I read Jindal's statement, and nothing seemed to indicate he didn't know there were volcanoes in the US. It was more a question of how effectively the money is spent. As someone who was funded to study volcanoes, and had 2 bosses who went on to the USGS monitoring program, my take is: most of the money for "volcano monitoring" goes to pure research, and very little gets used in any predictive capacity. The mother-and-apple-pie proposals always mention the great benefits that will be reaped by understanding volcanoes, but really that's just the game. I wrote some of those proposals, back in the day. If you really want to monitor volcanoes, put all the money into the most basic of geophysical monitoring, and that will be a small fraction of the money currently spent in the program.

To me monitoring and research and inextricably linked. The data from the monitoring lets you do the research needed to understand what's going on. That understanding helps you fine tune your monitoring effort. The monitoring effort at different volcanoes varies with risk factors. At Mt. Rainier say it's important to have a much better monitoring, magma modelling and predictive effort due to lahar potential than at one of the Aleutian islands where a few instruments are enough to tell you that you might have an eruption and some ash for planes to look out for. So with monitoring and research, one is not better than the other as I see it, it's about getting the balance right for the situation that you have.

And when the situation calls for "Energy for the Universe from the Center of a Volcano," nobody lays down the licks better than Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles ...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_tgfWBHdig[/youtube]

lcarreau wrote:And when the situation calls for "Energy for the Universe from the Center of a Volcano," nobody lays down the licks better than Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles ...

OMG ONE OF MY FAVORITE LPs OF ALL TIME! Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles Live!