In the early 1990s I got involved with an Archaeological problem concerning the demise of the Minoan civilisation. At that time a theory due to the Greek archaeologist Marinatos was still in vogue. His theory was based on the idea that the bronze age eruption of the island volcano Thera (Santorini) produced tsunamis which hit the north coast of Crete and wiped out coastal cities. I talked with archaeologists about this theory and this resulted in my work on the initiation of tsunamis by high speed outbursts from volcanoes. Most people are familiar with volcanic plumes of erupting volcanoes, but a much deadlier process is the pyroclastic flow which can burst without warning from a volcano as a flow of extremely hot gas, ash and rocks. When a flow like this hits a body of water it may produce giant waves called Tsunamis.

I realised that SPH could be used to investigate these problems. To get an idea of what to expect I began a series of laboratory experiments with Andrew Kos and Ray Cas. To simulate the experiments we needed to simulate the motion of water and this was done by a straightforward extension of SPH to the flow of incompressible fluids . and to multiphase flows.