Volcanoes – Nature’s architects
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00:00:10:05 - 00:00:16:00
Abigail Acton
This is CORDIScovery.
00:00:16:02 - 00:00:41:24
Abigail Acton
Hello. Welcome to this episode of CORDIScovery With me, Abigail Acton. Let's talk volcanoes. The underwater explosion of Tonga on the 14th of January sent a shockwave traveling faster than a thousand kilometers an hour, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Almost as fast as the speed of sound. Sonic booms from the eruption world across the Pacific, including in Fiji and Vanuatu, and as far as Alaska, more than 9000 kilometers away. In La Palma
00:00:42:00 - 00:01:04:18
Abigail Acton
The volcano that erupted over Christmas has spewed lava that swallowed over 1000 homes and continues to hold temperatures of more than 500 degrees Celsius in some parts. Once the lava cools, a process that could take months, it might be easier in some cases to build on top of it rather than breaking it up and removing it, says Inez Galindo, a geologist who's heading the Canary Islands unit of Spain's Geological and Mining Institute.
00:01:04:20 - 00:01:24:01
Abigail Acton
But however destructive. Throughout history, volcanoes have provided nutrients to create some of the world's most fertile soils, allowing the civilizations that cultivated them to thrive. So what can the latest research into what have been called Earth's architects tell us about the lead up to an eruption? Can we trace the mechanisms by mapping the crystals that appear in lava?
00:01:24:06 - 00:01:54:07
Abigail Acton
And can the organisms living in some of the world's most inhospitable parts help us tackle climate change by converting methane? We ask three guests whose projects have been supported by the EU Horizon 2020 program. Are here to share the results. A very warm hello to Stephan Kolzenburg assistant professor at the University of Buffalo, New York. Stephan is interested in understanding the physical processes in volcanology and geo material science through a combination of experimentation and fieldwork.
00:01:54:09 - 00:02:16:11
Abigail Acton
He is the principal investigator of the DYNAVOLC Project. Welcome, Stephan. Jane Scarrow is senior lecturer at the University of Granada in Spain. Her research focuses on processes in magmatic reservoirs beneath active volcanoes. She was involved in the VESPER project looking at eruptive styles, pre eruptive, evolution and risk. And she is involved in the response to the La Palma eruption.
00:02:16:13 - 00:02:38:14
Abigail Acton
Welcome, Jane. Huub Op den Camp professor in microbiology of acidic volcanic systems at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, who is interested in the eco physiology of microorganisms in relation to carbon, nitrogen and sulfur cycles in volcanic, marine and freshwater ecosystems. He was the principal investigator of the VOLCANO Project. Huub. Hello.
00:02:38:19 - 00:02:39:15
Huub Op den Camp
Hello, Abigail.
00:02:39:19 - 00:02:57:22
Abigail Acton
Wonderful. Well, I'm very glad to have you all here. So let's get started. Stephan DYNAVOLC wanted to map the lead up to volcanic eruptions, looking at the changes of the viscosity of magma and the impact that that has on what are known as transition zones. Can you tell us what transition zones are and your findings regarding the behavior of the magma?
00:02:58:02 - 00:03:04:06
Abigail Acton
And if we think of the recent submarine eruption of Tonga, how does that change? If the eruption is submarine.
00:03:04:08 - 00:03:30:09
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yes Abigail. So on the way through the crust, magma finds itself away from its original starts. So it's getting out of equilibrium and it's no longer happy in the state that it was initially in. So on the way to the surface, it finds itself in a lower pressure environment and a lower temperature environment. And these changes in pressure and temperature really introduce two critical transition zones in the texture.
00:03:30:09 - 00:03:59:23
Stephan Kolzenburg
And with that, the flow behavior, the first one being magmatic gases are being exposed and with that the magma turns into a foamy liquid. If you want, similar to when you open a can of soda pop. And that foaming and depressurization really changes the formation behavior in that it becomes easier for the magma to flow. And similar to if you imagine a rigid piece of plastic turning into a more soft sponge, it's way easier to define that softer sponge.
00:04:00:00 - 00:04:25:20
Stephan Kolzenburg
And with the increase in exhaust gases, it also drops the density of the material, forcing it towards the surface more intensely because we have a higher density contrast Now as it comes towards the surface where it's cooler, the magma also changes its textural state and that it goes from being a liquid more to being a solid. So it crystallizes and that's very much like freezing of that liquid into a solid block of ice.
00:04:25:20 - 00:04:52:17
Stephan Kolzenburg
If you want to draw the comparison to water. And so that really defines the point where magnets are no longer able to move. Now, the Tonga eruption was kind of a very peculiar event in that during this rise process, the magma is driven by the magnetic volatiles that supply the pressure to really drive that eruption. But in addition, there was water present.
00:04:52:19 - 00:05:15:23
Stephan Kolzenburg
And if water interacts with with a hot liquid, then that turns into steam and that causes an expansion of up to 70 times the volume. And it's very similar in a way where you wouldn't want to extinguish a burning oil fire in your kitchen with water because that steam expansion now disperses the droplets all over the place and you get fire throughout your whole kitchen.
00:05:16:00 - 00:05:30:02
Stephan Kolzenburg
So in a way, adding that water to to draw the thermal energy out of the magma is like supercharging your volcanic eruption. So you get Magmatic power. Plus the steam explosion power. And that just makes it a lot more intense.
00:05:30:04 - 00:05:53:23
Abigail Acton
Yeah. And the figures that we were seeing, which were really astonishing. So in the case of a volcano that we think of as a land volcano, I would say normal, but that's simply because I'm not an expert in volcanoes, but a land volcano, let's call it. And I understand that it can sometimes be quite challenging. It sounds counterintuitive, but I understand it sometimes can be quite challenging to really work out where the lava is coming from, either lots of small fissures.
00:05:54:00 - 00:06:02:18
Abigail Acton
And I guess that underlines the importance of on the ground monitoring. Can you tell us something about the challenges of monitoring on the ground and identifying exactly where the lava is coming from?
00:06:02:24 - 00:06:28:22
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah, So often the places or the regions of origin where the magma comes from, that is something that's reasonably well understood. So we're often looking at plate boundaries, tectonic plate boundaries, where we have increased heat, flexible time flux in the crust and then weak spots where the magma could rise. But when or why, exactly, A certain batch of magma is starting the journey from the storage zone to the surface.
00:06:28:24 - 00:06:54:14
Stephan Kolzenburg
That's really something that's very poorly understood and something we try to chart in the tone of our project. So it's really trying to find out when the magma goes from being locked in place to able to move to the surface. Now where exactly it would come out, that's something that's really hard to pinpoint. And most of the I would say that's because we don't really know much about we can't really feel or sense the magma good enough in the crust.
