Cosmic Queries – Volcanoes

Is the super volcano under Yellowstone going to erupt? What’s the difference between lava and magma? Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and volcanologist Janine Krippner, PhD, answer fan-submitted questions about volcanoes.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. This is a Cosmic Queries edition in the Coroniverse as we continue to have our guests join us from wherever they are in the universe. But first, we got my co-host Chuck Nice.

• 0:35Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening? I'm actually having breakfast, Neil.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, very nice. More than I care to know about your work.

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  I know. I know. I know you don't care about my nutrition.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're tweeting at ChuckNiceComic. Always good to follow you there.

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so today's Cosmic Queries is on a topic we have yet to really jump into. Ha, ha, ha. We're talking about volcanoes.

• 1:02Chuck Nice?

  Ah, I see what you did there.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see what I did there. Isn't that clever of me? Okay, no, none of us have any such expertise, so we combed Earth to find... There are a few of them out there. I think they're called volcanologists. And we found one who works with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. And welcome, Janine Krippner.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Thank you very much for having me here. First of all, please don't go jumping into volcanoes. I cannot recommend that.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Try not to.

• 1:34Chuck Nice?

  But Janine, how else would we appease the gods?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  That is an important question. Clearly, for 2020, we have not been appeasing the gods very well. So I'll get back to you on that.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a volcanologist, which has to also mean that you're fundamentally a geologist. Is that correct?

• 1:53Speaker 02

  There are different types of volcanologists, so gas, physics. But yes, I am a geology-based volcanologist, so I look at a lot of rocks.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot of rocks. And the Smithsonian Global Volcanoes Program, like, what is that?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  So it's this really neat program where we're basically recording and keeping track of the world's volcanic eruptions.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm glad somebody's doing that. That's good. Good. Okay.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for letting us in on this fact that somebody's taking care of business. Okay.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, there are volcano observatories around the world. They do the day-to-day monitoring and making sure, we're trying to make sure the communities are safe, but we collate all of that data so that we have this wealth of knowledge about volcanoes so we can look back and study them and look for any patterns or have a better understanding of what volcanoes do.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how many volcanoes are being actively monitored at this moment?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Oh, actively monitored, I don't know, but do you guys know how many are actively erupting today?

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 2:52Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  What's your guess?

• 2:54Chuck Nice?

  Uh, I'm, I'm gonna say too many. That's my guess. That's where I'm.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Too many.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  Too many.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Oh, volcanoes.

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  That's where I'm going.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd say 150.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Forty-four ongoing eruptions, but there are over 1,400 volcanoes that we consider to be potentially active, so that means they've erupted within the last 10,000 years. So in the Holocene, and that's, that's a baby for a volcano that's not.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Holocene is, is that what we're now calling our, our time, the time of civilization?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Uh, I've been on the scene, the fringe of the debate on that.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Um, but Holocene is the last 10,000 to 12,000 years.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's, that's when humans have had agriculture and when we've been sort of doing our thing, creating civilization, right?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  We base it, um, we use that age because in the northern hemisphere, that's when a lot of the ice sheets came down and actually removed a lot of the recent, before that, records of volcanic activity. So from 10,000 to 12,000 years onwards, we have a much better record of what volcanoes had actually done.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I see. So the Ice Age wiped your slate clean?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  A little bit.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. Interesting.

• 4:08Chuck Nice?

  That's good. So now where, where do you stand on the Anthropocene?

• 4:13Chuck Nice?

  I'm just curious. I'm just curious.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're trying to pick a fight.

• 4:17Chuck Nice?

  That's why I asked the question.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, step away from the microphone. Step away from the mic.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  As their spokesperson today, they would ask us to stop polluting the planet, but they don't care about that.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, that's a whole other show, Chuck, talking about the Anthropocene. Yeah, yeah. So with volcanoes, so I came with the number 150 because I think there's active ones and then there's, sure, but then there are ones that like could blow at any moment. Was that closer to what my number would be, maybe?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  So the ones that could start an eruption any time would be that 1,400-plus volcanoes. So while they might not be showing any signs of erupting today or tomorrow, even next year, that can change very quickly. So there are four, we have to prioritize somehow which volcanoes we're gonna put our resources and our monitoring into. So that's a good start, is looking at, okay, which ones have erupted recently, which ones have young, magnetic systems underneath them that might start any time soon.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So magnetic means just molten rock. Magnetic, that's like the verb, or no, the adjective.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like if you have a lava lamp above the surface, it's a lava lamp. If you put it below the surface, it's a magma lamp. So magma below, lava above. That's the only difference.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, interesting. So magma that's hit the surface, it has a new name, even though it's the same stuff?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it does change because now it's the atmospheric pressure, so it starts to crystallize and cool down, and it releases a lot more gas very quickly. So there are changes, but it's the same stuff.

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'd never thought about that. Okay. You wouldn't speak of magma rivers flowing down a volcano, those are lava rivers, that moments ago were magma coming up out of the caldera?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  And do you, do you sell magma hats? Because I've been trying to...

