Volcano Eruption

2002 was a tough year for the people who live along the shores of Lake Kivu in the [Democratic:aromatic] Republic of the Congo. It started off with a bang, when the Nyiragongo volcano erupted in January. And it tailed off with a shudder, when a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck the region in October. Both events devastated local communities - and their close timing struck some scientists as suspicious."We were wondering if there could be a link - so, a causality - between those two [major:minor] geological events."Christelle Wauthier, a geologist at Pennsylvania State University.From studying radar images of the ground taken before and after the January eruption, [Wauthier:Fauthier] knew that lava didn't just spew out of the volcano. It also wedged itself into cracks in the crust, forming what [geologists:researchers] call a dike."So you can think of it as like a blade-shaped type of magma intrusion, [moving:shifting] from depth toward the surface.