Predicting Volcanic Eruptions Isn't Easy, Especially When Your Funding Is Cut

In Iceland, researchers hope to watch volcanoes closely enough to predict eruptions. In Sicily, the most closely watched volcano continues to be unpredictable. In Alaska, researchers are running out of the necessary funding to try.   As Alaska's Mount Pavlof continues to pump out smoke and ash (that's it belching above), one question is on volcano watchers worldwide: When's the next big one?

Pavlof is on the Aleutian Arc about 625 miles from Anchorage, and began erupting on May 13, jetting lava and sending an ash cloud 20,000 feet into the air. It looks fantastic from space.

But that plume is also causing trouble, as it's become big enough to force airlines to reroute flights around it. While it's not as severe, it brings up memories from 2010, when a huge eruption from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull twisted our tongues and grounded trans-Atlantic flights. For airlines, it was a nightmare to deal with.

Iceland’s response to Eyjafjallajokull has been to monitor their most active areas even more closely. Their new program, called FutureVolc, involves setting up monitors to watch for shifts in the ground, or bulging. Volumetric strain meters, which are large canisters of liquid, are lowered into boreholes, and allow scientists to see if the rocks shift, crushing the canister and displacing the liquid.

"Volcanoes actually scream 'I'm about to erupt'," Dr. Matthew Roberts of the Icelandic Meteorological Office told the BBC. "Before they erupt they show many measurable signs, and it's the challenge for today's volcanologists to actually gather all that information and make use of it in real time and that's exactly what FutureVolc is about."

Twenty-six organizations from across Europe, in addition to the IMO and the University of Iceland, are taking part in FutureVolc, determined not to laid low by another eruption, and also to give the people of Iceland adequate warning about the next one.

Alaskan scientists must be jealous. Iceland is a volcanic island sitting atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, with lava fields instead of a Midwest, and the 2010 eruption was enough of an inconvenience that, to the public, monitoring volcanic activity is clearly worth funding.

Meanwhile, it seems like Pavlof is going to have to get much worse before volcano monitoring gets to the top of America’s priority list. Between a shrinking federal budget and now sequestration, the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s budget is down to half of what it was in 2008. “There comes a time when you can’t do more with less,” Jeff Freymueller, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks told Nature. “We’re well into the realm of doing less with less.

In response, researchers from the UAF, hurting for lack of federal funds, have struck out on their own and will provide volcano monitoring to paying customers with a company called V-ADAPT, which stands for Volcanic-Ash Detection, Avoidance and Preparedness for Transportation.

Is a subscription service and scientists doing half as many days in the field going to be enough? In Sicily, constant monitoring hasn’t rendered the irascible Mount Etna predictable.

Mount Etna has erupted 13 times since February, sometimes shooting lava higher than the Eiffel Tower, and spewing ash as far as 31 miles away. Considered the most heavily studied volcano in the world, it also produces several gigabytes of data from magnetic field monitors, GPS altimeters and seismic sensors.

In spite of this, Etna is still a mystery. “I used to believe that we would soon be able to predict volcanic eruptions," geophysicist Rolf Schick told Der Spiegel. "Today, I'm no longer certain that we'll ever succeed.”

But perhaps Etna is just a difficult case, and Icelandic scientists shouldn’t be concerned. The trick is knowing the volcano’s inner plumbing. “We need to understand how magma is flowing inside the volcano prior to an eruption so we have equipment to detect that," Dr. Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told the BBC.

And Etna resists that. "The stream of magma doesn't move uniformly, but in spurts, vibrating as if it were in a hydraulic pump," said Schick. “That’s what makes it so unpredictable.”

Lava comes up from almost 20 miles below the surface into the reservoir just over a mile underground. The mountain has been shooting out water vapor and 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide every day. "There have been violent eruptions like this once even few thousand years, as, for example, in the year 122 B.C.," said Boris Behncke, a volcanologist who is in Italy monitoring Etna.

Like Iceland, Etna is on the cusp of two tectonic plates.  Also like Iceland, the local population lives close to the volcano, and sees its volatility, which is a tangible motivator to fund observation.

If it wasn’t so photogenic, I doubt I would even be aware that Pavlof the volcano exists, much less was erupting. It’s incredibly remote so scientists would be hard pressed to use it as a part of any “public safety” appeal. Still, it’s another reminder of the nature’s sublime power, and a reminder that we ignore it at our own peril.