Will We Ever Be Able To Forecast Volcanic Eruptions Like Weather?

So a volcano is the Earth's way, or any planet's way really, of letting off steam.

[instrumental music] There's a lot of hot stuff in the middle of the planet, to put it crudely.

I mean, there's radioactive matter that decays and melts things with its heat, and there's the heat left over from the planet's fiery formation.

All that heat's gotta go somewhere, and that generally takes place in the form of magma, which is molten rock underground, and eventually that's gotta erupt to the surface, and there's kinda two ways you do that.

You either do it in that Hawaiian oozy lava flowy kinda way, or you basically blow something up and it comes out as ash and pumice and rock and all lots of nasty things you don't want on your head, basically.

And sometimes volcanoes can transition between the two.

But yeah, volcanoes are like the exhaust ports of the planet, so it's good to know when they're gonna explode, I think.

[laughs]

So does every volcano have a magma pocket under it?

Yeah, I mean, there are some that might just have weird tendrils that come up from depth where it's not like one single body of magma is just sitting there, and there's increasing evidence that loads of volcanoes have nests of magma chambers, or they have labyrinths of magma swirling in and out.

So it's not really like that textbook image that we're all lied to about.

It's really complicated.

I mean, some even think that magma chambers aren't even one big whole cavernous thing.

It's more like a sponge where you have lots of pores in between where the liquid moves, and then, like, matrices of crystals and all wild other stuff.

But no one's ever seen a magma chamber in real life.

Everyone's just trying to interpret the data, so they are complicated, weird things.

Yeah, I can't believe we've never seen one in real life.

How far deep are they, and what's the closest we can get to seeing one?

Well, sometimes they're just a mile or two beneath the surface, which is obviously a little concerning, and sometimes they're 10, 20 miles down.

The closest we've ever got to seeing one was when [laughs] geothermal drillers in Iceland accidentally punctured a magma chamber, which disappointingly did not cause magma to just run up and squirt out of the side.

It just sort of melted the drill bit and seized it up.

But they are building a rather special laboratory there now to try and actually directly see a magma chamber in real time.

I don't know how they're gonna do that, but good luck to them.

They chose that place because that was where this was accidentally drilled into?