00:06:54:16 - 00:07:19:20
Stephan Kolzenburg
And so what we would need to see is much better geophysical monitoring and characterization of magma that's in the crust. There's a really interesting project of starting at CASA, the Casa Magma Observatory, where people have initially accidentally drilled into the magma chamber, and now they're trying to evolve that into a continuous magma observatory for tracking changes in the chamber to time.
00:07:19:22 - 00:07:41:04
Abigail Acton
It sounds like a highly risky accident. I guess that the drill into a magnet chamber sounds low. Okay, Quite dramatic. I believe also that it's it's sometimes problematic to do on the ground fieldwork in some of these areas because maybe some parts of the world don't have access to the kind of instruments and equipment that are needed to monitor and so on.
00:07:41:06 - 00:07:57:12
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah, that is correct. I think the good examples in 2021 where the eruption of Johan Gongol Volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo versus the eruption at La Palma. And so while La Palma is very well instrument instrumentalized.
00:07:57:14 - 00:07:59:22
Abigail Acton
Yeah, there's a lot of instruments at La Palma Yeah.
00:08:00:02 - 00:08:21:16
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So while there are a lot of instruments monitoring at La Palma, it was still unclear where exactly the magma would come out. Similarly as the Congo volcano, which is much, much more poorly instrumentalized, the general tectonic structure was known, but the exact location of the fissure is almost impossible to pinpoint.
00:08:21:18 - 00:08:31:24
Abigail Acton
And I guess that is that partly why it's so important to try and replicate this in the or at least analyze it in the lab? Is that is that what draws you back to the laboratory as opposed to being in the field all the time?
00:08:32:01 - 00:09:02:13
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So the goal is really that understanding processes from the field. We take them to the laboratory and we try to figure out how exactly do they work, because once we know the characteristics of these geo materials, so these magmas and we know a little bit more from the geophysical monitoring side of things, we can try and piece things together and really find out what is this sub volcanic system the magma storage zone has to look like and how could we find out whether or not magma is on the move.
00:09:02:15 - 00:09:10:19
Abigail Acton
And to do that in a laboratory, what what do you actually do in the lab? How do you replicate anything like this? I mean, the heats are so the temperatures are so extreme and so on.
00:09:10:19 - 00:09:39:18
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So it's technically really challenging to recreate this in the lab. But the there are two components that we want to recreate, really. It's the changes in pressure and the changes in temperature. Now, the changes in temperature are reasonably easy approached using high temperature furnaces. So for a lot of this we just build custom devices that are able to house the magma melted and then measure the flow properties either by twisting it or by squeezing it.
00:09:39:23 - 00:10:10:21
Stephan Kolzenburg
But the changes in pressure are extremely challenging to get at. So high pressure, high temperature experimentation is probably one of the most challenging topics in experimental petrology and volcanology. So what we're trying to do there is then take two little tricks where we take rocks out of the field that may still have some volatiles exalting in them and then take them back to the lab, heat them up, and that causes sort of a chemical depressurization and we can make rocks foam in the laboratory.
00:10:10:23 - 00:10:20:20
Stephan Kolzenburg
And so that way we can look at the changes in viscosity as bubbles grow, even though we're not necessarily working with different pressures.
00:10:20:22 - 00:10:36:08
Abigail Acton
I read a little bit in the background research I did in your project, the notion of of some insights. I found this very, very exciting, some insights into volcanoes or tectonic structures on other planets. How does that work? Tell me a little bit more about that.
00:10:36:10 - 00:10:59:08
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah, so a lot of the viscosity data, the real object data that we derive from these experiments can help us on Earth to model how fast and how far the lava flow might make it. But it also has implications on the the geometry of these features. And for most of planetary exploration, what we have, the data that we have is really just surface data.
00:10:59:08 - 00:11:26:13
Stephan Kolzenburg
And so we can get optical images. Sometimes we get sort of 3D models of planets, and if there are volcanic features that are identified, their morphology is often used to deduce the composition. So if you think of Hawaiian basaltic lava flows, they have low viscosity. There are sort of these thin sheets, whereas and the sites in the Andes, they have sort of intermediate viscosities and are much higher, much thicker and a little bit more narrow.
00:11:26:15 - 00:12:00:04
Stephan Kolzenburg
And then lava domes such as what grew in Mount St Helens in 2004 to 2008. Those are of higher viscosity and create more like piles of lava. And so that helps us on Earth to tie that to sort of the silica content. And that can also be applied to other planets. One thing that one has to be careful of this, that translating these changes in the in the surface structure from Earth to other planets has to keep in mind that the atmosphere in other planets is very different.
00:12:00:04 - 00:12:13:14
Stephan Kolzenburg
For example, Venus has an atmosphere that's 5 to 600 degrees hot, and it's made of very thick and dense CO2. So it has very different dynamics for the depressurization and for the cooling of these kind of features.
00:12:13:20 - 00:12:20:21
Abigail Acton
Yeah, Yeah, of course. Really very interesting. Does anyone have any questions that they would like to ask, Stefan? Yes. Huub.
00:12:20:23 - 00:12:34:11
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah. I have a question on which temperatures are we are we talking about if we go from magma below the finally, let's say, a mass of stone that the after cooling down.
00:12:34:12 - 00:12:53:01
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. That's a it's a good question. So the hottest magma that we know on earth they came out early in the Earth's history near about 1500 degrees centigrade. But currently active systems are running at the sort of the highest temperatures near 1200 degrees centigrade and below.
00:12:53:03 - 00:13:13:23
Huub Op den Camp
Okay. And if you look the yeah, you want to depict the world, the the fashion erupts. In fact, is there any possible involvement of water at this deeper layers or is that more or less excluded since you're talking about this enormous expansion, which also could help to break such a fushion.
00:13:14:04 - 00:13:41:17
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So the Tonga eruption was a beautiful example of the sweet spot between when magma can actually water can flash into steam when driven by magma and where it could not happen. So there have been recent eruptions in the Tonga arc that were slightly deeper in the water level. So they have more pressure underneath. And that sort of kept the magmatic volatiles in the melt and they did not have sufficient power to break through the surface.
00:13:41:19 - 00:14:00:06
Stephan Kolzenburg
And if you are too shallow, then a lot of that water is flushed into steam and you're transitioning back to sort of a dry volcanic eruption. But if you are in the sweet spot where you have sufficient magma supply and sufficient water supply at the same time, that's when you can really go big and supercharge like what recently happened.
00:14:02:03 - 00:14:21:07
Jane Scarrow
Something that I was I'm well, we're interested in is the transitions between explosive diffusive eruptions, sometimes even within the same event. And so what can your results sort of tell us about that?
00:14:21:09 - 00:14:48:15
Stephan Kolzenburg
So, yeah, magnets and silicate melts are really interesting in the way that depending on how fast they they deform, they can either flow or they can break. And so that really is a result of the timescale of relaxation of the silicate melt. If you've ever played with Silly Putty, you can tear it slowly and it will flow and if you rip it fast then it'll snap and magnets act in a very, very similar way.
