Pacaya is more than 2,500 metres tall and is almost constantly active.
More than 10,000 people live within a three-mile radius of the volcano, which could be extremely problematic in the event of a landslide.
Judit Gonzalez-Santana, a doctoral student in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State University, said: “If you take into consideration the last avalanche (1,000 years ago) travelled 15 miles away, anyone living in the valleys around the volcano could be at risk.”
Now, researchers have begun using satellite observations of the volcano to measure flank stability.
Volcano news: Scientists identify potential landslides in event of a major eruption (Image: GETTY)
Scientists identified flank instability at Pacaya, an active volcano in Guatemala.
Image: Kirsten Stephens/Penn State
Landslides caused by the collapse of unstable volcanoes are one of the major dangers of volcanic eruptions. A method to detect long-term movements of these mountains using satellite images could help identify previously overlooked instability at some volcanoes, according to Penn State scientists.
“Whenever there is a large volcanic eruption, there is a chance that if a flank of the volcano is unstable there could be a collapse,” said Judit Gonzalez-Santana, a doctoral student in the Department of Geosciences. “To better explore this hazard, we applied an increasingly popular and more sensitive time-series method to look at these movements, or surface deformation, over longer time periods.”