• 6:11Chuck Nice?

  I just want one of those magma hats. I love them so much.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Might have to make them black, like the rock, once it's cooled down, instead of red.

• 6:22Chuck Nice?

  You had me at black, Janine.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I wanted to make fun of the fact that you had two different words, but in my world, we have three different words for the same thing. So, there's an asteroid moving through space. If it's visible as it descends through the atmosphere, then it's a meteor. And then, after it hits the ground and you pick it up, it's a meteorite.

• 6:44Chuck Nice?

  Meteorite.

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, same damn thing.

• 6:46Chuck Nice?

  And it's all the same thing.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same damn thing, yeah.

• 6:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, they're very complicated, these astrophysicists.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's start with questions. This must have been a very fertile topic, because who doesn't think about volcanoes in our lives?

• 7:01Chuck Nice?

  Without a doubt.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  You should, every day.

• 7:04Chuck Nice?

  So, you know what we normally do? We go out to our various incarnations on the internet and we ask people to send in their inquiries. We always start with a Patreon patron, because they give us money. And, quite frankly, we just, we love that transaction.

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we need a more, a less crass way to communicate this information.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's why I love it so much. Anyway, here we go. So let's start with Christopher Zappel on Patreon. And he asks, "Are there any new developments with the supervolcano under Yellowstone?" And I will add to Christopher's question as an addendum. What is the supervolcano under Yellowstone?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  I should have placed a bet that this would be the first question. I knew it was coming. So, supervolcano is actually a word I don't like. It's a word that means a volcano that can produce these largest style of eruptions. What we call, we have a VEI, or Volcano Explosivity Index, which goes from smaller eruptions to the biggest of the big. So, this has been coined a supereruption, the biggest style of eruption. And a supervolcano is a volcano that can produce a supereruption. Yellowstone has produced two of these in its entire history. So, while it may never do one again, and at the moment, there's no signs that it even has enough magma to do that any time soon, it's just a word that says that it's capable.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Because it has in the past of producing these very large eruptions. As far as new developments go, people are always trying to learn more about this volcano, basically getting more understanding of the subsurface of the geothermal system, which is not really related to the subsurface. And the Yellowstone Volcan Observatory, which is part USGS, part universities, part other organizations.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So USGS, United States Geological Survey.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yes, that is correct. Yeah, but it's not just them. It's a group of organizations that are monitoring this volcano and constantly looking at the geology to understand what style of eruptions have happened before and therefore what it might do in the future.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, so how, how, when, when was the last eruption?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Um, the last eruption, I think Yellowstone, the last eruption was about 70,000 years ago, and that was just a lava flow. Um, in fact, the last 50 eruptions Yellowstone, most of them have just been lava flows.

• 9:32Chuck Nice?

  In other words, it's just the potential for the eruption, it's, I mean, it's not, that's it? Just it could? I mean, that's like.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  It has.

• 9:42Chuck Nice?

  It has and therefore it could.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Janine, just, just admit it, say, we have no idea.

• 9:48Chuck Nice?

  Uh, yeah, because I was going to say, that's not a really, it's just not a really good like descriptor, because it's like me saying I'm a super dad. I never met my kids, I don't play child support, but I could.

• 9:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He could.

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He could do it.

• 10:03Chuck Nice?

  I could do it.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  It's not a good name. I agree really completely. It just means it has in the past. Uh, most of the eruptions are much, much smaller, but it's become this, it's like the adult version of the monster under the bed at this point.

• 10:17Chuck Nice?

  Got you. All right. Okay, let's move on.

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question.

• 10:20Chuck Nice?

  Let's go to Christopher Fowler. Dr. Tyson and Dr. Krippner in regards to volcanic emissions and climate change.

• 10:30Chuck Nice?

  Does volcanic activity release more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than human activity? Now, you know, climate obfuscators often cite volcanic activity as one of the main contributors to greenhouse gases on Earth. So...

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Janine, where do volcanoes fit in the equation? In the greenhouse equation?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  So looking at carbon dioxide alone, which as we know is a very large culprit. Humans release through fossil fuels and our activities forty to a hundred times more than all volcanoes. So under the ocean and on land. There's a huge program, the Deep Carbon Observatory, that's been actually looking into this. And no, we are releasing so much more than volcanoes.

• 11:16Chuck Nice?