00:14:48:17 - 00:14:56:23
Stephan Kolzenburg
And so the key part is trying to understand how fast magma can come through the surface and whether or not that exceeds this relaxation timescale.
00:14:57:00 - 00:15:20:23
Abigail Acton
Okay, Super. Okay. Thank you very much, Stephan Excellent. That was that was very interesting. Jane, I'm going to turn to you now, VESPER Your project used the crystals carried by erupted magma to get a clearer idea of magma storage conditions and channels underground. The idea being that a better understanding of past events could perhaps help us predict future volcanic eruptions. Was there one mineral in particular that you were interested in and why?
00:15:21:00 - 00:15:42:19
Jane Scarrow
Yes, the mineral that we're really interested in is aircon. And this is because of its chemical and physical properties. It's a tiny, tiny and you can in silicate mineral usually has dimensions of around 100 microns or a 10th of a millimeter and can compose maybe less than 1% of most volcanic rocks.
00:15:42:21 - 00:16:20:08
Jane Scarrow
But it's super useful because in addition to the zirconia that takes into its structure, it also takes in uranium. So over time, with radioactive decay, this uranium converts to thorium and lead. And we can measure the ratios of those two elements, and that can help us that can permit us to calculate the time since the zircon and by association when the magma crystallized, it also incorporates other elements in very low trace concentrations such as titanium, which we can use to determine the temperature of the magma when zircon was crystallizing.
00:16:20:10 - 00:16:46:24
Jane Scarrow
And this is important because temperature is a critical control and viscosity and as we've heard, how that relates to magma behavior and the trace elements that we find we analyze in zircon can give us information about the magma source. And so these these tiny crystals really packed with information.
00:16:47:01 - 00:17:16:21
Abigail Acton
Yeah, that sounds it sounds amazing. Sounds almost like a real snapshot of of what happened at that moment. That's that's great. And so which volcanoes did you study and what did you find when you were looking at the at the characteristics of Mineral Zircon in that situation?
00:17:16:23 - 00:17:42:07
Jane Scarrow
Well, in the Vesper project, we were focused on volcanoes, on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic and also Super Hills on Montserrat in the Caribbean. And Montserrat was studying Zircon in deposits from the last event of the recent activity that ran from 1995 to 2010. And what we found was that in quite small fist size pieces of volcanic rock, we were detecting zircons that are crystallized over up to 250,000 years. So this tells us that the lava that erupted contains minerals from this magmatic reservoir over a long period of time, and this can permit us to consider the physical properties in the magma reservoir beneath the volcano.
00:17:42:09 - 00:18:15:15
Abigail Acton
So it would be something like a melt mineral marsh that before the eruption, a amalgamated together, mixing all these different zircons that are crystallized over the period of time that the small melt pockets that came together and then erupted. And this is significant because if we can look at from the composition of the zircon or the age of the zircon, the distribution of the melt, that can tell us something about potential volume of future eruptions.
00:18:15:17 - 00:18:56:06
Jane Scarrow
And what was particularly interesting when we were dating these cones in these relatively small samples from the event was that we obtained ages that not had not been detected in volcanic rocks at the surface. So this is telling us that we can have magma below the surface that doesn't necessarily erupt. And in a context of volcano monitoring, if we have geophysical signals such as seismic images that melt below the region, then that doesn't mean necessarily that there's an imminent eruption and so the aim of this type of study really is to look how volcanoes behaved in the past.
00:18:56:06 - 00:19:20:05
Jane Scarrow
And this can give us information about what they might do in the future. And that can guide decisions made related to communities living with volcanoes to make them less vulnerable and more resilient. So that's, you know, the ultimate aim of this type of work.
00:19:20:07 - 00:19:41:08
Abigail Acton
And it’s fascinating. And coming to La Palma, what was exactly your involvement with the La Palma situation? Were you able to apply any of the research that you've been doing or was it in fact a completely different activity that you were you employed upon in La Palma? Did any of it tie in with what you've been describing there? Well, in La Palma, the situation was that the composition of the rocks, the composition of the magma is such that it doesn't crystallize Zircon Okay, If there isn't enough silica, there isn't enough zirconium.
00:19:41:08 - 00:20:13:03
Jane Scarrow
Okay, So it's a different geology, so it's a different context. But what we were doing and what we have been doing, we continue to do is analyze, for example, the whole rock composition of the lavas and the test for the pyroclastic material that's interrupted by the volcano and look at how that's changing over time. So I was collaborating with the Canary's Volcano Logical Institute in Vulcan, and they were they had people on the ground and they were collecting samples every single day, samples of lava and samples of Tesla.
00:20:13:09 - 00:20:45:22
Jane Scarrow
So that gives us a great time series The Evolution of the Eruption. And so we've we've analyzed the rocks and we're seeing changes in the composition of the rocks, which relates to changes in processes at depth and what we now are going to move on to do is look at the minerals, look at the minerals in more detail, because that will permit us to have to obtain more information about the depth, about the pressure, about the temperature in the reservoir and how that might control potentially what's going on at the surface.
00:20:45:24 - 00:20:49:20
Abigail Acton
Okay, great. Does anyone have any questions for Jane? Yes Huub.
00:20:49:22 - 00:21:00:18
Huub Op den Camp
Yes, I have a question also on Elements, so I'm especially interested in what's called rare earth elements. Do you collect data on these type of elements?
00:21:00:20 - 00:21:37:16
Jane Scarrow
We do, because rare earth elements are some of those that have the right ionic radius and the right charge to substitute in for the zirconium in the in the zircon. And they can give us a lot of information when we analyze those because we can relate to them the crystallization of the zircon and the crystallization of other minerals, whether the rare earth elements are taken, for example, into Garnet or into unstable, or whether they're taken into the zircon, can tell us something about the depth at which the zircons crystallizing and what other minerals are involved in the magma crystallized and processed.
00:21:37:16 - 00:21:59:02
Huub Op den Camp
In view of that, they say that this elements are in fact rare earth elements. Well, for instance, cerium is really not rare, only distributed. And is there also a reason that you can think of why this rare earth elements don't exist as ores? So like iron, for instance?
00:21:59:04 - 00:22:29:07
Jane Scarrow
That's not really my field of expertise. Okay, but but interestingly enough, in some particular composition, oceans of magmatic rocks such as rocks that form by very, very low degrees of melting of the mantle, alkaline rocks, they're called those can concentrate rare earth elements in in high, high enough quantities to be mined, such as in the Kola Peninsula, such as in the Western Sahara.
00:22:29:09 - 00:22:35:09
Jane Scarrow
There are various little bodies of of magmatic rocks that can be mined for rare earth elements.
00:22:35:12 - 00:22:42:10
Huub Op den Camp
Okay. That would be also very interested in view of the biological role that we have discovered for these elements.
