Advances in volcanology. An official book series of the international association of volcanology and chemistry of the Earth’s interior / Достижения вулканологии. Официальная серия книг международной ассоциации вулканологии и химии недр Земли

Volcanoes are an astonishing manifestation of the activity of planets and their satellites, as observed in active and/or fossil examples on Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Moon and the Jovian satellite Io. On Earth, volcanoes are one of the most impressive evidence of the same imbalance in energy that is also driving plate tectonics. Active volcanoes have terrified and at the same time fascinated populations and civilizations for thousands of years. This instinctive attitude towards volcanoes has been gradually replaced, in the last centuries, by a more rational curiosity and scientific approach, heralding the birth of volcanology, although only in the last decades volcanology has grown to the point of understanding general processes. Nevertheless, this increased knowledge has been only partially paralleled by an improved capacity to forecast eruptions and mitigate the environmental impacts of volcanic activity, which remain the ultimate and exciting challenges for modern volcanology.

Any synthesis of the general knowledge gained on volcanoes would deserve a voluminous monograph, and for an overview several appropriate texts may be examined (e.g., Schmincke 2004; Lockwood and Hazlett 2010; Sigurdsson et al. 2015). Here this introductory chapter builds up on these texts to summarize the fundamental concepts on volcanoes and their activity, also pairing Chap. 2, which summarizes the basic notions on crustal deformation. Both introductory chapters provide the essential background to the remaining eleven chapters focusing on the stress-deformation processes associated with the rise, emplacement and eruption of shallow magma (i.e., in the upper crust), at the local and regional scale, which concern volcano-tectonics. <...>