Barry Voight

Barry Voight ( ; born 1937) is an American geologist, volcanologist, author, and engineer. After earning his PhD at Columbia University, Voight worked as a professor of geology at several universities, including Pennsylvania State University, where he taught from 1964 until his retirement in 2005. He remains an emeritus professor there and still conducts research, focusing on rock mechanics, plate tectonics, disaster prevention, and geotechnical engineering.

In April 1980, Voight's publications on landslides, avalanches, and other mass movements attracted the attention of Rocky Crandell of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), who asked him to look at a growing bulge on the Mount St. Helens volcano in the state of Washington. Voight foresaw the collapse of the mountain's north flank as well as a powerful eruption. His predictions came true when St. Helens erupted in May 1980; Voight was then hired by the USGS to investigate the debris avalanche that initiated the eruption. After his work at Mount St. Helens brought him international recognition, Voight continued researching and guiding monitoring efforts at several active volcanoes throughout his career, including Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia, Mount Merapi in Indonesia, and Soufrière Hills, a volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. For his research, publications, and disaster prevention work as a volcanologist and engineer, Voight has been honored with numerous awards, appointments, and medals.

Personal life and education Born in 1937, Voight grew up in Yonkers, New York. actress Angelina Jolie is his niece, and musician James Haven is his nephew. Barry and his wife Mary Anne (née Verdisco) have two daughters, Lisa and Barbara. and his mother Barbara was a teacher and swim instructor. Voight and his brothers grew up playing golf, and Barry also developed an interest in swimming. After high school, Voight pursued a 5-year intensive dual-degree program at the University of Notre Dame, studying landslips along Lake Michigan He earned his master's degree in civil engineering from Notre Dame in 1961. Voight attributes his interest in science to his mentors at Notre Dame, professors Ray Gutschick and Erhard Winkler. After spending one year studying at Cornell University, Voight transferred to Columbia University, where he graduated with a PhD in geology in 1965, studying rock mechanics and structural geology under Fred Donath. While at Columbia, Voight was named a President's Fellow, and taught a lecture course called "Geology for Engineers".

While at Penn State, Voight had a joint affiliation with the school's Department of Mineral Engineering and taught courses in physical geology, mechanics of geological materials, and volcanology. During his career, he also lectured as a guest professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1972, working under Jacques Dozy, and served as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 1973 and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1981.

A month prior to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, a United States Geological Survey (USGS) employee working in the Vancouver office near the mountain. Crandell sought Voight's expertise in landslides, hoping Voight would opine on a growing bulge, long, which had emerged on the mountain's north face. In his reporting to Crandell and his associates, Voight said that the bulge could fail and collapse the volcano's entire north sector. He suggested they begin monitoring the rate of movement of the bulge, worried that the collapse could trigger an eruption. He also advised hiring a local surveyor to take measurements, offending several of the geologists. Shortly after, Voight left the mountain and returned to teaching classes at Penn State. Before the eruption, he had sent his full report to the USGS, summarizing his predictions, depicting the failure of the bulge and the collapse of the mountain's north side followed by a violent eruption. After a magnitude 5.1 earthquake centered directly below the north slope caused that part of the volcano to slide, Mount St. Helens erupted, causing $1.1 billion in damage and killing 57 people.

After the eruption, Voight accepted a position as a consultant for the USGS. He led the investigation into the volcano debris avalanche which had occurred during the eruption, guiding other volcanologists including Harry Glicken, who built upon Voight's preliminary research to create his report "Rockslide-Debris Avalanche of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens Volcano, Washington" (1996). Voight's work won him international renown, Although Voight already had a burgeoning interest in volcanology, the eruption at Mount St. Helens propelled him to dedicate himself to the field. His work helped reinvigorate widespread interest in landslides and other phenomena at volcanoes that potentially pose a threat to life. In January 1986, Voight visited Nevado del Ruiz responding to concerns from the Colombian government that the northeastern section of the volcano might cave in, causing another eruption. He established a monitoring network of reflectors and used laser ranging to track how the distances to these reflectors changed over time.

When one reflector indicated significant movement, and large cracks became visible from the air, Voight contemplated initiating an evacuation, but waited. By March 1986, he realized the widening cracks were caused by the creep, or gradual shifting, of one of the volcano's glaciers, rather than rock movement. which analyzed how volcanic hazard management had failed at Armero. In July 1989, he obtained a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Natural and Manmade Hazard Mitigation for his proposal to predict eruptions at Merapi. phreatic eruption, which Voight and his team failed to predict.

Although Pasto was unaffected, six scientists attending a United Nations workshop for natural disaster relief were killed.

Following these eruptions, Voight served as a member of the Risk Assessment Panel that advised Montserrat's government, and he co-established the Caribbean Andesite Lava Island Precision Seismo-geodetic Observatory (CALIPSO) with a team of international scientists. He continued research at the island with Steven Sparks, a geoscientist at the University of Bristol, establishing the SEA-CALIPSO system to analyze Soufrière Hills by using seismic waves and explosions in the ocean. Among other findings, this effort detected a major fault trending north-to-west under Montserrat's western side. He currently serves as a member of the United States Geological Survey's Volcano Hazards Response Team, and has responded to potentially eruptive volcanoes in Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Chile.

The same year, Voight earned an award for "significant original contribution to research in rock mechanics" from the United States National Committee on Rock Mechanics. For his help monitoring the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines in 1985, he was granted a key to Legazpi, Albay, which had been threatened by Mayon's impending eruption. 1989 saw another major year of honors for Voight, as he was named a MacQuarie Research Scholar and again garnered an award from the United States National Committee on Rock Mechanics for his original findings. Voight has appeared as a distinguished lecturer several times, including at the University of Utah's College of Mining Engineering (1990), the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992), and the Association of Environmental & Engineering Geologists (1992). In 1991, he gained a Faculty Scholar Medal for "Outstanding Achievement in the Physical Sciences and Engineering".

Voight received the Thorarinsson Medal of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior in 2013, granted to a "scientist of outstanding distinction who has made fundamental contributions to research in volcanology", and in 2017 he was elected as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering for "contributions to the understanding, management, and mitigation of geologic hazards."

Recalling a conference where Voight appeared, Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, described him as "an illustrious expert on volcano instability and landslides".

Citing Voight for his Distinguished Practice Award, colleague Richard Gray named him among his "profession's brightest and productive members". In addition to journal articles, Voight has written or helped write at least 21 books and monographs since 1965; his co-authors include R.S.J. Sparks, A. Neri, D. Elsworth, A. Belousov, and G. Mattioli. His most recent book, The Eruption of Soufrière Hills Volcano, Montserrat from 2000 to 2010, was published in 2014.