00:22:42:12 - 00:22:50:13
Abigail Acton
Yes. And, and and we'll come to that right now. And then Jane can ask questions when you have with yours what you've discovered. Yes. Stephan?
00:22:50:15 - 00:23:17:20
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah, I have one more question for Jane. So I find these times serious monitoring all the time, serious metrological monitoring of ongoing eruptions, extremely exciting because that is part of input data that could be used together with measurements that I am producing in the laboratory, for example, to make some predictions or estimates on which direction in the eruption would go, whether it would go more explosive or less explosive.
00:23:17:22 - 00:23:28:21
Stephan Kolzenburg
How far do you think we are from being able to integrate all of our different subfields into a near-real-time response to the eruption forecasting?
00:23:28:21 - 00:24:12:14
Jane Scarrow
Great, great question. And that's really relevant in the context of La Palma because I think that we're really close because what we've been using is a lot of automated mineralogy. So it's almost now the logistics of collecting the samples, sending the samples requires more time than analyzing the samples, obtaining the data and interpreting the data. So we were you know, we've been doing some dry runs almost of, you know, how what's the quickest we can get from we collect the sample of the active lava flow to get in the data and we're talking about a period of three or four days so that their information can be fed back into the type of modeling work
00:24:12:14 - 00:24:22:02
Jane Scarrow
that you're doing. It can be fed back in and related to the geophysical signals that we're receiving from from the Magmatic system. So yeah, I think we're really close.
00:24:22:04 - 00:24:23:09
Stephan Kolzenburg
Great. That's very exciting.
00:24:23:10 - 00:24:40:03
Abigail Acton
Yeah, it's it's, it's really exciting. I mean, I find what you just said there, Jane, about the idea that actually retrieving the samples is actually another thing that takes longer than the analyzing of the samples. There must have been a moment where that switched.
00:24:40:05 - 00:25:02:14
Jane Scarrow
Well, the logistics of taking the samples and getting the sample of the laboratory. Yes. This is this is really innovative. Yes. What's what's been done on La Palma? Because the automated mineralogy, we can produce scans that give us the full, complete mineralogy of a sample in hours. Yes. Rather than days that would have taken previously.
00:25:02:16 - 00:25:19:00
Abigail Acton
Reminds me a little bit of sort of the work on DNA as well, the ability to analyze things in such detail so quickly. Just is is growing Wonderful. Okay. Huub, I'm going to turn to you now. VOLCANO considered volcanoes from a different angle. You were interested in what lives in what we can consider to be an incredibly hostile environment. Can you tell us a bit about the microbes in their habitats in the fumaroles?
00:25:19:02 - 00:25:52:13
Huub Op den Camp
Yes, the microbes we talk about and I'm interested in are in fact extremophiles, which means in a world that they like the conditions where they live and they don't see them as hostile as we do. So the human view is a bit different over there. So they really like to be at their places so they would not feel comfortable at the conditions where we live and in in my case, that my especially interested in the microbes that are living at low values and moderate to high temperatures, let's say up to 75 degrees.
00:25:52:15 - 00:26:29:07
Huub Op den Camp
And the volcanic ecosystems like Fumaroles passing rocks, mud pots and hot filled Gallic soils and these systems all are emitting gases like methane, carbon dioxide, but also hydrogen carbon monoxide. And the temperatures of a vent can go up to 100 degrees. But since they pass over stones and cooled down, then the temperatures of the biofilm that forms there is a bit less so and so mud spots are in fact rainwater filled.
00:26:29:07 - 00:27:03:15
Huub Op den Camp
And then also gas bubbling and the hot volcanic soils, they release gases. So it's slow release of gases and we have temperatures that go from 25 at the surface to 100 degrees at 50 centimeters depth. And within all this analysis that we did, the major finding was this biological role of rare earth elements like cerium and lanthanum. And that is very broadly used and all electronic equipment also the ones that we are using now.
00:27:03:17 - 00:27:05:20
Huub Op den Camp
So that was quite a discovery.
00:27:05:21 - 00:27:12:00
Abigail Acton
So what did you discover with regard to the interaction between the microbes and these rare earth elements? What are we looking at here now?
00:27:12:02 - 00:27:42:03
Huub Op den Camp
What what we in fact, that's so and our discoveries of a methane oxidizing bacterium from the sulfur tiger volcano and that put and Italy we isolated a bacterium that finally we could show that it only could grow if we added water from this mud pot to the growth medium. And it took some time. But finally we found out that, well, rare earth elements that we had to add to this media in order to get this bacteria growing.
00:27:42:06 - 00:27:44:05
Abigail Acton
So it was dependent on that.
00:27:44:07 - 00:27:50:23
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah. And finally, we also could pinpoint why, since it is really a cofactor in an enzyme.
00:27:51:00 - 00:27:55:04
Abigail Acton
Okay. And in terms of these discoveries, what do they lead you to understand?
00:27:55:08 - 00:28:07:03
Huub Op den Camp
Although I must say that this discovery on its own already results in a new field of research in which people are now adding rare earth elements to our enrichment media, which was.
00:28:07:03 - 00:28:08:02
Abigail Acton
To see what happens.
00:28:08:07 - 00:28:10:08
Huub Op den Camp
And what was never done before.
00:28:10:09 - 00:28:10:19
Abigail Acton
Right.
00:28:10:20 - 00:28:20:17
Huub Op den Camp
It gave really? Yeah. Dramatic changes in what was growing, right. that was that was really a new field of research.
00:28:20:19 - 00:28:32:17
Abigail Acton
And which volcanoes did you look at? I mean, you've just mentioned this one in Italy. Did you did you look at any other how did you actually capture the microbes? I know that sometimes that was also challenging since we're talking this. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us a bit about that.
00:28:32:19 - 00:28:52:23
Huub Op den Camp
There. There is a nice picture of my colleague Alan Paul, who is sampling this, but what that is, I think when I think back to that said, that happened several years ago, it's it was quite a tricky business to get something out if only a stick and something connected like to it to stick to, to pull out this or that.
00:28:52:23 - 00:29:38:16
Huub Op den Camp
That was really yeah, maybe not safe enough if we would look to real conditions. Yeah. So we did a lot of the research on the this of the volcano and especially the mud spot and also the soil. But I think I used the, the island of the area as another example. So we, we came across this possibilities by colleagues from Palermo, from the University and the Volcanic Institute and in fact this island, this top of an ultra guano and the part of the island called the fog icon Ghandour is still of show is geothermal features like Gaza meeting soils and also from oils.
00:29:38:18 - 00:29:55:08
Huub Op den Camp
So that that is well we we in fact went and together with the colleagues we start sampling over there and in our case we are sampling for two days and that was enough to work for four years.
