Haraldur Sigurdsson is professor of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. He has worked on research in the field of volcanology for over forty years, with studies on volcanoes in his native Iceland, North and South America, Caribbean, Indonesia, Italy and Africa, as well as on submarine volcanoes. He first visited Santorini (Thera) in 1975 as a member of the oceanographic expedition that studied the fallout from the Minoan eruption in the Bronze Age. His studies on the violent explosive eruptions of Krakatau in 1883 and Tambora in 1815 have strong parallels to the Thera eruption in the Bronze Age. During the 1975 Thera expedition the URI research vessel R/V Trident carried out sediment sampling of the sea floor east of Thera in order to determine the fallout pattern of air-borne volcanic ash from the great Minoan eruption. Haraldur’s and co-workers publications regarding Thera volcano are:

Sigurdsson, H., S. Carey and J. Devine, 1989: Assessment of mass, dynamics and environmental effects of the Minoan eruption of Santorini volcano. In: Thera and the Aegean World, Proceedings of the Third Thera Conference, vol. I, 81-94.

Watkins, N.D., R.S.J. Sparks, H. Sigurdsson, T.C. Huang, A. Federman, S. Carey and D. Ninkovich, l978. Volume and extent of the Minoan tephra from Santorini volcano: New evidence from deep-sea sediment cores. Nature 27l, l22-l26.

Chapter 3 in the volume: Sigurdsson, H., 1999: Melting the Earth; The evolution of Ideas about Volcanic Eruptions. Oxford University Press. 350 pp.

Guichard, F., S. Carey, M.A. Arthur, H. Sigurdsson and M. Arnold 1993: Tephra from the Minoan eruption of Santorini in sediments of the Black Sea. Nature, 363, 610-612.