  So volcanoes are not the problem. They shouldn't even be part of the conversation. Because they're gonna do what they're gonna do anyway, right?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  They are. They are. They helped us get our atmosphere in the beginning. And they're a very important part of the carbon, natural carbon cycle and our atmosphere and all these nutrients. But as far as what we're seeing now is climate change, or global warming, or whatever you wanna call it, they are not the culprit we are.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me invert the question. So if you could find a way to tap a volcano, releasing some of the gas pressures so that it never blows, and maybe use the energy from that tapping process to drive the power needs of a city, that might otherwise be leveled under lava slide. You're saying that's not good for the greater balance of the Earth's ecosystem? Because Earth needs some rate of volcanoes to sustain its balance? Is that a true statement?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah, I think so. I mean, not that we can't, we can't stop eruptions. That's something we cannot do. We are so tiny on the scale of these enormous, enormous systems. But they're a hugely important part of life on this planet, just like for life, for soils, for the atmosphere, for nutrients. So no, we shouldn't be stopping them. That's just what our planet does that is part of us living here. When it happens, when people are involved, of course, that's heartbreaking and devastating. But it is something that we have to live with.

• 12:45Chuck Nice?

  I just love the fact that Neil deGrasse Tyson turned into a Bond villain just then.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  He did, right? He's killed the volcanoes.

• 12:56Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, be careful what you wish for, right? If you get rid of all the volcanoes, something else happens down the line.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  2020, please stop saying stuff like that.

• 13:05Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, great. One more question before we go to break.

• 13:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right.

• 13:12Chuck Nice?

  I love this. This is Karen Nederlin from Facebook. And Karen says, hi, this question is from Jackson, who is six years old. Jackson would like to know, why do volcanoes explode? Ooh.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. So, we actually don't have time to get to Jackson's question right now. But when we return, we will find out why volcanoes blow in the first place on StarTalk.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk, we're back. Cosmic Queries, the volcano edition of Cosmic Queries. I got Chuck Nice, as always. Chuck?

• 14:12Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we have our volcano expert. They do exist in this world. Janine Krippner. Janine, works for Smithsonian. And if you heard our first segment, you caught a little bit of an accent in her. And you hail from originally where, Janine?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  New Zealand. And when I'm in New Zealand, my accent is much stronger, I promise.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, thanks for tamping it down for us, so we can understand your English.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I visited New Zealand a couple of years ago. It's a beautiful place, and I would return in a heartbeat. And, of course, I visited Hobbiton.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the whole family went. My son didn't, he wanted to move there. He just wanted to live in Hobbiton.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  I don't blame him. That's actually just sort of up the road from where I live. It's a beautiful place to live in.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. Very cool. So, Chuck, we left off with a question from a six-year-old kid named Jackson. And what was that question?

• 15:09Chuck Nice?

  That's right. And Jackson wanted to know, why do volcanoes explode?

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back to basics. Janine, what do you have for us?

• 15:18Speaker 02

  That's a really great question. So, once we get magma high enough, down way deep, deep down below, it's magma is rising towards the surface because it's less dense than the rock around it. So if you pour oil into water, the oil rises because it's less dense. Same thing. Once you get it closer to the surface, that magma has a lot of gas in it. Very, very gassy stuff, a whole lot of different kinds of gas.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck is gassy all the time, I've known, I've noticed.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  I hope you're okay with that.

• 15:47Chuck Nice?

  Well, I eat up. It's because I eat a lot of vegetables, that's all.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Oh, good, it's healthy. I'm just glad we're on Zoom right now and on the same room.

• 16:01Chuck Nice?

  Thanks for playing along there, Janine.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go on.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  So volcanoes can be just as dangerous, if not more. Um, once you get them closer to the surface, there's less pressure because there's less rock on top of the magma. Everything's being pulled down because of gravity. So, so if you think of a bottle of soda, when you get it straight out of the store, you can't see the gas. You know there's gas in it, but that gas is under pressure. It's inside the liquid, it's in solution. Once you take the cap off, that's releasing the pressure and that gas can start to come out. If you shake it up and take the cap off, that's essentially what an explosive volcanic eruption is. You have this gas coming out so quickly that it's violently ripping apart the fluid, or in this case, the magma or the rock.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's why it's not just a single pop. It's not just a single amount of pressure trying to pop a lid. It's, once that does pop, all these gases now want to continue coming out.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It can be a bit of what we think can happen is it can be a wave that goes down that conduit of the magma. Once you have a more of an open system, so it's already made its way to the surface, you can have more discreet eruptions or explosions. We call those volcanian. Or if you have runny magma, you can get trembolian eruptions. Um, but yeah, if you have the magma coming up, hasn't erupted yet, it's essentially like shaking up a bottle of Coke and taking the lid off.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've classified types of eruptions?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so volcanion is where you have these volcanic ash plumes, and volcanic ash is not smoke. It is pulverized volcanic rock and gases. So that's when you have an ash plume that comes out and then it detaches eventually. And then you range up to your very large eruptions, which we call plenion, which is from the Vesuvius 79 AD eruption, but named after Pliny the Elder, who was there. And scaling it back to the other end, when we have runia magmas, we have Strombolion eruptions, we have Hawaiian eruptions, which is what we saw in Hawaii when that was still erupting.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna guess that.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  Oh, good guess.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Hawaiian eruptions, yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  We do have plenty of other types of eruptions too, but those are the main ones.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright, cool. So we tell Jackson, it's like, open up a bottle of soda.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Outside, please.

