Le Tampon, La Réunion, (February 2021) – Piton de la Fournaise (Peak of the Furnace), one of the world’s most active volcanoes, rises from La Réunion, a French department island off the coast of Madagascar. To improve safety for the island’s almost nine hundred thousand residents as well as Indian Ocean rim communities and to conduct scientific volcanology research, the Piton de La Fournaise Volcanological Observatory (OVPF) is charged with monitoring the volcano’s activity.

OVPF’s post-eruption monitoring includes quickly characterizing, within two days, the resulting large-scale spatial deformation that has just occurred. Following each eruption, which average two per year, two teams from OVPF, each equipped with a Spectra Geospatial SP85 GNSS receiver and a MobileMapper 50 data collector, are deployed to 79 established locations.

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