San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cataclysm draws researchers from around globe to island
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 hurls 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 cutting-edge 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 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 Hernandez of the Canary Islands’ volcanology institute, Involcan.
“We are probably beginning to know the stars better than what happens under our feet,” he said.
The previous land volcano eruption in La Palma was 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.
The European Union’s Copernicus satellite program has produced highresolution imagery of the island to track quakeinduced deformations, leading to near real-time tracking of lava flows and ash accumulation. At sea, Spanish research vessels are studying the impact the eruption is having on the marine ecosystem as lava flows extend beyond the coast.