Rabaul Volcanological Observatory

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The Rabaul Volcanological Observatory (RVO) is located in the town of the same name in Papua New Guinea's East New Britain Province . Administratively it is a department of the Geological Survey of Papua New Guinea , which in turn is subordinate to the Ministry of Mining and Petroleum.

General

The facility with around 30 employees is a member of the World organization of volcano observatories - a commission of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior in the International Union for Geodesy and Geophysics - and is one of the most important of its kind in the world. The main focus is on on the Tavurvur and the neighboring Vulcan . However, the observatory is also responsible for monitoring all of the other 14 active and 23 inactive volcanoes in the country . There are branches in Esa'Ala ( Milne Bay Province ) as well as on Ulawun , Langila , Manam and Karkar .

history

The observatory was founded in 1940 after a major eruption of the Tavurvur , which caused extensive destruction on May 29, 1937 and made the city almost uninhabitable. At that time Rabaul was part of the New Guinea territory , which was administered as a mandate of the League of Nations of Australia . During the Pacific War Rabaul was occupied by Japanese invasion forces on January 23, 1942 . Allied air strikes as part of Operation Cartwheel destroyed the RVO.

From 1950 Tony Taylor , who worked for the Commonwealth Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR; today's Geoscience Australia ), was responsible for the reconstruction and re-establishment of the observatory. In the following two decades he significantly shaped the development of volcanological research in the region.

After Taylor's untimely death in the summer of 1972, a new generation of scientists around Robin JS Cooke continued his work at the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory. For the first time, several indigenous peoples have also been employed as scientific assistants - for example Benjamin P. Talai and Elias Ravian . On September 16, 1975, Papua New Guinea gained full state sovereignty and was thus also responsible for the administration of the RVO. Due to social unrest, surveillance of the Lamington and the Bagana was temporarily suspended in the 1990s. In October 1994, Talai became the first Melanesian to be appointed head of the facility. He took over from the Australian Chris O. McKee , a cousin of Cookes, but resigned in 1999. His successor to this day (as of November 2015) is Ima Itikarai . Another important employee of this era was Herman Patia , who worked at the RVO from 1986 until his death in 2012.

RVO scientists regularly take part in the International Training Program of the Center for the Study of Active Volcanoes (CSAV) at the University of Hawaii at Hilo . In 2015, the observatory was on the list of candidates for the United Nations Sasakawa Award for Disaster Reduction , which was presented in March at the third UN World Conference on Risk Reduction of Natural Disasters held in the Japanese city of Sendai .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry on the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory on wovo.org (World Organization of Volcano Observatories). Retrieved November 10, 2015.
  2. ^ Johnson, Robert Wallace: Fire mountains of the islands. A history of volcanic eruptions and disaster management in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands . Canberra (2013), 296.
  3. ↑ obituary of Patia . Retrieved from volcano.si.edu (“Global Volcanism Program” of the Smithsonian Institution ) on November 10, 2015.
  4. ^ Entry on the first International Training Program of the Center for the Study of Active Volcanoes in 1990 . Retrieved from hilo.hawaii.edu ( University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo ) on November 10, 2015.
  5. ↑ Presentation of the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory on the occasion of the Sasakawa Award 2015 . Retrieved from wcdrr.org (World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction) on November 10, 2015.