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Outside, after you shake it.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  After you shake it.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's popping a cap on a... Alright Chuck, give me some more.

• 18:25Chuck Nice?

  It's an excellent, excellent, yeah, excellent definition, very, very easily to understand. Here we go, this is...

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before we get to our next question, Janine, when I visited New Zealand not too long ago, just a couple of years ago, I visited Christchurch and they were still recovering from a major earthquake that had occurred there. And I'm just wondering, does proximity to geologic activity enhance people's interest to want to study it?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Well, I always loved volcanoes. I'm pretty sure I was born that way, I don't remember when I started, but I'm the only person that I know from my hometown who's a volcanologist. So while I'm sure it does in some ways, we have an extremely active geologic country in New Zealand, we're actually on a major plate boundary, but the plate boundary changes, it's a subduction zone in North Island, and that's more of a, sort of, it's moving, it's a mountain building zone in the South Island, and then there's a weird transition zone in the middle, and then in North Island are also drifting apart, so it's a very complicated region. We have the potential for a lot of different eruption centers, as well as earthquakes and tsunamis and landslides and all of that.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're all related, I mean, the moving plates, the existence of volcanoes, tsunamis, they're all, it's all a family of earth getting pissed off.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, big happy family.

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, if you wanted to be a volcanologist from very early on, you still have your eyebrows. So it seems to me you would lose those every time you leaned into a volcano to look in.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Oh, these are painted on.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  I've only nearly lost eyebrows or, yeah, I'm here once. But no, I haven't leaned over a crater looking into lava yet. So I'll let you know the eyebrow status after that.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha. I want a full report.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, what else you have?

• 20:21Chuck Nice?

  That is pretty good, actually. That kind of, it's a perfect segue into the Jizil Attics from Instagram. His question, or her question, not sure, says, hey Neil, big fan here. And hey, Janine, everybody seems to be asking about the volcanoes themselves. But I'm more interested in the equipment. What ways are there to analyze volcanoes? And how far can we reach into a volcano? Thanks. Love StarTalk. And I'll just say thank you to his last statement because it was a compliment. But I don't need to actually say it, but thanks.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Withholding compliments from you.

• 21:02Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I'm withholding compliments from myself, you know.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yourself too. Yeah, so Janine, are you in full moon suit when you go, you know, go into calderas? What's your standard equipment?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  So going into calderas, so this, I should probably say the difference between a crater and a caldera. So going into a crater, which I've done, it did not have lava in it. Most of them don't have lava in it. Whereas a caldera, you mentioned you've been to Yellowstone. So most, all of that area within the park is the caldera. It's just so big you can't see it. But if you are sampling lava, you can have that space suit looking thing, which is basically to protect you from the heat if you have to be there long enough. But if you run up, grab a sample of lava, run away again, there was some great footage of people doing that with the 2018 Kilauea eruption. You don't need that, so you just need to be quick. And our technology.

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I noticed that I visited Vesuvius in Italy and that thing, I don't know when it last erupted, if not Pompeii, but I didn't see any lava, but it was hot. It was, it was hot. I went down there to get a closer picture. I said, I can't get any closer. And nothing was glowing, nothing was flowing. So I felt like the really inadequate stuff, like I would never be a volcanologist.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  No, probably not. You're not, you're not tough enough.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Sorry. I have been in a lava tube that was so hot, my eyeballs were drying out. That's the hottest I've been near. And that was two-year-old lava. So it was mostly cool and solidified at that point. But no, they can get very dangerously hot. So floor is lava, not a good game.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you do have a special equipment. Do you, do you have like, do you stuff to rappel down the side of a wall? That sort of stuff, like mountain climbing things?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, depending on the type of fieldwork you're doing. So there's a huge range in fieldwork, whether you're collecting rock samples, whether you're collecting gas, whether you're mapping everything that's around there, whether you're looking at temperature, whether you're, there are so many different things to do on a volcano and each one of them is their own specialty.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It seems to me, everything you just said can be done with drones and robots.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  No, no, you cannot replace us with robots.

• 23:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay, now wait a minute. Janine, Janine, you, you, you gotta qualify that. I mean, that's, that's like me saying, no, a robot cannot tell jokes, you know, like.

• 23:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want the robot to tell jokes.

• 23:30Chuck Nice?

  Right. I don't want the robot to tell jokes, but robots can tell jokes. So why, why could you not, why could you not replace you with a robot?

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I got one. What college did the robot go to?

• 23:39Chuck Nice?

  What college did the robot go to?

