The view from inside a volcano

The magma chambers at the heart of volcanoes are very deep and very hot. So naturally, some researchers want to build an observatory in one. Guests: Mike Poland, scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory; Yan Lavallée, chair of magmatic petrology and volcanology at LMU München and scientific and technical board member of the Krafla Magma Testbed; John Eichelberger, volcanologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and founding scientist of KMT For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠vox.com/members Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:07Speaker 02

  In the Caribbean, there is a beautiful island, full of lush greenery, called Bastard. It is home to tens of thousands of people and a volcano.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  A volcano called Soufriere. Actually, there's, it seems like most volcanoes in the Caribbean are named Soufriere, but this one is Soufriere de Guadeloupe.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Mike Poland studies volcanoes for the US Geological Survey. He's kind of like an encyclopedia of interesting volcano stories. But the story he's telling me today takes place in the mid-1970s, when this particular volcano started making concerning rumblings.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  So you were seeing more and more earthquakes. They were getting up to like magnitude 3s. They were being felt. And then there were these sort of steam explosions.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  And people knew that earthquakes and steam explosions like this could be a clue that a more dramatic eruption was on the way.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  There is a history of really bad eruptions in the Caribbean. For example, in 1902, there were a pair of eruptions that happened right on top of one another.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  That killed tens of thousands of people.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  These kinds of volcanoes are so deadly because they can cause massive ash flows.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  These clouds of ash that rush along the landscape at hurricane speeds, they're full of gas and bits of pulverized rock, and they're incredibly hot. So imagine getting hit by a hurricane of really, really hot wind that's loaded with rocks. And on an island where there's not a lot of room to get out of the way, they're devastating.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  So there's a healthy respect for volcanoes in the Caribbean because of those sorts of events. So 1976 comes along, there's a lot of unrest at Sufría de Guadalupe. And there's a question of what's going to happen? And if there is going to be an eruption, how impactful will it be? And what should people on the island do?

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Should they stay and hope for a small eruption? Or should they evacuate the island? And if they did evacuate, when could they come back?

• 3:15Speaker 03

  It's not quite the same as evacuating like in advance of a hurricane, where there's an event that's going to, or a wildfire, right? It happens, it goes through your area, and then you go back. Volcanic eruptions, or volcanic unrest, are sort of famous for kind of lingering on in places. There can be low-level eruptive activity that goes on for years.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  The government authorities did eventually decide to evacuate. So more than 70,000 people had to leave the island. And the situation was so dramatic that the filmmaker Werner Herzog made a documentary about it called La Sufría. He flew down to film the empty city.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  It was as spooky as a science fiction locale.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  He made his way through the streets, noting things like traffic lights signaling to no one, and animals wandering around, all in kind of classic Herzog fashion.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  This is the police station. It was entirely abandoned. It was a comfort for us, not having the law hanging around.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  And then, as Rachmaninoff music starts to swell under his narration, Herzog explains that he left the island, flying out on a helicopter.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  During the flight, we got the impression that these were the last hours of this town and the last pictures ever taken of it.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  It all feels kind of tragic, this city that's about to be lost forever. Except...

