Skip to main content
Blog entry

This is a picture from one of our customers / collaborators, John Stix and fellow intrepid researchers from the Earth and Planetary Sciences Deparment at McGill University in Canada. We believe this is the first time anyone has driven a live, running anallyzer up and down a smoking volcano to capture gas concentration samples.

Multi-point or continuous in situ gas sampling from mobile platforms in volatile, dangerous places like volcanoes has primarily been the province of people using flask capture. Some research observatories maintain instrumentation in fixed locations. No one, that we know of, puts the instrumention in a truck and drives it up and down the volcano, with fairly dramatic elevation changes and all the incumbent vibrations and bounciness. This type of data collection should give a much more nuanced picture of gas concentrations in and around volcanoes (in this case, Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua) and provide far greater insights into emissions rates, flow characteristics, and the impact volcanoes have on the surrounding environment and atmospheric chemistry.

Stix learned a lot about taking data in this environment and is fine-tuning his methods but he's stoked for his next research foray. And that's part of what we are always trying to do - innovate and iterate alongside our customers. We expect them to do new things with their Picarros because they've never had a world class laboratory that can ride shotgun in a pickup on a bumpy road going up and down a smoking volcano.

Oh, by the way. The Picarro is riding shotgun in the backseat, wearing a hat. We anthropomorphize our Picarro analyzers and encourage all our customers to do the same (got a pet name for your Picarro? Share it with us!).