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Solid State University.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  That could also be geology, jerk.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  A bad one.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  So there are a lot of things that we need to see in the field for ourselves. So when we're going out there, we're basically looking at everything around us to try and understand what this volcano has done before. So if you have a drone and it takes even high-resolution photographs, or even if it gets samples, which would be very time-consuming, we do use drones when it's dangerous. There are absolutely good uses for drones. But there's so much more that we can do as humans with all of the experience that we have, knowing what to look at when you have this huge area, even when it's crater, craters are really, really big. You know, you said you looked into Vesuvius. That's, you know, they get much, much bigger than that and we are tiny. If you look at photos of people on craters. So there are more, um,

• 24:32Speaker 02

  there's much more analytical thinking that we can do with our experience instead of sitting in a drone saying, "Look at that, go look at that, get that sample." And things like collecting gas, you need to get it at the vent in a lot of cases. And you can get samples using drones higher up, but by then you have the gases are diffusing. And so drones are absolutely useful, but it's still very important that we get in the field as well.

• 24:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, sounds to me like Janine wants to keep her job.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I do. I really like my field.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  You're welcome to come and tell jokes.

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  Sounds good, sounds good. All right. Um, let us move on to, uh, I just like the name. This is, uh, Do Russell, okay? And Do Russell says from Instagram, "Can a mountain ever form into a volcano?"

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of volcanoes are mountains.

• 25:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Um, and if you have a mountain area that is a volcano, you can grow new cones, which some people might call a new volcano. If you're looking at mountain building ranges, often those are made of things like older granite or the areas that aren't really volcanically active. That might be more difficult to get a volcano to form there because the magma still make its way through the subsurface and everything's under pressure down there. So it's going to find the easiest way to the surface. So, yes, it absolutely could. And it really depends on the easiest way that the magma can get to the surface in that area.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. The magma is opportunistic is what you're saying. Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, it's already come all this way, like hundred, tens of hundreds of kilometers towards the surface.

• 26:19Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yeah. So it's basically, but when it gets to that point, it's like, I can't do no more. I just, I just can't. So I got you.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  If you look at all the granite in the world, that's failed eruptions technically. That's granite is magma reservoirs that froze, that stopped, that didn't erupt and slowly crystallized by the surface. So if you look at granitic mountain ranges, all of that is magma that never managed to make its streams as an eruption.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is Mount Rushmore, what's Mount Rushmore made of?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  I don't actually know. Sorry.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 26:53Chuck Nice?

  I think Mount Rushmore is made of American exceptionalism. That's right.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lost dreams. All right, let's get one more before the break.

• 27:10Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. This is, um, this is Diego Herrera from Instagram. He says, greetings from Colombia. Uh, how does the temperature?

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That what he says?

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  That's what he said. He said it just like that.

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how he said it.

• 27:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he said, greetings from Colombia. Anyway, he says, how does the temperature distribution of flowing lava change as it comes out of the erupting volcanoes? Specifically, how long does it take for the lava to solidify? So...

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jeanine, I've always wondered that because you see the lava come out and it looks like it's hardening in situ, right? For the part that's, but then it breaks and keeps going. So, uh, what, what's going on there as this thing is flowing but hardening at the same time?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's a really good question. Um, so first of all, starting out in Celsius, because again, sorry, from New Zealand, magma or lava at the very beginning coming out, the more sticky, more explosive style of um, lava is we call rhyolites, those are around 800 degrees-ish. And then we go all the way...

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  800 degrees Celsius?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Celsius.

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like a million degrees Fahrenheit.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Basically. Compared to us.

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, hang on.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  I'm glad I have you here.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we're gonna take a, I gotta take a quick break. We'll come back to learn more about the temperature of the lava that comes out of volcanoes when StarTalk returns.

• 28:50Chuck Nice?

  We'd like to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patron, Joel Jericho. Joel is a prolific creator of cosmic art and has been an avid supporter of StarTalk for years, and we thank him for his patronage. And if you would like your very own Patreon shout out, go to patreon.com/starTalkRadio and support us.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk, we're back. Cosmic Queries, the volcano edition. So we're learning about what happens to lava, magma becoming lava. Is it freezing? Is it flowing? What's it doing? And tell me that temperature that it is, that temperature it takes to liquefy rock. What temperature is that?

• 29:43Speaker 02

  So it depends on the rock. It depends on the composition of the rock. Your lower temperature compositions like bright light, around 800 degrees-ish, it will take a few hundred. We're looking at our basaltic lava, like a kilowater, 1,000 to 1,200 degrees Celsius. So extremely hot. So when you have those lava flows, or across the entire range, all of it can form lava flows. When you come out, when it comes out of the surface, the crust is cooling very, very quickly. That's when it turns to black or gray of some kind very quickly. If you had a really thin lava flow, it will cool a lot faster. It can still take, I don't know, I don't actually know, I'm gonna guess days to weeks if it's a thinner lava flow of a few meters. You can get lava flows that are tens of meters, and those

• 30:25Speaker 02

  can take months to years. So it really depends on how much lava you have, the thickness of the lava, and how much of it is coming out. But it can take a very, very long time.

• 30:36Chuck Nice?

  It's amazing. Wow. Well, so this is cool then, because K Futch asked this, it's a perfect tie-in. If lava moves so slowly, why is it so destructive? I mean, you know, I guess, you know, get out of the way is probably not, not the way to handle it.

