Check that out man. That's the volcano eruption cloud.
In January 2022.
The planet had a near miss.
Satellite imagery picked up signs of a vast underwater eruption.
This footage was taken moments after.
The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai eruption
was so large it sent a sonic boom around the world twice
and the internet went bonkers.
It was the largest eruption of the 21st century
from a volcano over 20 kilometres wide,
sending water and ash 58 kilometres into the atmosphere.
But it might not stay the largest because around the world
there are at least 12 even bigger volcanoes with the potential to blow.
Super volcanoes.
So I decided to go digging.
It's a dead certain that we'll have something very large
in the next few centuries for sure.
A super volcanic eruption would lead to planetary wide devastation.
But luckily for us, the brains at NASA may have come up with a solution.
I was on the Committee on Planetary Defence
looking at defending the Earth from asteroids and comet impacts.
It became evident to me that the asteroid impact problem,
although a serious problem, an even greater problem,
is the supervolcano problem.
It's not good news.
But before talking to Brian,
I first wanted to find out exactly what this supervolcano problem actually is.
How bad would one of these eruptions be?
And more importantly,
what are the chances of one happening in the first place?
So I headed off to meet scientist Dr. Laura Mani
at a place where all they do is study things that can kill us.
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
We mainly focus on large magnitude eruptions,
or you might have popularly
heard of them as super eruptions or super volcanic eruptions
or super volcanoes.
These kind of super volcanic eruptions are VEI 8 and VEI 9.
Okay, so this confused me slightly, so let me try and explain.
Volcanoes are measured on something called the Volcanic Explosivity Index.
The scale goes from 1 to 9 and it's logarithmic.
With each jump it increases tenfold.
So two is ten times bigger than one, and three is ten times bigger than two
and so on.
And by bigger, what they mean is how much material is being blown up and
and released from the magma chamber.
The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcano was at a level five,
but there are at least 12 super volcanoes around the world
capable of eruptions a thousand times larger than that.
The reason that we're interested in these larger type volcanic eruptions
are because they can have severe global consequences.
So eruptions of this size could potentially loft enough ash and gas up
into our upper atmosphere that can cause global climatic cooling.
And this is something that we've seen throughout history with the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia,
that led to the Year Without a Summer in 1816.
And what we saw was the Thames in London froze over in summer and we lost major
and we lost major swathes of crops in the northern hemisphere.
And this led to a huge food shortage and price spikes.
Volcanic eruptions, if this large, would affect nearly everybody.
How real is the possibility that one of these large scale eruptions could occur?
New studies are starting to suggest it could be as much as 1 in 6% per century.
That's a recurrence interval of about every 600 years.
It's actually really frequent.
Compared to other threats we see like asteroids and comets,
how likely are these large scale eruptions?
The threat posed by these types of impacts are 1000 times less likely than
those posed by large magnitude eruptions.
But yet we're doing very little in terms of preparing or thinking about mitigation of that risk.
How underprepared do you think we are?
So in January 2022, we had a very large,
the highest intensity eruption ever recorded on modern instruments.
Oh, oh.
But I would describe this as our near miss.
Had this gone slightly differently, had the eruption lasted longer,
we could be having a very different conversation right now.
With these large scale eruptions, is it a case of when rather than if?
It's a dead certain that we'll have something very large in the next few centuries, for sure.
I have to admit, I came away from that conversation terrified, but even more
eager to hear from former NASA's engineer, Brian Wilcox, about a potential plan
to prevent a super volcanic eruption.
So what is it you actually proposed?
Well, I propose that we study the problem to see if there was a way,
to, you know an an engineering solution that was practical
within something that humans might be able to actually do in the in the relatively near future
to prevent a super volcano from erupting.
And we chose Yellowstone as an example.
Yellowstone is one of the largest volcanoes on the planet
and a volcano that some believe is due an eruption.
So trying to stop it erupt might not be the worst idea in the world.
Brian's plan was to cool down the volcano,
reducing the pressure in the magma chamber, and therefore also the chances of an eruption.
