Professor David Pyle
David Pyle read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, specialising in Earth Sciences, and completing a PhD in volcanology. After a year at the California Institute of Technology, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer, where he stayed until in 2006 he took his post as Lecturer in Igneous Processes in the Department of Earth Sciences and Tutorial Fellow at St Anne's.
David's research is focused on understanding the factors that influence when and how volcanoes erupt. These include investigating the past histories of volcanic activity in particular regions (for example, examining what happened to volcanoes in Southern Chile when the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age), and also working on the continuing behaviour of active systems (for example, studying an ongoing episode of faulting and eruption in the Afar region of Ethiopia).
His research has found that subtle changes can influence the threshold at which volcanic eruptions begin. These include both the effects of large, but distant, earthquakes and the changes associated with the global annual water cycle and variations in Earth's ocean mass. The question of how these factors affect the internal workings of individual volcanoes is one of the challenges remaining to be solved.
