Barry Voight

Barry Voight (born 1937) is an American volcanologist and engineer. He is also the brother of actor Jon Voight and songwriter Chip Taylor, and the uncle of actress Angelina Jolie and actor James Haven. After attending a five-year intensive dual-degree program at the University of Notre Dame, Voight became a teaching assistant there while pursuing his Master's degree. He studied at Cornell University and Columbia University, earning his Ph.D. in geology at the latter in 1965. He worked as a professor of geology at several universities, including Pennsylvania State University, where he taught from 1964 until his retirement in 2005. Voight's publication on avalanches and other mass movements attracted the attention of United States Geological Survey (USGS) employee Rocky Crandell, who asked him to look at an expanding bulge at Mount St. Helens in Washington. Voight foresaw the bulge's failure, followed by the collapse of the mountain's north flank as well as a powerful eruption. His predictions came true as St. Helens erupted in 1980; Voight was then hired by the USGS to investigate the avalanche that marked the eruption. After his work at St. Helens brought him international recognition, Voight continued researching and guiding monitoring efforts at several active volcanoes throughout his career, including Nevado del Ruiz, Mount Merapi, and Soufrière Hills. For his research, publications, and disaster prevention work as a volcanologist and engineer, Voight has been honored with several awards and citations as a lecturer.

Early life and education

Voight was born in Yonkers, New York^[1] in 1937.^[2] His brothers are actor Jon Voight and songwriter Chip Taylor,^[1] and actress Angelina Jolie is his niece.^[3]

Voight pursued a 5-year intensive dual-degree program at the University of Notre Dame, receiving undergraduate degrees in geology (1959) and in civil engineering (1960).^[4] He also received his Master's degree in civil engineering from Notre Dame in 1961.^[5] Voight attributes his interest in science to his mentors at Notre Dame, professors Ray Gutschick and Erhard Winkler.^[6] After spending one year studying at Cornell University, Voight transferred to Columbia University, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in geology in 1965, studying under Fred Donath.^[7] While at Columbia, Voight was named a President's Fellow.^[5]

Teaching career

Voight began teaching in 1961, serving as a teaching assistant (TA) at the University of Notre Dame while pursuing his master's degree in civil engineering. From 1961−1963, he also served as a TA at Cornell and Columbia. In 1964, he joined the faculty at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) as an assistant professor of geology, becoming a regular professor of geology and geotechnical engineering in 1978.^[5] He remained at Penn State for more than four decades, retiring in June 2005.^[8] While working at Penn State, Voight had a joint affiliation with the school's Department of Mineral Engineering, teaching two courses, "Physical Geology for Engineers" and "Volcanology". During his career, Voight also taught as a guest professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1972. He was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 1973 and at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1981.^[5] As of 2009, he remains an emeritus professor at Penn State.^[9]

Volcanological work and research

Early assignments

Voight correctly predicted a bulge collapse that caused Mount St. Helens to erupt at 08:32 a.m. on May 18, 1980.

Voight began his career as a geologist in 1971, working for the United States Bureau of Mines.^[5] In 1978, he published the first volume of a publication on avalanches, titled Rockslides and Avalanches. After the second volume was released in 1980, the work became a benchmark in studying avalanches and other forms of mass movement.^[10]

Prior to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, Voight was contacted by Rocky Crandell,^[11] a United States Geological Survey (USGS) employee working at the mountain.^[12] Crandell sought Voight's expertise in landslides, hoping Voight would opine on a growing bulge, 270 feet (82 m) in length, which had emerged on the mountain's north face.^[11][13] In his report to Crandell and his associates, Voight insisted that the bulge could fail and collapse the volcano's entire north sector. He suggested they begin monitoring the rate of movement of the bulge, worried that the collapse could trigger an eruption. He also advised hiring a local surveyor to take measurements, offending several of the geologists.^[14] Shortly after, Voight left the mountain and returned to teaching classes at Penn State. Just before the eruption, he published a paper summarizing his predictions, depicting the failure of the bulge and the collapse of the mountain's north side followed by a violent eruption, all of which came true.^[15] After a magnitude 5.1 earthquake centered directly below the north slope triggered that part of the volcano to slide at 8:32 a.m.,^[16] the volcano erupted, causing USD $1.1 billion in damage and killing 57 people.^[17] After the eruption, Voight accepted a position as a consultant for the USGS. He led the investigation into the volcano debris avalanche which had occurred during the volcano's eruption, guiding other volcanologists including Harry Glicken,^[18] who built upon Voight's preliminary research to create his report "Rockslide-Debris Avalanche of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens Volcano, Washington" (1996).^[19] Voight's work won him international renown,^[7] and he later cited his experiences there as "career-changing".^[20] Although Voight already had a growing interest in volcanology, the eruption at Mount St. Helens propelled him to switch careers and dedicate himself to the field. His work helped to reinvigorate widespread interest in landslides and other phenomena at volcanoes which potentially pose a threat to life.^[8] After Mount St. Helens, Voight began work analyzing the volcanic hazards from several other active volcanoes.^[20]