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the cartoon, I never understood the cartoons where there's a ball rolling down the hill, and they're just running away from the ball rather than just stepping to the side.

• 31:04Chuck Nice?

  Stepping to the side.

• 31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Never understood that.

• 31:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  That is very good Hesse's advice. Stay away from the hill.

• 31:11Chuck Nice?

  But you might, is that because of these temperatures? Is that really the big? I mean, aside from the fact that you basically have slow moving rock that's going to consume whatever's in its path. But is it the temperature primarily that makes it so destructive and so dangerous?

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Some of it is pretty quick. We saw that with the Fisher AIDS killer way 2018 event. That was very rapidly moving lava. But even with the very small, slow moving ones, you're going to usually outwalk lava, but it will bulldoze everything in its path. So if you have a town in the way, it's going to go through everything. But with the fast moving lavers, it can destroy everything and create, can create fires. It can have a lot of very dangerous gases coming off it. And it's also extremely hot. So there are a lot of hazards that are around lava flows.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about pyroclastic flow.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Oh, goodie. Yeah, I will.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  So when you're talking about pyroclastic flows, lava flows are very slow. Pyroclastic flows are essentially these exploding rapid avalanches of solid rock and very hot gas that race down the volcano or away from the bend very high speeds. You cannot outrun them and they will destroy everything in their path. So they are like the nightmares of volcanoes, these things.

• 32:25Chuck Nice?

  So is that like in the, in the movies? When you see the big cloud that goes down the side of the volcano burst? That's the pyroclastic flow?

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Yes, like Dante's Peak, they actually did a really good pyroclastic flow on Dante's Peak. So they're incredibly dangerous.

• 32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that'll kill you too, even though it's not lava, it's, it's very hot and that'll kill you too.

• 32:46Chuck Nice?

  So when you say very hot, what's the temperature we're talking about? Am I going to get like burned alive? I mean, how exactly am I going to die? Am I going to be covered and encased in, in ash? Am I going to burn up and all my flesh is going to peel off? Or am I going to breathe in and choke? Am I going to choke to death? What's going to happen?

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Janine, how will Chuck die?

• 33:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and I'm not talking about anybody else, Janine. I'm just talking about me.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Um, you can, we can have a longer conversation about this later if you'd like, but specifically with pyroclastic flows, the temperature is extremely dangerous. Um, so if you do survive, you're looking at intense third degree burns over much of your body, especially anything that's exposed. Um, you're looking at lung damage, especially if you're not wearing any kind of proper gas mask. So the damage to the lungs and the esophagus can be, um, very dangerous as well. That can kill you. Um, and you also have a lot of rocks, um, unless you have a very gassy, um, gas rich, low rock content pyroclastic flow, which we call a search. If you have a very, um, rocky kind of pyroclastic flow with huge amount of solid rocks, they can be quite big too. These

• 33:53Speaker 02

  rocks can be the size of a car, then the impact is very dangerous as well. So every part of these things is dangerous.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck will die 12 ways?

• 34:02Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, I'm just dying every way that I just asked.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, you did.

• 34:06Chuck Nice?

  Outside, out, the outside, in.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:08Chuck Nice?

  I'm dying on every single level. Okay, all right. Good to know. Good to know.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  We'll be doing a very efficient job.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. What more do you have, Chuck?

• 34:17Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Um, we kind of got to this, but, um, I think we can get into it maybe a little deeper because it's a great question from Whoopsie Doodle on Twitter. And Whoopsie Doodle says, "Hi, Dr. Tyson and, uh, Janine. I would like to ask, what role does volcanoes play in our ecosystem? And what do they tell us about the Earth?" We got into the ecosystem a little bit, but what, what are we learning about us and this planet from volcanoes?

• 34:48Speaker 02

  There's a lot volcanoes can teach us. Um, like we can, but what, as magma's coming up from very deep, especially hotspot volcanoes, which where we have mantle plumes coming up. So that's magma coming up, or at least hot rock. Coming up from very, very deep below, it can grab chunks of that rock and bring it up to the surface. We can actually learn about the insides of our own planet that way. And looking

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without having to dig, without having to dig.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  So it's much more efficient. Um, they also tell us about how our atmosphere formed. So looking at how our planet actually evolved, um, looking at areas like, um, geothermal areas can tell us how life evolved on this planet and how like things like extremophiles, how they actually managed to survive in these areas. So there's a lot we can learn about our planet, how it's evolved through time, but also how we have evolved through time.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. I like that. I think we also learn from metals that come out of volcanoes that harden in with their magnetic domains aligned to Earth's magnetic field. It tells us that Earth's magnetic field has flipped. That was, I think, the earliest evidence, uh, the flipping of Earth's magnetic field over the, um, over the millennia.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that can even help us understand when things erupted. So we can line those up with different polarities and understand the ages of eruption deposits. You need me.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, she really wants to stay employed. That's what it sounds like.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's loving, loving her job.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, what else, Chuck?