• 4:40Speaker 03

  The ensuing eruption was minor.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  If anything, the evacuation itself wound up being more of an issue than the volcano. People were away from their homes for months, kids' schooling was disrupted, and there was a lot of economic fallout, all of it unnecessary.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  But what if it had been necessary?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Like, two decades later, in the Philippines, when volcanologists predicted a big eruption, evacuated people, and the ensuing eruption was enormous, like, one of the biggest eruptions in the 20th century. That evacuation saved a lot of lives.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  So this is the problem. How do you know how big an eruption's going to be? Because you don't want to evacuate too soon, you don't want to evacuate too broad an area, or, you know, you don't want to evacuate too late, or evacuate too small an area.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  You don't want to ignore a problem, but you also don't want to be the volcanologist who cried eruption, right, and have your warnings ignored down the line.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Now, we've come a long way since the 1970s, right? Volcanologists have installed a lot more monitoring equipment on volcanoes, and they've made better equipment over time. So their forecasts have improved a lot as a result. But Mike says that, in some ways, volcanologists are still grappling with the same fundamental problem here. They're pretty good at predicting whether a volcano will erupt, but they could, even now, still be better at predicting what those eruptions will look like.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Once an eruption starts, is it going to be one that lasts a long time? Will it get to be a big eruption? Will it be a kind of a piddly eruption? That's really hard to tell.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  And to answer these important questions, to kind of take the next big leap in improving our forecasts, Mike says it's not just about continuing to improve our monitoring equipment. What we really need is better information about volcanoes themselves, and specifically about the hot molten rock that powers them.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Which is why a couple of researchers are proposing something that seems both bold and a little absurd.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  They want to build a magma observatory, basically. They want to drill into a magma chamber.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  So, literally, they want to go deep, deep into the swirling fiery heart of a volcano, a place that can be thousands of degrees, this furnace of molten minerals, and they want to build a little monitoring station right in that furnace.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  And that would give us some idea of what's going on in there.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  So, this is Unexplainable. I'm Byrd Pinkerton, and today on the show, the plan to learn more about volcanoes by drilling into the heart of one and making an observatory there.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  The first question here is just, why, right? Like, why would it help us improve our predictions if we went down into a volcano's hot little heart? To answer that question, I think it helps to understand a little bit about how we currently forecast eruptions. So Mike says, right now, researchers can make some really good guesses about what volcanoes might do in the future, based on what those volcanoes have done in the past. But that's actually kind of the issue that he has with a lot of volcano forecasting.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  A lot of the forecasting of eruptions is based on pattern recognition, right now.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Researchers can take really impressive, really precise measurements of earthquake activity and gas emissions and all kinds of other stuff, and sometimes even measure, like, millimeter movements of the earth. But at the end of the day, Mike says that a lot of it boils down to saying, like, X is happening, and when X happened before, Y happened afterwards. So maybe Y will happen again soon.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  It's not necessarily based on any special understanding of the physics of volcanic activity or that particular volcano. It's more based on, OK, we've seen this before. We've seen this movie before, and we know how it's likely to evolve over time.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Mike likes to compare this to how we forecast the weather. Because in the past, weather scientists also relied on this kind of pattern matching.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  I mean, decades ago, you sort of said, well, the pressure's dropping, and it's starting to get colder, so I think there may be a storm coming.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  But then, weather forecasting essentially went through a revolution. Scientists gathered huge amounts of data about the atmosphere. They used satellites to measure surface temperatures and circulation patterns. They collected information about clouds and wind and rain. Like, people flew directly into the eyes of hurricanes, right, to measure what was happening inside of those storms.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  And this really abundant information was then used by modelers, who could then use those details to work out the physics of what's going on.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Weather scientists still definitely use historical patterns to help them predict the future, but they've also built these really sophisticated models of the physics of the atmosphere.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  And based on that, we can now forecast with some degree of accuracy whether a hurricane will form, how intense is it going to be, where it's going to go. You know, obviously, not every forecast is perfect, and that's because our knowledge is still imperfect. But they know enough to be able to make these forecasts and even show how uncertain they are. That's incredible. That's amazing.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Sounds like you're jealous.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  I am, maybe a little. Volcanology is not there.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And the reason volcanology isn't there is not for lack of trying, right? The problem is that to really understand the physics of a volcano, you have to understand the physics of something called a magma chamber.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Picture your classic volcano, right? In my mind, I see a mountain sticking up into the sky. At the top of that mountain, maybe there's a crater, maybe even like a lake of bright, hot red lava bubbling away in that crater. And it's all very exciting, but it's also just the tip of the volcano berg. If you then descend down through the volcano, through layers and layers and miles and miles of rock, you'll find the thing that's usually depicted in like a geology textbook as the fiery red balloon underneath the pointy mountain. This is the magma chamber. It's where hot minerals from Earth's mantle have pushed up into the Earth's crust. And it's the source of the volcano, essentially. It's its heart.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  It is why hot rock and ash is bursting up through the surface. But it is also wildly complicated. Like a magma chamber can have hot liquid rock, some of it thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, but it can also have some solid material. There are hotter parts and cooler parts and different minerals melting at different heats and different gases, too, that might make pressure build up. And all these things are potentially broiling and moving around in different ways and sometimes exploding upwards in eruptions.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  So we draw them as red balloons. They are not. They're super complex, but it's a very difficult thing to represent.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  That is the challenge, though, right? And in order to do better forecasting for volcanoes, researchers need to find a way to represent these chambers better. And to do that, they need to do the volcanic equivalent of what the weather scientists did. Gather lots of data and sort out all the physics. But because magma chambers are so deep and so hot, volcanologists can't just fly into them like a hurricane, right? They've done their best to take measurements from up here at the surface, to take the equivalent of like X-rays of the Earth, for example. But that's not direct information.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  You know, we don't have the cutaway, like the glass-bottomed volcano, where you can just sort of look into and go like, oh, well, that's what's going on. Oh, OK.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  But after the break, what if you could make a glass-bottomed volcano by drilling down directly into a volcano's heart?

