Many of the world’s volcanoes that erupt, experience significant preeruption surface deformation. Internal magma pressure makes the surface bulge upwards and outwards. Thus, precise monitoring of surface deformation has the potential to contribute significantly to the realisation of a predictive capability of volcanic eruption. In particular, eruption source depth and evolution time can be estimated from surface deformation…

How would the world look like if you were standing on an arbitrary point on earth? It is not easy to imagine, how a randomly chosen location would look like since most pictures that come into our mind are somewhat special: our home, Piccadilly Square, a picture from National Geographic, or a photo that had been taken on top of a famous summit.

Usually, us human beings tend to cumulate in urban centres, and if we go places, then to those which we consider as worthwhile a visit, such as the Tower of Pisa or Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Due to our unbalanced focus on certain areas, we have a distorted image of our world – much more jam-packed of houses, roads and people than it actually is…