Island turns into lab for volcanologists
LAS MANCHAS, CANARY ISLANDS » They come with eagle-eyed drones and high-precision instruments. Aided by satellites, they analyze gas emissions and the flows of molten rock. On the ground, they collect everything from the tiniest particles to “lava bombs” the size of watermelons that one of nature’s most powerful forces hurl as incandescent projectiles.
Scientists from around the world are flocking to La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, to take advantage of a volcanic eruption happening just an hour’s drive from an international airport and the safety of being able to work under the escort of military brigades. They are applying cuttingedge technologies to scrutinize a rare volcanic eruption from the land, the sea, the air — and even space.
As in the two dozen other major live eruptions across the planet, from Hawaii to Indonesia, the ultimate goal on La Palma is to use a unique window of opportunity to better understand volcanic eruptions: how they form, develop and, even more crucially for the islanders, how and when they end.
But despite recent technological and scientific leaps, the researchers can only do a lot of estimating of what happens in the underworld where magma is formed and melts any human-made equipment. The deepest that humans have been able to drill into the planet’s crust has been just over 7.6 miles, a feat that Soviet scientists achieved in 1989.
“There has been a lot of progress in the last 30 or 40 years in the understanding of geological and evolutionary processes, but it’s still difficult to know for sure what happens at 40 to 80 kilometers (25 to 50 miles) of depth,” said Pedro Hernández, an expert with the Canary Islands’ volcanology institute, Involcan.
“We are probably beginning to know the stars better than what happens under our feet,” he said.
Volcanic eruptions are a one or, at most, twice-in-ageneration event in the Canary Islands archipelago, which lies 62 miles northwest of Africa. Some of the Canary Islands are still growing due to magma accumulating underneath and, as is happening in La Palma, by forming lava peninsulas beyond the coastline.
The last eruption, a decade ago on the southern island of El Hierro, happened just off the coast, which made it more difficult for volcanologists trying to collect samples. The previous land volcano erupted in La Palma in 1971, the year when Valentin Troll, an expert in rocks with Sweden’s Uppsala University and co-author of a geology study of the archipelago, was born.
“It’s been mind-blowing, literally, to see this dynamism in action,” the geologist said. “We are learning so much about how volcanoes work.”
Still, trying to compare notes with previous eruptions involves delving into centuries-old records, some from a time when photography did not exist.
When magma started accumulating deep under La Palma’s Cumbre Vieja range, scientists were measuring the surge on the land’s surface, concentrations of quakes known as seismic swarms and other signs of an impending eruption. They weren’t able to predict the exact time of the eruption, but their assessments prompted authorities to begin the first evacuations just hours before it took place on Sept. 19.
Although one man died in November when he fell from a roof while cleaning off volcanic ash, there have been no deaths directly linked to the eruption.
Much of that is due to new technologies in volcanology: everything from drones that allow scientists to peek into a volcanic cauldron to supercomputers that run prediction algorithms.
The European Union’s Copernicus satellite program has produced highresolution imagery and mapping of the island to track quake-induced deformations, leading to near real-time tracking of lava flows and ash accumulation.