So I guess the logical next question is,
how on Earth do you go about cooling down a super volcano?
Well, basically, the concept is to drill 200 pairs of holes around the perimeter
of the magma chamber.
And so you'd be far enough outside that the rock would not be fractured
and you wouldn't risk, you know, having triggering a an eruption by by possibly
opening a pathway to the magma chamber.
So you would drill down and then circulate cold water into half of the
of the tubes, would carry cold water down, and then the other half would carry the hot water up
As soon as you got to the point where you were pulling heat out
at the same rate that it was coming in, you would effectively
have reduced the likelihood of an eruption by a tremendous amount.
And then eventually, after 50,000 years, you would have cooled the magma chamber off completely
50,000 years.
He says it like it was nothing.
However, despite taking 50,000 years to fully cool down, Brian explained how
with every degree that is released, the probability of an eruption reduces,
so results would be seen instantly.
It also got me thinking that if there's that much heat being released,
couldn't we harness this for our own purposes?
Wouldn't power companies be all over this?
So if there is that financial incentive for geothermal energy companies to actually do this,
I guess why hasn't it been done?
So the problem is that the cheapest thing to do is drill right on top of the
magma chamber and get to the hot rock with a shorter drilling path as possIble
That would affect Old Faithful and all the other geysers and natural features there.
So that that is abhorrent just from a kind of an environmental point of view.
But also it it does risk setting off the volcano.
There is absolutely some risk that you could trigger an eruption
if you if you cooled it too fast, you might force the gas out of solution
and cause an eruption.
The exact thing you were trying to prevent would have in fact been caused by your actions.
So. So we don't want to do that.
No, Brian, we definitely don't.
It's not only as an eruption coming, most likely, we're also grossly underprepared.
Brilliant.
And if we want to stop it completely, it will take 50,000 years.
Just as I thought my investigation was over, I heard back from a scientist
who may have the answer to protect us against volcanic eruptions.
Remember how earlier Brian said that if you drill directly into a volcano,
you risk triggering an eruption?
Well it turns out there's a power company in Iceland that's done exactly that
So this is what happens when you drill into a live magma chamber by accident
This was a serendipitous encounter, so it was not planned for.
In fact, with some of the best geophysics that we have in the world,
we did not know that the magma reservoir, the magma would be encountered at 2.1 kilometres
Luckily for them, it didn't trigger an eruption.
What they did then is they decided not to go further, but then they decided to produce energy.
So for them, they managed to produce about 50 megawatt of energy
which is about ten times the average well in Iceland,
which is a lot of energy.
More excitingly, scientists believe that this window into a live magma chamber
can help us forecast and even predict eruptions, allowing us to better prepare
and protect ourselves.
Right. Instantaneously.
The minute all of us have heard about that, we thought that's our way in.
All right.
Because if anyone said, oh, we would like to get to drilling the magma reservoir.
Anyone would say, no, there's probably too much danger.
It is truly transformative.
Eventually, if we can actually understand what happened to the magma in situ
we might be also able to predict volcanoes.
And that is quite a big word.
We don't predict volcanoes.
We don't know what's going to happen.
Is the ultimate goal to have setups like this one
in different places around the world so that we can monitor different types of lava
and different types of volcanic activity?
Ultimately, what we what we learn there.
Essentially, which is how to drill into magma sample, magma instrument, magma
and manipulate magma needs to be utilised elsewhere down the line.
That's one of the goals.
But we need to learn to do this safely in one place
before we can simply bring that technology elsewhere.
Before delving into this, I had no idea how great an issue these super volcanic eruptions are
And I can't say it isn't worrying that no one denies that one is coming.
It is, however, reassuring to know that there are scientists out there
actively looking for solutions.
Maybe not to stop an eruption.
Not unless you want to wait 50,000 years, but to help understand them and
the risks they impose.
I think it's probably the uncertainty that stops people taking it too seriously
At least with an asteroid impact, you can calculate exactly
when it's going to hit and then take some action.
But it's clear that more needs to be done.
But hopefully by making people aware,
it might shed some light on this potentially existential risk.