Politician Asks if We Could Simply Bomb La Palma Volcano

Since the Cumbre Vieja volcano started erupting on the island of La Palma within the Canary Islands on September 19, the lava flows have destroyed greater than 2,500 buildings, compelled round 7,500 folks to evacuate, and launched a variety of lethal hazards to the world.

The lava is displaying no signal of stopping or slowing down, so one native politician has an excellent concept: What if we simply bombed the shit out of it? The president of the La Gomera Municipal Council, Casimiro Curbelo, floated the thought final week.

“Isn’t there a plane that flies and can drop… today the technology is very reliable… and boom! And send the lava in a different direction?” he said in an interview with Radio Faycán, a radio station within the Canary Islands. “Maybe it’s madness, but I get the impression from a technological point of view that it should be attempted.”

As loopy as Curbelo’s concept sounds, he’s really not the primary one to provide you with it—and it’s even been tried earlier than. Lava flows are difficult to cease: Shannon Nawotniak, a professor of geology at Idaho State University, said in a BBC interview people have had a “spectacularly poor success rate” at stopping lava. Lava usually flows by way of what are generally known as lava tubes, the place molten lava is surrounded by a tough, protecting, cooled crust. Accordingly, the thought of forcibly breaking them up with explosives just isn’t, per se, a foul one; it will break by way of that tough outer crust and expose the lava circulate to the air, cooling it down and presumably diverting the circulate to a brand new route.

It’s even been tried earlier than. In 1935, the U.S. Army dropped a cluster of bombs onto the lively Humu‘ula lava flow on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, which erupted for over a month between 1935 and 1936. The bombings have been an try to cease the lava circulate from reaching town of Hilo. The aerial bombing marketing campaign didn’t work, although the lava circulate eventually stopped naturally and spared Hilo. But the thought wasn’t conscripted to historical past. In the early Nineteen Nineties, engineers created trench utilizing greater than 15,400 kilos (7,000 kilograms) explosives to guard a small Italian city from a Mount Etna eruption.

Desperate instances typically name for determined measures, and issues have gotten fairly gnarly on La Palma just lately. Some of the Cumbre Vieja’s lava flows at the moment are more than 130 feet (40 meters) tall. Earthquakes of as much as magnitude 4.9 shook La Palma and its neighboring islands as much as 60 miles (96 kilometers) away last week. Experts say there could possibly be earthquakes of as much as magnitude 6 on the Richter scale, which might unleash a brand new wave of harm even outdoors the areas impacted by the lava flows. (Volcanoes usually produce related earthquake activity.)

Dramatic lightning tied to the volcano has additionally lit up the sky. Scientists from the Canary Islands Volcanology Institute have said that lightning sightings within the ash column have turn into extra widespread in current days. “During an explosive volcanic eruption, ash, rock, lava, and sometimes water collide, creating electrical charge in the eruption plume, and if the charge build up is high enough, lightning occurs,” Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist on the personal climate agency Vaisala (which extensively maps lightning), wrote in a 2020 weblog submit for the corporate.

Predicting when the volcano goes to cease erupting is a tough enterprise. The Canary Islands “are closely connected to thermal anomalies that go all the way to the core of the earth,” a Cornell University geochemist Esteban Gazel who has been taking samples from the volcano told the AP. “It’s like a patient. You can monitor how it evolves, but saying exactly when it will die is extremely difficult. It’s a process that is connected to so many other dimensions of the inside of the planet.”