• 36:25Chuck Nice?

  I love it. All right. This is Angry Scientist, um, at Air Edition of Life. Okay, he says, is that red hot glow or brightness because of photons? And does the magma and lava create their own photons? So it's, it's light that we see coming from it. Uh, would that be, is that the same light?

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could take this one, Janine, if, if you.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  You're drawing, yeah.

• 36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Oh, I'll let you answer a volcanic question on your own shirt.

• 36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, is the answer. No, it's very simple. As you... Everything, even at room temperature, is emitting infrared light. But your eyes are not sensitive to that, so when you turn out all the lights, you can't see anything. But you take out an infrared camera and it can see which things are slightly warmer than others. If you keep raising the temperature, okay, they become more and more visible to the infrared camera. Eventually, the glowing object no longer only emits infrared, it'll begin to emit red light. And this is what happens if you have an electric stove. If you put it on low, you don't see it if you turn out the lights. Put it a little higher, it begins to glow red. And the temperature at which things glow red, that's up around the 1000 degrees Celsius that Janine was talking about.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you want to raise the temperature some more, it'll glow white-hot. And I don't think magma gets to white-hot. Does it, Janine?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  We get yellows.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get some yellows, okay. Yeah, and so in transitioning to white-hot, you go through a yellow-hot phase. And then the hottest of all hots is glowing blue-hot. And... but apparently you're melting these rocks at red-hot, so we're good to go there.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can get burning gases that come out blue.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's great. And then for a different reason. It's not because they're thermally glowing blue. It's because they're emitting blue light specifically.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But yeah, they're photons. They're actual photons. Being given... and it's no different from the photons of an electric stove. That's on high.

• 38:25Chuck Nice?

  Sweet!

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Oh, I rate you a 10 out of 10 for that. Volcano answer.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, thank you. Thank you.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The honorary vulcanologist.

• 38:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:39Chuck Nice?

  This is Irene Polly, Plug-in Polly, actually, from Facebook. She says, "Greetings, doctors." Here is what... that kind of left me out.

• 38:54Chuck Nice?

  Here is one question for you guys. How many dormant volcanoes with potential to cause, now here's the qualifier, mass devastation are there here on Earth? So, you know, that excludes a lot.

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the definition, Ginny, what's the definition of dormant?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Dormant, I would say is something that hasn't erupted recently. But really, I don't, we don't really have like a, this is what a dormant is.

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, then what does recently mean to you? Is it 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years?

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Um, well, we call a volcano actively erupting if something hasn't, generally, there are exceptions to this, but generally if it hasn't erupted within three months. So after that three month mark is when we go, okay, it can be considered not actively erupting now. But you can still have active systems. So we have a few crossover terms there. But I think the important thing there is how devastating are we talking about? So I see a lot of questions about can we wipe out life on Earth? No. Um, but devastating can be extremely devastating with a much smaller eruption if you have a city on the flank of the volcano.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like Pompeii, for example.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Like Pompeii, exactly. And there are some cities living in volcanoes, like Canli Flegre, right next to Pompeii. So, but if you're talking about like impacting a large area, I don't know how many we have. Um, so we could look at how many we know that have erupted, those large solid eruptions. I don't know the number either. But that doesn't say that volcanoes that we know now that haven't done that in the past might not do that in the future. So there have been some volcanoes that people didn't even really know were volcanoes before they produced extremely large eruptions. And Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 was a kind of example of that, was the locals didn't really see it as a volcano. It was just like a low lying hill. And then it had the second largest eruption of the last century.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  So, good question, don't know the answer.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, during Pinatubo, I had observing time allocated for me completing my PhD thesis in Chile, in the Andes Mountains, and Pinatubo's ash...

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crossing the Pacific Ocean interfered with my observations.

• 41:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Through the telescope.

• 41:12Chuck Nice?

  Sorry about that.

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The transmissivity of the air of this starlight that's been coming from the center of the galaxy for 30,000 years, and it's got to slam into Pinatubo Ashed. Pissed me off.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  F you, Pinatubo.

• 41:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Janine's fault.

• 41:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was totally in charge of that effect being.

• 41:34Chuck Nice?

  That's so funny. Well, there you go, Irene. By the way, Irene is coming from Helsinki, Finland, just wanted you to know. And she also gave me a friendly little troll by saying, Chuck, my name is pronounced Irene. So there you go.

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Irene, helping you out, Chuck.

• 41:54Chuck Nice?

  No, no, she's mocking me, Neil. She's mocking me. Her name is Irene.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, she's mocking you.

• 42:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, she's totally mocking me, man.

• 42:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 42:06Chuck Nice?

  That happened a lot. What's that? That happened a lot.

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Chuck is still learning how to read.

• 42:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, listen, I think as a person who has suffered tremendous head trauma all my life, that I do a fantastic job

• 42:23Chuck Nice?

  reading these names and questions, okay? You've done great. I'm proud of you. Okay.