• 13:02Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 16:36Speaker 06

  Fueled by the magnified blast of hammer, the volcano's fury reaches the breaking point. It erupts!

• 16:44Speaker 07

  A story, or a story, well, it is a yarn of sorts.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  The story John Eichelberger is telling starts with an accident. In the 2000s, some scientists were working in collaboration with some power companies, drilling down into the rock near a volcano in Iceland, when they accidentally drilled right into a magma chamber.

• 17:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, this was a big shock to everybody.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  And you might think this would be a big, dramatic problem.

• 17:12Speaker 07

  Oh, it's gonna erupt. It's gonna destroy the whole thing.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  But instead of, like, hot rock shooting out of their hole and an explosion of fire or something, the magma basically climbed a little ways up the hole and then cooled off into a plug of dark, obsidian glass. When John heard about this and a couple of other similar accidents in other parts of the world, he thought,

• 17:36Speaker 07

  What am I going to do about it? How do I get in on this?

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Because the thing about John is, he has been studying volcanoes for a while now.

• 17:44Speaker 07

  Oh, my God. If you, if you start counting for my PhD, then it's five decades.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  And over the course of those decades, he became kind of obsessed with this question of what was happening deep down in the heart of volcanoes. He thought knowing more could help people forecast better, also maybe let people tap into volcanoes for geothermal power. But he couldn't really drill down into a magma chamber himself to investigate because people didn't know what would happen if you drilled down into a magma chamber. Until these drilling accidents. They were very good news for John.

• 18:22Speaker 07

  Yes, given my obsession, I was very excited about it.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  As John remembers it, he wound up meeting someone from one of the power companies in Iceland that was connected to the drilling. And the guy said that the power company was open to letting John come do some research in the area.

• 18:36Speaker 07

  And I thought, oh, boy. Okay. So I set about gathering my friends together from all over the world.

• 18:45Speaker 08

  And 50 or 60 of us spent best part of a week together browsing ideas as to what could we learn if we were to do this? What could we learn if we were to drill back in the magma?

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Jan Lavelle is a volcanologist at LMU Munchen. He was invited to this first gathering in 2014. And this gathering was kind of the start of a dream.

• 19:12Speaker 07

  A dream of magma dancing in my head.

• 19:15Speaker 08

  The first international magma observatory.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  The location for this dream was a volcanic spot in Iceland called Kafla.

• 19:22Speaker 08

  It's quite a bear land. It's beautiful.

• 19:24Speaker 07

  There's a lot of steam coming out of the ground.

• 19:27Speaker 08

  There's a beautiful lake that is.

• 19:32Speaker 08

  This azurite blue, it's amazing color. It's reflecting sunlight when there's sunshine there. And a pure color, it's gorgeous.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  And even more importantly, the Icelandic power company that they're working with has already gathered lots of data on this volcanic system, which means that it has like a wealth of information and also a lot of infrastructure that the team can draw on.

