Another volcano just erupted in the “Ring of Fire”

A massive column of smoke and ash shot nearly 10 miles into the sky above Sumatra Monday morning as Mount Sinabung, one of three currently active volcanoes in Indonesia, began erupting.

It’s the latest rumble in what’s already been a very rowdy couple of months along the Ring of Fire, the geological region that follows the 25,000-mile perimeter of the Pacific Ocean and is home to 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes.

The Volcanic Ash Advisory Center in Australia warned aircraft to divert from Sumatra, but noted that satellite imagery shows that much of the ash has already dissipated.

Mount Sinabung has a tragic history, with deadly eruptions in 2010, 2014, and 2016. More than 30,000 people have left the area in recent years due to the volcano. No fatalities or injuries were reported after Monday’s eruption.

Over in the Philippines, Mount Mayon, which began erupting on January 13 and forced 75,000 to flee, saw another eruption of ash and lava on Monday.

Mount Kusatsu-Shirane, 100 miles northwest of Tokyo, also erupted in January, leaving one soldier dead in an avalanche and injuring a dozen at a ski resort. Indonesia’s Mount Agung, which has been spewing ash since November, also had four distinct eruptions.

And then there are the earthquakes. A magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck southern Mexico on Monday, following a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in the region last Friday. The quakes didn’t cause any deaths, but 13 people died in a helicopter crash after surveying the damage. Across the ocean, a magnitude 5.3 earthquake shook Taiwan Monday morning.

And last month, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake rumbled 100 miles southwest of Jakarta, Indonesia, the same day a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck off the coast of Alaska. (A tsunami warning was issued, and subsequently canceled, for the entire West Coast of the US.)

Could some of these events be related? In theory, yes, but in practice, it’s unlikely.

“The short answer is yes, earthquakes and volcanoes can interact,” said Emily Brodsky, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz. However, she noted it’s too early to connect the dots between all the activity we’ve seen these past couple of months and it’s hard to say how much one event has influenced another.

Brodsky added that having multiple earthquakes and eruptions at the same time is not unusual, especially in a region that is so notoriously feisty.

Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are often clustered, she said. A volcanic eruption can cause tremors, while a large temblor can rattle a magma chamber underneath a volcano, causing towers of ash and rivers of lava to gush forth. The Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile erupted in 1960 just 38 hours after a magnitude 9.6 earthquake, for example.

This is because large tracts of the Earth’s crust called tectonic plates are constantly running into each other, sliding past each other, or rolling on top of each other. These movements can cause pressure to build up and dissipate in the form of earthquakes, or can create fissures that allow magma to reach the earth’s surface.

Scientists are starting to get a handle on how big geologic events influence each other, stitching together measurements of how an eruption in one part of the world can lead to tremors in another.

“One of the things that is helping us grapple is our vastly improved global instrumentation,” Brodsky said. Many countries, particularly in earthquake-prone regions, have been deploying networks of seismic sensors to gain a better understanding of movements of the ground.

The ultimate goal is to get ahead of these events so that the next time the ground shakes or a volcano growls, people won’t be caught off guard and lives can potentially be saved.

But that will require years of monitoring the earth with detailed measurements in some of the most remote places, like the bottom of the ocean, to build a baseline. Since large earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are uncommon events in general, it’s hard to build a meaningful statistical relationship between the two at the moment.

“The correlation between earthquakes and volcanic eruptions is weak, if not existent,” said Marine Denolle, an earthquake researcher at Harvard University, in an email.

As a result, it may be years before scientists can develop an early warning system for either tremors or eruptions.