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We might have time, I think, just one more question, Chuck.

• 42:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you have?

• 42:35Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go, here we go, here we go. This is Hussein, that ain't right.

• 42:46Chuck Nice?

  Oh, Hussein says from Twitter, if this ever happened, or has this ever happened? And if it does, how much are we prepared for a super eruption that would cause global darkness for months? First of all, is that possible? That's not here, but one, is that possible? Two, would there be any contingency plans for something like that?

• 43:17Speaker 02

  So as far as a volcanic eruption, there's a lot of misunderstandings about that. So Yellowstone is usually one people refer to as saying that would destroy the entire United States, but with the recent very large ones we've seen, where I am in D.C., we get about a centimeter or less of volcanic ash. So this wouldn't cause darkness around the world. That's not what blocks out the solar radiation, that's the gases. And as you pointed out, those can reduce visibility, but not cause darkness. As far as how prepared we are, that's a complicated question, because in volcanology, what we do is we learn as much about volcanoes as we can to understand what they've done, and therefore what they might do and where they might do it.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  We also put a lot of effort into volcanic monitoring using technology and building experience to understand when volcanoes start giving us signals that, hey, I might be doing something soon.

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because you're not useful to us unless you can make an accurate prediction.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  You need us, but we don't do accurate predictions.

• 44:18Chuck Nice?

  You need us, but we're not useful at all.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  We are very useful, excuse me.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  We give forecasts, so just like the weather, they're not going to say like it's going to rain over your house at 3:00 P.M. on Friday.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'd be nice if they could, yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Come on, meteorologists are my friends, be nice. So we say like we might have an eruption of this style or this big within this amount of time, which is incredibly important and this saves lives. Now, as far as is society ready, that's not a volcanology question. That's a political question, that's a community question, and you can look at some of the big disasters that we've had recently, even the pandemic, and say, with all the knowledge that we have, have we been prepared?

• 45:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so let me go out with this slightly nuanced version of that question. If you say this could blow any minute between now and 10 years from now.

• 45:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, okay, that's not very precise, but suppose 10 years go by and it doesn't blow. Do you lose credibility to people who are trying to make business decisions on statements that you make?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  That's a big problem. And generally, if you're going to have unrest that's that long, we're gonna, the longer time goes, the more information we're getting. We're getting more information, the more we're monitoring it, so we're gonna understand more what might happen. But you absolutely have volcanoes that are, magma is actually moving towards the surface and it slows down and it stops, and then it moves again and then it stops, and this can go on for weeks or months. So it's really important for us, for people, for us to communicate and have people understand the uncertainty. You know, the magma could be racing towards the surface and if it keeps going the way it is, it could produce a very large eruption, but that can slow down, it can stop, and not all of that magma can erupt. So it's a constantly evolving system.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So people need to know that, so they can work along with you when you make your best guess prediction, based on the data.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm not gonna say guess.

• 46:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, your best estimate is forecast, fine, thank you.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Yes, and it saves a lot of lives doing that. Knowing when people need to evacuate, you know, that's, we don't want people evacuating and not living in their homes for weeks or months of the year, that's horrible. We want to help people, not harm them. But getting them out of the way in time, you know, not getting them out of the way might kill them. So no, it's a very difficult area of helping communities is when do you evacuate? When do you tell people, like, this might happen? And we are very, you know, we tell people everything that we know as soon as we know it, as, and we get more information, that updates constantly, just like this pandemic. Our information has been changing and our estimates of what might happen has been changing the more data that we get, and that's with any scientific field.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the public, of course, wants a level of certainty that rarely the scientist can ascend to.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 47:11Speaker 02

  And sometimes we can. Sometimes we can say, this is probably gonna erupt in the next day or the next hours, and it does. There's a lot of different things, like how well we know that particular volcano, they own, have, all have their own personality, how well we've been monitoring it to understand its background level of activity, so what's it normally doing when it's not erupting. And the more we do that, the more we can understand when things are really ramping up or when they're changing.

• 47:36Chuck Nice?

  Well, based on everything that you just said, irrespective of how accurate your predictions may be, I hope to God that there are no volcanoes in Florida.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  I can predict that there's probably not gonna be any volcanoes in Florida.

• 47:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's a good thing then.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. There is a, there is a movie about a volcano in Florida, but I don't recommend that either.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, right on. All right, we gotta actually end it there. Janine, give me one last words of wisdom in one sentence that we can take with us and gives us hope. That doesn't start with "you need me."

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Oh, damn.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Volcanoes are incredibly beautiful, amazing, and important part of life on this planet. So it's up to us to learn how to live with them and how to keep safe when they decide to do what they're gonna do.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beautiful.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  That's lovely.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love that. Excellent.

• 48:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Janine Krippner, it's great to have you back on StarTalk and for this very important topic. And maybe we can tap you again for some more volcanic wisdom and contribute to the show. Chuck, always good to have you.

• 48:51Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, bidding you to keep looking up.