The view from inside a volcano
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In the Caribbean, there is a beautiful island full of lush greenery called Bastère. It is home to tens of thousands of people and a volcano. A volcano called Soufrière. Actually, it seems like most volcanoes in the Caribbean are named Soufrière. But this one is Soufrière de Guadeloupe.

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

And people knew that earthquakes and steam explosions like this could be a clue that a more dramatic eruption was on the way. 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 that killed tens of thousands of people. These kinds of volcanoes are so deadly because they can cause massive ash flows. 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. 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 Soufriere de Guadeloupe.

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? 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? 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. 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 Soufrière. He flew down to film the empty city. It was as spooky as a science fiction locale. 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. This is a police station. It was entirely abandoned.

It was a comfort for us not having the law hanging around. And then, as Rachmaninoff music starts to swell under his narration, Herzog explains that he left the island, flying out on a helicopter. During the flight, we got the impression that these were the last hours of this town and the last pictures ever taken of it. It all feels kind of tragic, this city that's about to be lost forever. Except... The ensuing eruption was...

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. But what if it had been necessary? 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. So this is the problem. How do you know how big an eruption is 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. 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. Yeah, pretty much.

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. 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.

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.

Which is why a couple of researchers are proposing something that seems both bold and a little absurd. They want to build a magma observatory, basically. They want to drill into a magma chamber. 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. And that would give us some idea of what's going on in there.

So this is Unexplainable. I'm Bird 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. 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. A lot of the forecasting of eruptions is based on pattern recognition right now. 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. It's not necessarily based on any special understanding of the physics of volcanic activity or that particular volcano. It's more based on, okay, we've seen this before. We've seen this movie before, and we know how it's likely to evolve over time. 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. 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. 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 meteorites.

people flew directly into the eyes of hurricanes, right, to measure what was happening inside of those storms. 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. 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. 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. Sounds like you're jealous. I am, maybe a little. Volcanology is not there. And the reason volcanology isn't there is not for lack of trying, right? The problem is...

But to really understand the physics of a volcano, you have to understand the physics of something called a magma chamber. 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. 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 roiling and moving around in different ways, and sometimes exploding upwards in eruptions. So we draw them as red balloons. They are not. They're super complex. But it's a very difficult thing to represent. That is the challenge, though, right? 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. You know, we don't have the cutaway, like the glass-bottomed volcano where you can just sort of look into it and go like, oh, well, that's what's going on. Ah, okay. But after the break, what if you could make a glass-bottomed volcano by drilling down directly into a volcano's heart? Support for the show comes from NetSuite. There's a lot of things you need to keep in mind if you're running a small business.

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A story. A story. Well, it is a yarn of sorts. 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. Yeah, this was a big shock to everybody. And you might think this would be a big, dramatic problem. Oh, it's going to erupt. It's going to destroy the whole thing. 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, "What am I going to do about it? How do I get in on this?" Because the thing about John is, he has been studying volcanoes for a while now. Oh my god, if you start counting from my PhD, then it's five decades.

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. Yes, given my obsession, I was very excited about it. 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. I thought, oh boy, okay, so...

I set about gathering my friends together from all over the world. And 50 or 60 of us spend the 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? Jan Lavelie is a volcanologist at LMU München. He was invited to this first gathering in 2014.

And this gathering was kind of the start of a dream. A dream of magma dancing in my head. The first international magma observatory. The location for this dream was a volcanic spot in Iceland called Grafla. It's quite bare land. It's beautiful. There's a lot of steam coming out of the ground. There's a beautiful lake that is just azurite blue. It's amazing color and it's reflecting sunlight when there's sunshine there.

And a pure color. It's gorgeous. 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. So it is the right place to do this. 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 is

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. 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. 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, the fluid will cool a little bit of that molten magmatic rock down too. And it will quench it, and it will vitrify to a glass.

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. At 1,000 or even 1,500 degrees Celsius. 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. And then it will engulf all of the instruments by flowing around them. It'll take a while for the magma to melt completely and mix in with the magma around it so that it's 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. 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.

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. I don't think we can really fully conceive how it's going to change things, but I think it would be revolutionary. There's no doubt about it. Even Mike Boland, who isn't directly involved with this project at all,

is pretty enthusiastic about its potential. 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. ♪♪

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 Poland's paper, Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Lava Flows.

This episode was reported and produced by me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Meredith Hodnot and Jorge Just. Meredith also runs the show. Noam Hassenfeld 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. 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 unexplainable at Vox.com. 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 slash members. You can also support us by leaving a nice rating or a review or just by telling people in your life to listen.

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.