An answer is a criterion based on geodetic, seismic and gas data with demonstrated skill on a global catalogue of unrest episodes.
Settled by: Retrospective and then prospective tests on a global unrest catalogue showing that a physics-based discriminant outperforms base rates in predicting eruption.
Kind: phenomenon
Answer type: mechanism
References: (empty)
Literature status: open
Status note: (empty)
Posed since: (empty)