00:29:55:10 - 00:30:10:12
Abigail Acton
Right. You got enough materials. So our team in the lab for four years, that's about the longest relationship that you found with regards to methane and the conversion of methane. Why does this matter in terms of climate science? Because we did talk a little bit about that in the past, you and I.
00:30:10:14 - 00:30:43:03
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah, I think that if you look to the methane and the increasing concentrations, it's good that we can make climate models and also models for this increase and explanations for the increase, and that you must imagine that there is, let's say, a hidden methane that we take out to heat our houses. So that's old methane. But if you bulla stick into a mud in a freshwater environment, it starts bubbling.
00:30:43:05 - 00:31:10:17
Huub Op den Camp
And that's that's new methane. So it also comes out. But if you would directly, without interrupting with analyze the methane that comes out, then it is much less. And that is also the way we discovered this methane eating bacteria in the soil for data. And geo geologists and geochemists showed that they expected more methane to come out from the data below than what came out.
00:31:10:17 - 00:31:12:18
Huub Op den Camp
So there must be something consuming.
00:31:12:20 - 00:31:14:07
Abigail Acton
Yeah. Missing methane. Yeah.
00:31:14:07 - 00:31:24:06
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah. And understanding this, a consumption can also be implemented in, let's say, climate models to better understand sources and sinks of methane.
00:31:24:09 - 00:31:28:17
Abigail Acton
Okay, great. Thank you. Any questions at all for Huub Yeah Stephan.
00:31:28:19 - 00:31:54:15
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So you mentioned area as a beautiful example of an island to work on. What's interesting there is that a lot of the rocks and Pennsylvania area are crystallized and others are quenched to the grasses. And so what I'm wondering is how are these bacteria dealing with the the accessibility of nutrients that might be in these rocks, whether they are in the glassy form or in a crystalline form?
00:31:54:17 - 00:32:15:16
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah, well, one of the advantages of the of some of the gases that are expelled by by this geothermal activities at the sulfur that it was very clear since there a lot of hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen sulfide is a very good energy source for bacteria. And if they use it as an energy source and burning it, they produce sulfuric acid.
00:32:15:18 - 00:32:31:19
Huub Op den Camp
And this or ferric acid, of course, helps enormously by liberating minerals for growth. And these organisms in total are all out of troughs. So they consume methane and they fix carbon dioxide.
00:32:31:21 - 00:32:33:22
Abigail Acton
Is that the definition of an outer trough?
00:32:33:24 - 00:32:40:14
Huub Op den Camp
Yes. Okay. Okay. Not not only methane, but fixing carbon dioxide. That's the definition of an out like a plant.
00:32:40:16 - 00:32:59:17
Jane Scarrow
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Jane, did you have a question? I think yeah, I was. I was interested to know you've been studying mud pools related to magmatic volcanoes, but what about the mud volcanoes that form in the sediment environment that are of such interest at the moment to the oil and gas industry?
00:32:59:19 - 00:33:35:05
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah, So that that's not my part of expertise. But I know there's a lot of research done for instance, by the Max Plug Institute and Plasma in which they use this underwater volcanoes and study also the microbiology of that because of the high concentrations of of sulfate at that places and the presence of so-called methane hydrates that that also resulted in a discovery of a quite new type of microorganisms that in fact can burn methane by reducing sulfate.
00:33:35:07 - 00:33:47:20
Huub Op den Camp
So that regenerates sulfide in that places and methane is oxidized to carbon dioxide. So a lot of very exciting metabolism of microorganisms.
00:33:47:22 - 00:34:06:18
Abigail Acton
It seems like every time you look again, there's something else to discover. And all these discoveries seem to be really tip of the iceberg discoveries, because, I mean, that's the definition of a discovery. Of course, I'm being told a lot, but yeah, well, what is it? Well, why is this possible now? Is it is it because we've got different equipment or people looking at things differently, asking different questions?
00:34:06:20 - 00:34:28:22
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah. A lot of the things that are really important in that aspect is what you already mentioned and the improved DNA technologies that we have. So also in sequencing and becomes much cheaper and cheaper, the first human genome sequencing cost millions of dollars. If you now sequence your genome, you can do it for $1,000.
00:34:28:23 - 00:34:29:18
Abigail Acton
Yes. Amazing.
00:34:29:18 - 00:34:40:18
Huub Op den Camp
Is that that's amazing difference that also that makes it of course also sequencing DNA from the environment which learns is a lot about the bacteria living there without culturing.
00:34:40:24 - 00:34:41:15
Abigail Acton
You're right.
00:34:41:17 - 00:34:43:10
Huub Op den Camp
That's a very big advantage and.
00:34:43:10 - 00:35:04:09
Abigail Acton
That makes it faster, obviously. Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit what we were talking with Jane Jane, with regards to the the that the new abilities to to analyze so quickly. Fantastic this wonderful technology shining showing all sorts of insights into into things that were closed doors before and maybe prohibitive with cost and so on. Okay. Well, listen, I want to thank you very, very much for your time today.
00:35:04:09 - 00:35:20:02
Abigail Acton
That was very interesting. I particularly like the notion of the fact that we are moving so much closer to the ability to analyze this in real time and, maybe maybe limit the extent of devastation on communities living in or around areas of eruption. Fantastic. Thank you very much.
00:35:20:03 - 00:35:20:21
Jane Scarrow
You're welcome.
00:35:20:23 - 00:35:21:10
Huub Op den Camp
Thank you.
00:35:21:12 - 00:35:22:14
Stephan Kolzenburg
Thank you. Pleasure to be.
00:35:22:19 - 00:35:23:09
Stephan Kolzenburg
Nice to do.
00:35:23:15 - 00:35:41:05
Abigail Acton
Good. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thank you. Are you interested in what other EU funded projects are doing to uncover the secrets of what's going on beneath our feet? The Cordis website will give you an insight into the results of projects funded by the Horizon 2020 program that are working in this area.
00:35:41:07 - 00:36:00:05
Abigail Acton
The website has articles and interviews that explore the results of research being conducted in a very broad range of domains, from pollinators to pollution. There's something there for you. Maybe you're involved in a project or would like to apply for funding. Take a look at what others are doing in your domain. So come and check out the research that's revealing what makes our world tick.
00:36:00:07 - 00:36:13:07
Abigail Acton
We're always happy to hear from you. Drop us a line. Editorial at Cordis Don't Europa dot EU. Until next time.
Abigail Acton
This is CORDIScovery.
00:00:16:02 - 00:00:41:24
Abigail Acton
Hello. Welcome to this episode of CORDIScovery With me, Abigail Acton. Let's talk volcanoes. The underwater explosion of Tonga on the 14th of January sent a shockwave traveling faster than a thousand kilometers an hour, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Almost as fast as the speed of sound. Sonic booms from the eruption world across the Pacific, including in Fiji and Vanuatu, and as far as Alaska, more than 9000 kilometers away. In La Palma
00:00:42:00 - 00:01:04:18
Abigail Acton
The volcano that erupted over Christmas has spewed lava that swallowed over 1000 homes and continues to hold temperatures of more than 500 degrees Celsius in some parts. Once the lava cools, a process that could take months, it might be easier in some cases to build on top of it rather than breaking it up and removing it, says Inez Galindo, a geologist who's heading the Canary Islands unit of Spain's Geological and Mining Institute.