• 19:54Speaker 08

  So it is the right place to do this.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Well, what is this exactly? The initial plan for the magma observatory that Jan and John and their various collaborators are trying to get funded, it's pretty simple. They want to try and drill down to a magma chamber again. But this time, they want to do it on purpose.

• 20:13Speaker 08

  So how we're going to do this is first, we're going to install a drill rig at the earth's surface, and we're going to start drilling.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  As they get deeper and deeper, the ground will get hotter and hotter. So they're going to pump a lot of fluid in there to kind of cool things way down. Their drilling will create cracks in the rock ahead, and fluid will rush into those cracks, cooling things down some more. And when they drill deep enough to hit the magma chamber itself,

• 20:45Speaker 02

  the fluid will cool a little bit of that molten magmatic rock down, too.

• 20:50Speaker 08

  And it will quench it, and it will vitrify to a glass.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  So then they'll have a lump of dark black glass, like a blob of obsidian, at the edge of a molten magma chamber. And the researchers will then kind of carve into that glass while keeping it cool to make this hollow pocket, essentially. And once that glass pocket is made, they will drop a bunch of measuring devices into it. So Jan works with tools in his lab that are made of the same kinds of heavy-duty materials that we put into stuff like jet engines, stuff that can operate at a really high heat.

• 21:27Speaker 08

  At 1,000 or even 1,500 degrees Celsius.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  So they'll take tools like these, stuff that measures temperature and pressure in real time, and they will lower those into their pocket. And then they will stop cooling things down, stop pumping in cool fluid, which means that, very slowly, the heat of the surrounding molten rock will start warming the glass pocket back up again. And the glass will slowly turn back into melted magma.

• 21:57Speaker 08

  And then it will engulf all of the instruments by flowing around them.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  It'll take a while for the magma to melt completely and mix in with the magma around it so that it's its normal self. But then, hopefully, these researchers will have their observatory, their kind of glass-bottom volcano, if you'll allow for dark melted glass. And looking into that glass-bottom volcano will finally give them real-time, direct updates about what is happening down in an active magma chamber.

• 22:31Speaker 07

  To get really good scientific information, you have to be patient. And the idea here is to have an international infrastructure like we do in other fields of science, like particle accelerators, or telescope arrays, or space missions. Big science, expensive science, that can't be done by small groups.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  If they get this big science going, it could help them understand the fundamental physics of volcanoes, it could help people forecast eruptions better, it could also potentially let them explore a new source of energy, and it could maybe even lead to things they're not imagining yet.

• 23:18Speaker 08

  I don't think we can really fully conceive how it's going to change things, but I think it would be revolutionary, and there's no doubt about it.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Even Mike Boland, who isn't directly involved with this project at all, is pretty enthusiastic about its potential.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  I am excited to hear what they can come up with. You know, it's, whenever you try these things, you learn things. And often, it's not what you expect. It's maybe not what you go in there thinking you're going to learn. So, yeah, no matter what, you go into a magma chamber, you're going to learn some things.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  If you want to read more about the dream of a magma observatory, check out the website for the KRAFLA magma testbed, also known as KMT. We'll also link to it in the transcript. You can also learn more about volcano forecasting by checking out Mike Pollan's paper, "Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Lava Flows." This episode was reported and produced by me, Bert Pinkerton. It was edited by Meredith Hoddinott and Jorge Just. Meredith also runs the show. Noam Hasenfeld made the music for this episode. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Melissa Hirsch checked our facts because she's a hero and a queen.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Melissa, don't fact check that. Julia Longoria is the fact that toads don't cause warts. And I am always, always, always grateful to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. Extra thanks this week also to Matt Haney for his time. If you have thoughts about volcanoes or other cool things that we should cover, please write in to [email protected]. I mean it when I say that your emails make my day. If you want to support the show and help us keep making it, please join our membership program. That is at vox.com/members. You can also support us by leaving a nice rating or a review, or just by telling people in your life to listen.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  And before I go, I want to especially shout out the listener who wrote in to tell us that the show made them want to become a biologist someday. Because our whole team is rooting for you and any other would be scientists out there who are listening. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

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