In 1985, Voight responded to the Armero tragedy, where more than 23,000 died from an eruption from the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, by blaming human error. He felt that while totally accurate predictions of volcanic eruptions were impossible, unpreparedness for the disaster and inaction in preventing it exacerbated the death toll.^[21] In January 1986, Voight visited Nevado del Ruiz responding to concerns from the Colombian government that the northeastern section of the volcano might cave in, causing another eruption. He established a monitoring network of reflectors and used laser ranging to track how the distances to these reflectors changed over time. When one reflector indicated lots of movement and large cracks became visible from the air, Voight began contemplating evacuation, but waited. By March 1986, he realized the widening cracks were caused by the creep (gradual shifting) of one of the volcano's glaciers, rather than rocks.^[10] After leaving Ruiz, Voight compiled the 14-page report "Countdown to Catastrophe" (1988),^[22] which analyzed how volcanic hazard management had failed at Armero.^[10]

Later studies

When Voight began research at Mount Merapi in Java, Indonesia in 1988, it was hardly known by volcanologists. It had been omitted in the Smithsonian Institution's 1981 publication Volcanoes of the World, despite having close to a million people on its slopes as of 1996. Voight set up meters to record movement within the volcano, and educated local scientists on volcanic monitoring.^[23] In July 1989, he obtained a USD $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Natural and Manmade Hazard Mitigation for his proposal to predict eruptions at Merapi.^[10] After his funding ran out, he temporarily abandoned his research. An eruption from the volcano in 1994 produced pyroclastic flows that killed 63 people, including guests of a wedding ceremony. 23 people survived the eruption. Returning to Merapi the following year, Voight compared data from the dead and survivors including the extent of their burn areas, clothing worn, and lung damage. He concluded that protective, long-sleeved clothing and masks enhance chances of survival when exposed to eruptive activity.^[23]

In April 1989, Voight returned to Colombia to the volcano Galeras after being contacted by the United Nations Disaster Relief Organization. People in Pasto, located at the foot of the volcano, became alarmed by noises and shaking from Galeras. While Galeras proved far easier to climb than Nevado del Ruiz, land mines planted to hinder guerrilla forces dotted the slopes of the mountain. With USGS geologist Dick Janda, Voight drew a hazard map which included several populated areas within the danger zone. Before Voight left Galeras, the volcano underwent an unexpected^[24] phreatic eruption, which Voight and his team failed to predict. Although Pasto was unaffected, six scientists attending a United Nations workshop for natural disaster relief were killed.^[24] After reviewing deformation data from the day before the eruption, Voight discovered that no acceleration in the deformation process had occurred. He surmised that phreatic eruptions do not exhibit an acceleration in deformation before taking place and left after confirming that the volcano's monitoring system functioned properly.^[10]

Voight's fulfilled prediction that an avalanche at St. Helens could provoke a lateral eruption, an eruption from the volcano's flank rather than its summit, attracted the attention of the government of Montserrat. Worried about an expanding lava dome at the Soufrière Hills volcano in March 1996, the island's government asked Voight to assess its potential for an avalanche that could generate an eruption. Voight thought it was unlikely that the crater would collapse, but expressed concern over a possible pyroclastic flow that could reach the city of Plymouth in approximately three minutes. The city of Plymouth and a village on the mountain were evacuated, and within three years, pyroclastic flows overtook the abandoned sites.^[9] Following these eruptions, Voight served as a member of the Risk Assessment Panel that advised Montserrat's government, and co-established the Caribbean Andesite Lava Island Precision Seismo-geodetic Observatory (CALIPSO) with a team of scientists. Voight continued research at the island with Steven Sparks, a geoscientist at the University of Bristol, establishing SEA-CALIPSO, an attempt to analyze Soufrière Hills utilizing seismic waves and explosions in the ocean. Amongst other findings, this effort detected a major fault trending north−west under Montserrat's western side.^[9]

With his students, Voight has analyzed pyroclastic flows, volcanically-induced seismicity, volcanic debris avalanches, and volcanic eruption prediction. Voight also served as a consultant geotechnical engineer for dams, tunnels, and nuclear power plants, helping plan engineering projects in France, India, Ireland, Somalia, Papua New Guinea, Canada,^[5] and Turkey, as well as the United States.^[7] Voight's research interests in lava dome collapses, stratovolcanoes, monitoring of active volcanoes, and pyroclastic flows have taken him to Iceland, Columbia, Japan, the Kamchatka Peninsula, Indonesia, the West Indies, Italy, and Chile.^[25] Combining his knowledge of engineering and geological concepts, Voight developed the widely used anelastic strain recovery (ASR) method for measuring stress on deep rock.^[7] With a team of geologists, he also derived the material failure forecast method (FFM), which predicts eruption times for volcanoes based on changes in the mountain's surrounding seismic and deformation data.^[26] He currently serves as a member of the United States Geological Survey's Volcano Hazards Response Team, and has responded to potentially eruptive volcanoes in Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Chile.^[9]