00:01:04:20 - 00:01:24:01
Abigail Acton
But however destructive. Throughout history, volcanoes have provided nutrients to create some of the world's most fertile soils, allowing the civilizations that cultivated them to thrive. So what can the latest research into what have been called Earth's architects tell us about the lead up to an eruption? Can we trace the mechanisms by mapping the crystals that appear in lava?
00:01:24:06 - 00:01:54:07
Abigail Acton
And can the organisms living in some of the world's most inhospitable parts help us tackle climate change by converting methane? We ask three guests whose projects have been supported by the EU Horizon 2020 program. Are here to share the results. A very warm hello to Stephan Kolzenburg assistant professor at the University of Buffalo, New York. Stephan is interested in understanding the physical processes in volcanology and geo material science through a combination of experimentation and fieldwork.
00:01:54:09 - 00:02:16:11
Abigail Acton
He is the principal investigator of the DYNAVOLC Project. Welcome, Stephan. Jane Scarrow is senior lecturer at the University of Granada in Spain. Her research focuses on processes in magmatic reservoirs beneath active volcanoes. She was involved in the VESPER project looking at eruptive styles, pre eruptive, evolution and risk. And she is involved in the response to the La Palma eruption.
00:02:16:13 - 00:02:38:14
Abigail Acton
Welcome, Jane. Huub Op den Camp professor in microbiology of acidic volcanic systems at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, who is interested in the eco physiology of microorganisms in relation to carbon, nitrogen and sulfur cycles in volcanic, marine and freshwater ecosystems. He was the principal investigator of the VOLCANO Project. Huub. Hello.
00:02:38:19 - 00:02:39:15
Huub Op den Camp
Hello, Abigail.
00:02:39:19 - 00:02:57:22
Abigail Acton
Wonderful. Well, I'm very glad to have you all here. So let's get started. Stephan DYNAVOLC wanted to map the lead up to volcanic eruptions, looking at the changes of the viscosity of magma and the impact that that has on what are known as transition zones. Can you tell us what transition zones are and your findings regarding the behavior of the magma?
00:02:58:02 - 00:03:04:06
Abigail Acton
And if we think of the recent submarine eruption of Tonga, how does that change? If the eruption is submarine.
00:03:04:08 - 00:03:30:09
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yes Abigail. So on the way through the crust, magma finds itself away from its original starts. So it's getting out of equilibrium and it's no longer happy in the state that it was initially in. So on the way to the surface, it finds itself in a lower pressure environment and a lower temperature environment. And these changes in pressure and temperature really introduce two critical transition zones in the texture.
00:03:30:09 - 00:03:59:23
Stephan Kolzenburg
And with that, the flow behavior, the first one being magmatic gases are being exposed and with that the magma turns into a foamy liquid. If you want, similar to when you open a can of soda pop. And that foaming and depressurization really changes the formation behavior in that it becomes easier for the magma to flow. And similar to if you imagine a rigid piece of plastic turning into a more soft sponge, it's way easier to define that softer sponge.
00:04:00:00 - 00:04:25:20
Stephan Kolzenburg
And with the increase in exhaust gases, it also drops the density of the material, forcing it towards the surface more intensely because we have a higher density contrast Now as it comes towards the surface where it's cooler, the magma also changes its textural state and that it goes from being a liquid more to being a solid. So it crystallizes and that's very much like freezing of that liquid into a solid block of ice.
00:04:25:20 - 00:04:52:17
Stephan Kolzenburg
If you want to draw the comparison to water. And so that really defines the point where magnets are no longer able to move. Now, the Tonga eruption was kind of a very peculiar event in that during this rise process, the magma is driven by the magnetic volatiles that supply the pressure to really drive that eruption. But in addition, there was water present.
00:04:52:19 - 00:05:15:23
Stephan Kolzenburg
And if water interacts with with a hot liquid, then that turns into steam and that causes an expansion of up to 70 times the volume. And it's very similar in a way where you wouldn't want to extinguish a burning oil fire in your kitchen with water because that steam expansion now disperses the droplets all over the place and you get fire throughout your whole kitchen.
00:05:16:00 - 00:05:30:02
Stephan Kolzenburg
So in a way, adding that water to to draw the thermal energy out of the magma is like supercharging your volcanic eruption. So you get Magmatic power. Plus the steam explosion power. And that just makes it a lot more intense.
00:05:30:04 - 00:05:53:23
Abigail Acton
Yeah. And the figures that we were seeing, which were really astonishing. So in the case of a volcano that we think of as a land volcano, I would say normal, but that's simply because I'm not an expert in volcanoes, but a land volcano, let's call it. And I understand that it can sometimes be quite challenging. It sounds counterintuitive, but I understand it sometimes can be quite challenging to really work out where the lava is coming from, either lots of small fissures.
00:05:54:00 - 00:06:02:18
Abigail Acton
And I guess that underlines the importance of on the ground monitoring. Can you tell us something about the challenges of monitoring on the ground and identifying exactly where the lava is coming from?
00:06:02:24 - 00:06:28:22
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah, So often the places or the regions of origin where the magma comes from, that is something that's reasonably well understood. So we're often looking at plate boundaries, tectonic plate boundaries, where we have increased heat, flexible time flux in the crust and then weak spots where the magma could rise. But when or why, exactly, A certain batch of magma is starting the journey from the storage zone to the surface.
00:06:28:24 - 00:06:54:14
Stephan Kolzenburg
That's really something that's very poorly understood and something we try to chart in the tone of our project. So it's really trying to find out when the magma goes from being locked in place to able to move to the surface. Now where exactly it would come out, that's something that's really hard to pinpoint. And most of the I would say that's because we don't really know much about we can't really feel or sense the magma good enough in the crust.
00:06:54:16 - 00:07:19:20
Stephan Kolzenburg
And so what we would need to see is much better geophysical monitoring and characterization of magma that's in the crust. There's a really interesting project of starting at CASA, the Casa Magma Observatory, where people have initially accidentally drilled into the magma chamber, and now they're trying to evolve that into a continuous magma observatory for tracking changes in the chamber to time.
00:07:19:22 - 00:07:41:04
Abigail Acton
It sounds like a highly risky accident. I guess that the drill into a magnet chamber sounds low. Okay, Quite dramatic. I believe also that it's it's sometimes problematic to do on the ground fieldwork in some of these areas because maybe some parts of the world don't have access to the kind of instruments and equipment that are needed to monitor and so on.
