Tourism and heritage are not strangers: A study of opportunities for rural heritage museums to maximize tourist visitation

Heritage tourism is growing rapidly in popularity as peo¬ple seek to rediscover the past. One obvious group of attractions heritage tourists seek out are museums. Many museums are outside the government sector, and for these museums, tourism offers considerable scope to generate revenue to fund new displays and pay recurrent costs. This study reports on a survey of three Queensland rural heritage museums designed to discover visitors’ reactions to the communication channels used to alert them to the existence of the museums and to identify the visitors’ preferred methods of advertising. The outcome of the survey identifies the need for museum custodians to reconsider the promotional strategies employed to advertise rural museums to the drive tourist market and suggests a simple checklist of low-cost yet effective ad¬vertising methods that can be used by rural museums

Outgassing through magmatic fractures enables effusive eruption of silicic magma

Several mechanisms have been proposed to allow highly viscous silicic magma to outgas efficiently enough to erupt effusively. There is increasing evidence that challenges the classic foam-collapse model in which gas escapes through permeable bubble networks, and instead suggests that magmatic fracturing and/or accompanying localized fragmentation and welding within the conduit play an important role in outgassing. The 2011–2012 eruption at Cordón Caulle volcano, Chile, provides direct observations of the role of magmatic fractures. This eruption exhibited a months-long hybrid phase, in which rhyolitic lava extrusion was accompanied by vigorous gas-and-tephra venting through fractures in the lava dome surface. Some of these fractures were preserved as tuffisites (tephra-filled veins) in erupted lava and bombs. We integrate constraints from petrologic analyses of erupted products and video analyses of gas-and-tephra venting to construct a model for magma ascent in a conduit. The one-dimensional, two-phase, steady-state model considers outgassing through deforming permeable bubble networks, magmatic fractures, and adjacent wall rock. Simulations for a range of plausible magma ascent conditions indicate that the eruption of low-porosity lava observed at Cordón Caulle volcano occurs because of significant gas flux through fracture networks in the upper conduit. This modeling emphasizes the important role that outgassing through magmatic fractures plays in sustaining effusive or hybrid eruptions of silicic magma and in facilitating explosive-effusive transitions