The secret to predicting a volcano's eruptions may lie in its plumbing.

New research looking at volcanoes in Iceland and the Afar region of Ethiopia — the two areas where mid-ocean ridges, where Earth's tectonic plates are moving apart, are visible at the surface of the Earth — found that the underground caverns holding a volcano's magma aren’t buried as deeply as scientists had thought. These caverns, called magma chambers, also swell, shrink and pulse every now and then, yielding possible clues about the size and timing of a volcano's next big eruption.

"The study shows that the deep magmatic plumbing of each volcanic segment, as well as the numbers of individual magma chambers and their connections, is more complicated than we expected,"said Carolina Pagli, a geologist at the University of Leeds in England. Pagli led one of two studies on spreading-center volcanoes published this month in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The majority of Earth's volcanoes are located at spreading centers, which form a 37,000-mile-long (60,000 kilometers) network, splitting the Earth into its major tectonic plates. Most of these spreading centers are underwater, which makes detailed observations very difficult. But the spreading centers exposed in Ethiopia and Iceland offer a rare glimpse into the inner plumbing of the Earth.

Mapping magma chambers and figuring out how they behave can help identify early warning signs hours — or even months — before an eruption.

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