00:07:41:06 - 00:07:57:12
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah, that is correct. I think the good examples in 2021 where the eruption of Johan Gongol Volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo versus the eruption at La Palma. And so while La Palma is very well instrument instrumentalized.
00:07:57:14 - 00:07:59:22
Abigail Acton
Yeah, there's a lot of instruments at La Palma Yeah.
00:08:00:02 - 00:08:21:16
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So while there are a lot of instruments monitoring at La Palma, it was still unclear where exactly the magma would come out. Similarly as the Congo volcano, which is much, much more poorly instrumentalized, the general tectonic structure was known, but the exact location of the fissure is almost impossible to pinpoint.
00:08:21:18 - 00:08:31:24
Abigail Acton
And I guess that is that partly why it's so important to try and replicate this in the or at least analyze it in the lab? Is that is that what draws you back to the laboratory as opposed to being in the field all the time?
00:08:32:01 - 00:09:02:13
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So the goal is really that understanding processes from the field. We take them to the laboratory and we try to figure out how exactly do they work, because once we know the characteristics of these geo materials, so these magmas and we know a little bit more from the geophysical monitoring side of things, we can try and piece things together and really find out what is this sub volcanic system the magma storage zone has to look like and how could we find out whether or not magma is on the move.
00:09:02:15 - 00:09:10:19
Abigail Acton
And to do that in a laboratory, what what do you actually do in the lab? How do you replicate anything like this? I mean, the heats are so the temperatures are so extreme and so on.
00:09:10:19 - 00:09:39:18
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So it's technically really challenging to recreate this in the lab. But the there are two components that we want to recreate, really. It's the changes in pressure and the changes in temperature. Now, the changes in temperature are reasonably easy approached using high temperature furnaces. So for a lot of this we just build custom devices that are able to house the magma melted and then measure the flow properties either by twisting it or by squeezing it.
00:09:39:23 - 00:10:10:21
Stephan Kolzenburg
But the changes in pressure are extremely challenging to get at. So high pressure, high temperature experimentation is probably one of the most challenging topics in experimental petrology and volcanology. So what we're trying to do there is then take two little tricks where we take rocks out of the field that may still have some volatiles exalting in them and then take them back to the lab, heat them up, and that causes sort of a chemical depressurization and we can make rocks foam in the laboratory.
00:10:10:23 - 00:10:20:20
Stephan Kolzenburg
And so that way we can look at the changes in viscosity as bubbles grow, even though we're not necessarily working with different pressures.
00:10:20:22 - 00:10:36:08
Abigail Acton
I read a little bit in the background research I did in your project, the notion of of some insights. I found this very, very exciting, some insights into volcanoes or tectonic structures on other planets. How does that work? Tell me a little bit more about that.
00:10:36:10 - 00:10:59:08
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah, so a lot of the viscosity data, the real object data that we derive from these experiments can help us on Earth to model how fast and how far the lava flow might make it. But it also has implications on the the geometry of these features. And for most of planetary exploration, what we have, the data that we have is really just surface data.
00:10:59:08 - 00:11:26:13
Stephan Kolzenburg
And so we can get optical images. Sometimes we get sort of 3D models of planets, and if there are volcanic features that are identified, their morphology is often used to deduce the composition. So if you think of Hawaiian basaltic lava flows, they have low viscosity. There are sort of these thin sheets, whereas and the sites in the Andes, they have sort of intermediate viscosities and are much higher, much thicker and a little bit more narrow.
00:11:26:15 - 00:12:00:04
Stephan Kolzenburg
And then lava domes such as what grew in Mount St Helens in 2004 to 2008. Those are of higher viscosity and create more like piles of lava. And so that helps us on Earth to tie that to sort of the silica content. And that can also be applied to other planets. One thing that one has to be careful of this, that translating these changes in the in the surface structure from Earth to other planets has to keep in mind that the atmosphere in other planets is very different.
00:12:00:04 - 00:12:13:14
Stephan Kolzenburg
For example, Venus has an atmosphere that's 5 to 600 degrees hot, and it's made of very thick and dense CO2. So it has very different dynamics for the depressurization and for the cooling of these kind of features.
00:12:13:20 - 00:12:20:21
Abigail Acton
Yeah, Yeah, of course. Really very interesting. Does anyone have any questions that they would like to ask, Stefan? Yes. Huub.
00:12:20:23 - 00:12:34:11
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah. I have a question on which temperatures are we are we talking about if we go from magma below the finally, let's say, a mass of stone that the after cooling down.
00:12:34:12 - 00:12:53:01
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. That's a it's a good question. So the hottest magma that we know on earth they came out early in the Earth's history near about 1500 degrees centigrade. But currently active systems are running at the sort of the highest temperatures near 1200 degrees centigrade and below.
00:12:53:03 - 00:13:13:23
Huub Op den Camp
Okay. And if you look the yeah, you want to depict the world, the the fashion erupts. In fact, is there any possible involvement of water at this deeper layers or is that more or less excluded since you're talking about this enormous expansion, which also could help to break such a fushion.
00:13:14:04 - 00:13:41:17
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So the Tonga eruption was a beautiful example of the sweet spot between when magma can actually water can flash into steam when driven by magma and where it could not happen. So there have been recent eruptions in the Tonga arc that were slightly deeper in the water level. So they have more pressure underneath. And that sort of kept the magmatic volatiles in the melt and they did not have sufficient power to break through the surface.
00:13:41:19 - 00:14:00:06
Stephan Kolzenburg
And if you are too shallow, then a lot of that water is flushed into steam and you're transitioning back to sort of a dry volcanic eruption. But if you are in the sweet spot where you have sufficient magma supply and sufficient water supply at the same time, that's when you can really go big and supercharge like what recently happened.
00:14:02:03 - 00:14:21:07
Jane Scarrow
Something that I was I'm well, we're interested in is the transitions between explosive diffusive eruptions, sometimes even within the same event. And so what can your results sort of tell us about that?
00:14:21:09 - 00:14:48:15
Stephan Kolzenburg
So, yeah, magnets and silicate melts are really interesting in the way that depending on how fast they they deform, they can either flow or they can break. And so that really is a result of the timescale of relaxation of the silicate melt. If you've ever played with Silly Putty, you can tear it slowly and it will flow and if you rip it fast then it'll snap and magnets act in a very, very similar way.
00:14:48:17 - 00:14:56:23
Stephan Kolzenburg
And so the key part is trying to understand how fast magma can come through the surface and whether or not that exceeds this relaxation timescale.
00:14:57:00 - 00:15:20:23
Abigail Acton
Okay, Super. Okay. Thank you very much, Stephan Excellent. That was that was very interesting. Jane, I'm going to turn to you now, VESPER Your project used the crystals carried by erupted magma to get a clearer idea of magma storage conditions and channels underground. The idea being that a better understanding of past events could perhaps help us predict future volcanic eruptions. Was there one mineral in particular that you were interested in and why?