Recognition and legacy

Throughout his career, Voight has received multiple accolades and citations, for his research as a professor and for his professional work as a geologist and volcanologist. In 1984, the Institution of Civil Engineers awarded him the George Stevenson Medal,^[5] recognizing one of his articles among "the best work published in [their] journals".^[27] The same year, Voight earned an award for "significant original contribution to research in rock mechanics" from the United States National Committee on Rock Mechanics. For his help monitoring the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines in 1985, he was granted a key to Legazpi, Albay, which had been threatened by Mayon's impending eruption. 1989 saw another major year of honors for Voight, as he was named a MacQuarie Research Scholar and again garnered an award from the United States National Committee on Rock Mechanics for his original findings. Voight has appeared as a distinguished lecturer several times, including at the University of Utah's College of Mining Engineering (1990), the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992), and the Association of Environmental & Engineering Geologists (1992). For his service as a professor at Penn State, Voight has been given two awards, specifically for his research. In 1991, he gained a Faculty Scholar Medal for "Outstanding Achievement in the Physical Sciences and Engineering".^[5] In 1990, he received the Wilson Research Award from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences for excellence in research.^[28] For "his research, teaching and consulting work", the Engineering Geology Division of the Geological Society of America presented him with their 2010 Distinguished Practice Award.^[25] In 2013 he received the Thorarinsson Medal of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior.^[29]

Recalling a conference which he attended where Voight appeared, Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, describes Voight as "an illustrious expert on volcano instability and landslides".^[30] Citing Voight for his Distinguished Practice Award, colleague Richard Gray names him among his "profession's brightest and productive members".^[7] When Voight published his prediction mechanism, USGS geologist Robert I. Tilling praised it for being "a significant refinement in the interpretation of monitoring data".^[10]

Major publications

In addition to many papers, Voight has authored at least 14 books since 1965, some of his co-authors including W. D. Gunther, R. T. Chase, Mary A. Voight, and George Stephens. His most recent book was published in 2012.^[31]

• Belousov, Alexander, Voight, Barry, and Belousova, Marina, 2007, Directed blasts and blast-generated pyroclastic density currents—A comparison of the Bezymianny 1956, Mount St. Helens 1980, and Soufrière Hills, Montserrat 1997 eruptions and deposits: Bulletin of Volcanology, v. 69, pp. 701–740.
• Ida, R., and B. Voight, eds. Models in Volcanology, Harry Glicken Memorial Volume. J. Vol,. Geochem. Res. 66:1–4, 1995.
• Voight, B., and D. Elsworth. Failure of volcano slopes. Geotechnique 46(4):1–40, 1997.
• Voight, B., et al. Magma flow instability and cyclic activity at Soufriere Hills Volcano, Montserrat, B. W. I. Science, 1999.
• Voight, B., et al. Remarkable cyclic ground deformation monitored in real time on Montserrat and its use in eruption forecasting. Geophys. Res. Lett. 25(18):3405–3408, 1998.
• Young, S., B. Voight, S. R. J. Sparks, et al. (co-conv.). Eruption of Soufriere Hills Volcano, Montserrat, B. W. I. Special Section, Geophy. Res. Lett. 25(18):3387–3340, and 25(19):3651–3700, 1998.

References

Sources

• Bickford, Marion E. (September 24, 2013). The Impact of the Geological Sciences on Society. Geological Society of America. ISBN 978-0-8137-2501-7. 
• Fisher, Richard V.; Heiken, Grant; Hulen, Jeffrey B. (1998). Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00249-5. 
• Glicken, Harry (1996), Rockslide-Debris Avalanche of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens Volcano, Washington (PDF) (U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 96-677), United States Geological Survey 
• Harris, Stephen L. (1988). Fire Mountains of the West: The Cascade and Mono Lake Volcanoes. Mountain Press Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-87842-220-3. 
• McGuire, Bill (June 9, 2005). Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a threatened planet. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280572-0. 
• "Newsletter of the Engineering Geology Division of the Geological Society of America" (PDF). 44 (1). Engineering Geology Division of the Geological Society of America. January 2010. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-06-17. 
• Thompson, Dick (January 2002). Volcano Cowboys: The Rocky Evolution of a Dangerous Science. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-20881-3.