Should we get rid of erupting volcanoes?

Eyjafjallajökull, after having been erupting for a little over 5 and a half weeks, appears to be a little more quiet - in the past week, no more lava has been coming out of the crater, and the plume is a pure steam plume, a mere 2km high - no more air-traffic disrupting ash; I took the above photo on May 24th. Now of course everyone (mostly the farmers located in the area of ash fall, and of course airlines) is hoping for the eruption to be over. But unfortunately, it is impossible to tell whether this is just a little rest phase to start again with renewed vigour, or whether it is truly over... so we will just have to wait and see.


But since the eruption has been causing all the air traffic chaos, people have been toying with ideas on how to try and get rid of erupting volcanoes, and all the problems associated with them. Some of the ideas, if not practical, certainly get points for creativity - BBC summarized some of those crazy ideas, either from scientists or from the public. The ideas range from putting a lid/plug on top of it, to towing the volcano away (!??), or putting a giant "carbon nano-tube" that would send the ash straight to outer space.


To me it is interesting to see how people believe one could do something about an erupting volcano - we were all brought up believing that if there is no solution, then there is no problem - or if we can't fix the problem then we clearly aren't trying hard enough. Volcanic eruptions such as Eyjafjallajokull are an interesting case of a natural disaster with a timeframe that is somewhat vexing to humankind.


One endmember of natural disasters are earthquakes, that are something we know we can't do anything about (at least at this point in time), they occur with no warning and the damage is done within seconds. Of course there can be numerous aftershocks, going on for weeks - as it was the case for the Chile earthquake earlier this year - but the basic scenario still can be summarized as " no warning -> seconds or minutes of shaking and instantaneous destruction -> mankind has to deal immediately with the physical and moral consequences of it".


The other endmember of that timescale could for instance be something like the consequences of global warning. Here the scenario would be "decades of warning -> decades of slow destruction -> mankind may have some time to adapt to the evolving situation, even though it comes at a great cost".


In the case of earthquakes, we have learned to just deal with them, and to accept the fact that nothing can be done about their occurence - and given that on average there is one magnitude 8 earthquake per year, we are regularly reminded of the fact that these things just happen. In the case of global warning, most people can just go on living their lives as always, mostly in denial about it when it comes to everyday activities. Yet in the case of ongoing volcanic eruptions, there is a certain inexorability to the event that somehow we seem not to be able to deal with very well. They are marginally more predictable than earthquakes, although the error on the time estimates are still very large. And once they are going, they could be going till tomorrow, or for the next 10 years - which makes it difficult to get ready for them, in particular if you are a farmer in the path of the main ash fallout, or the CEO of an airline company.

But for now, Eyjafjallajokull is quiet, its neighbour Katla shows no more, no less signs of unrest than it did before the Eyja eruption, and the farmers are doing their very best to get rid of the ash on their fields to still be able to plant some grass for their winter hay stocks. The ones who are upset about it are of course all the tourists who were hoping to see the volcano erupt in their summer vacation, and the Eruption Tour companies in Iceland that spawned immediately after the beginning of the eruption. Who knows? It is probably just taking a little break, and will make itself (himself? herself? What's the gender of a volcano?) heard again.

Meanwhile, new ash-induced mayhem has taken place in Central and South America, where yesterday's eruptions of Pacaya Volcano (Guatemala) and Tungurahua Volcano (Ecuador) caused the evacuation of thousands of people living on the slopes of the volcanoes, and killing one unfortunate reporter that got too close to Pacaya. Here's a good reminder of what volcanoes really are: Tungurahua has woken up from its dormant stage in 1999, and Pacaya has already been at it since 1965; every couple of years powerful eruptions cause all sorts of problems to the local population, but of course we rarely hear about it in Europe. It does put Eyjafjallajokull's eruption into a bit of perspective...

First visit to Eyjafjallajökull

Luckily, my move to Iceland was scheduled to happen in the few days where the various airports crucial to my journey (Geneva - Frankfurt - Reykjavik) were outside the influcence area of the now famous plume from Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, and I landed within 5 minutes of the scheduled time. Four days later, I was on my way to one of the observation spots of the volcano, in the valley north of the edifice, relatively close to Þórólfsfelli where one of the webcams is located.

Already from the hills of the Western Rift Zone, just a few kilometers outside of Reykjavik, we could see the plume billowing high into the blue sky - to about 7 km, according to the information statement of the Nordic Volcanological Center. As we got closer, daylight started to get dimmer, allowing us to start seeing the glow of lava fountains at the source of the plume.

I have been fortunate to see quite a few volcanoes during the last 15 years or so - in various stages of activity and of explosivity. But this one most certainly wins the competition of the most powerful one. Actually seeing the plume developing above the crater , and the glowing volcanic bombs flying up what looked like at least one kilometer into the air, really helped to get a feel for the incredible amounts of ash discharged every minute of every hour of every day, and a better grasp of the reason why the european airspace has been encoutering so many issues. Below you can see a satellite picture of the plume, taken roughly at the same time as I was standing there watching and taking my own pictures (Picture by Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir from the University of Iceland - check out the amazing collection of
satellite pictures of the eruption on her webpage) - and at the same time, many airports in Ireland, Spain and subsequently the UK were closed. Preliminary estimates of the magma discharge (= volume of lava actually ejected out of the volcano) were about 300 m³ per second (reported by the British Geological Survey quoting scientists of the Earth Science Insitute at the University of Iceland). That's the volume of a nice size 2-storey house every second. Or the volume of the Empire State Building every hour. Of course, not all of it is carried into the plume, and it appears that a little less than half of the material is being deposited on the crater immediately. Some of the ash falls from the plume along the way, causing a lot of damage for the population and the cattle - a couple of days ago the schools were closed below the trajectory of the plume in Iceland.

How will it evolve? No one really knows. At this point, people from the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland, as well as many other people in Iceland and scientists all over the world are working like bees to try and collect as much data as possible - seismic tremors and earthquakes which can tell how the magma moves beneath the surface to the deep roots of the volcano, ground deformation (using GPS) which occurs as material is being displaced below the ground (during the course of the eruption, the ground has moved by over 6 cm in certain locations..!) , ash chemistry which is an indication of the composition of the magma erupted, chemical characteristics of rivers around the volcano, as well as satellite pictures of the plume - all of these data are put together and there is an eruption meeting every 2-3 days at the Institute of Earth Sciences to ensure people from all disciplines are talking to each other, hoping every time something changes to learn a little something about the plumbing of the volcano, the eruptive processes and the consequences thereof on people's lives.