00:15:21:00 - 00:15:42:19
Jane Scarrow
Yes, the mineral that we're really interested in is aircon. And this is because of its chemical and physical properties. It's a tiny, tiny and you can in silicate mineral usually has dimensions of around 100 microns or a 10th of a millimeter and can compose maybe less than 1% of most volcanic rocks.
00:15:42:21 - 00:16:20:08
Jane Scarrow
But it's super useful because in addition to the zirconia that takes into its structure, it also takes in uranium. So over time, with radioactive decay, this uranium converts to thorium and lead. And we can measure the ratios of those two elements, and that can help us that can permit us to calculate the time since the zircon and by association when the magma crystallized, it also incorporates other elements in very low trace concentrations such as titanium, which we can use to determine the temperature of the magma when zircon was crystallizing.
00:16:20:10 - 00:16:46:24
Jane Scarrow
And this is important because temperature is a critical control and viscosity and as we've heard, how that relates to magma behavior and the trace elements that we find we analyze in zircon can give us information about the magma source. And so these these tiny crystals really packed with information.
00:16:47:01 - 00:17:16:21
Abigail Acton
Yeah, that sounds it sounds amazing. Sounds almost like a real snapshot of of what happened at that moment. That's that's great. And so which volcanoes did you study and what did you find when you were looking at the at the characteristics of Mineral Zircon in that situation?
00:17:16:23 - 00:17:42:07
Jane Scarrow
Well, in the Vesper project, we were focused on volcanoes, on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic and also Super Hills on Montserrat in the Caribbean. And Montserrat was studying Zircon in deposits from the last event of the recent activity that ran from 1995 to 2010. And what we found was that in quite small fist size pieces of volcanic rock, we were detecting zircons that are crystallized over up to 250,000 years. So this tells us that the lava that erupted contains minerals from this magmatic reservoir over a long period of time, and this can permit us to consider the physical properties in the magma reservoir beneath the volcano.
00:17:42:09 - 00:18:15:15
Abigail Acton
So it would be something like a melt mineral marsh that before the eruption, a amalgamated together, mixing all these different zircons that are crystallized over the period of time that the small melt pockets that came together and then erupted. And this is significant because if we can look at from the composition of the zircon or the age of the zircon, the distribution of the melt, that can tell us something about potential volume of future eruptions.
00:18:15:17 - 00:18:56:06
Jane Scarrow
And what was particularly interesting when we were dating these cones in these relatively small samples from the event was that we obtained ages that not had not been detected in volcanic rocks at the surface. So this is telling us that we can have magma below the surface that doesn't necessarily erupt. And in a context of volcano monitoring, if we have geophysical signals such as seismic images that melt below the region, then that doesn't mean necessarily that there's an imminent eruption and so the aim of this type of study really is to look how volcanoes behaved in the past.
00:18:56:06 - 00:19:20:05
Jane Scarrow
And this can give us information about what they might do in the future. And that can guide decisions made related to communities living with volcanoes to make them less vulnerable and more resilient. So that's, you know, the ultimate aim of this type of work.
00:19:20:07 - 00:19:41:08
Abigail Acton
And it’s fascinating. And coming to La Palma, what was exactly your involvement with the La Palma situation? Were you able to apply any of the research that you've been doing or was it in fact a completely different activity that you were you employed upon in La Palma? Did any of it tie in with what you've been describing there? Well, in La Palma, the situation was that the composition of the rocks, the composition of the magma is such that it doesn't crystallize Zircon Okay, If there isn't enough silica, there isn't enough zirconium.
00:19:41:08 - 00:20:13:03
Jane Scarrow
Okay, So it's a different geology, so it's a different context. But what we were doing and what we have been doing, we continue to do is analyze, for example, the whole rock composition of the lavas and the test for the pyroclastic material that's interrupted by the volcano and look at how that's changing over time. So I was collaborating with the Canary's Volcano Logical Institute in Vulcan, and they were they had people on the ground and they were collecting samples every single day, samples of lava and samples of Tesla.
00:20:13:09 - 00:20:45:22
Jane Scarrow
So that gives us a great time series The Evolution of the Eruption. And so we've we've analyzed the rocks and we're seeing changes in the composition of the rocks, which relates to changes in processes at depth and what we now are going to move on to do is look at the minerals, look at the minerals in more detail, because that will permit us to have to obtain more information about the depth, about the pressure, about the temperature in the reservoir and how that might control potentially what's going on at the surface.
00:20:45:24 - 00:20:49:20
Abigail Acton
Okay, great. Does anyone have any questions for Jane? Yes Huub.
00:20:49:22 - 00:21:00:18
Huub Op den Camp
Yes, I have a question also on Elements, so I'm especially interested in what's called rare earth elements. Do you collect data on these type of elements?
00:21:00:20 - 00:21:37:16
Jane Scarrow
We do, because rare earth elements are some of those that have the right ionic radius and the right charge to substitute in for the zirconium in the in the zircon. And they can give us a lot of information when we analyze those because we can relate to them the crystallization of the zircon and the crystallization of other minerals, whether the rare earth elements are taken, for example, into Garnet or into unstable, or whether they're taken into the zircon, can tell us something about the depth at which the zircons crystallizing and what other minerals are involved in the magma crystallized and processed.
00:21:37:16 - 00:21:59:02
Huub Op den Camp
In view of that, they say that this elements are in fact rare earth elements. Well, for instance, cerium is really not rare, only distributed. And is there also a reason that you can think of why this rare earth elements don't exist as ores? So like iron, for instance?
00:21:59:04 - 00:22:29:07
Jane Scarrow
That's not really my field of expertise. Okay, but but interestingly enough, in some particular composition, oceans of magmatic rocks such as rocks that form by very, very low degrees of melting of the mantle, alkaline rocks, they're called those can concentrate rare earth elements in in high, high enough quantities to be mined, such as in the Kola Peninsula, such as in the Western Sahara.
00:22:29:09 - 00:22:35:09
Jane Scarrow
There are various little bodies of of magmatic rocks that can be mined for rare earth elements.
00:22:35:12 - 00:22:42:10
Huub Op den Camp
Okay. That would be also very interested in view of the biological role that we have discovered for these elements.
00:22:42:12 - 00:22:50:13
Abigail Acton
Yes. And, and and we'll come to that right now. And then Jane can ask questions when you have with yours what you've discovered. Yes. Stephan?
00:22:50:15 - 00:23:17:20
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah, I have one more question for Jane. So I find these times serious monitoring all the time, serious metrological monitoring of ongoing eruptions, extremely exciting because that is part of input data that could be used together with measurements that I am producing in the laboratory, for example, to make some predictions or estimates on which direction in the eruption would go, whether it would go more explosive or less explosive.
00:23:17:22 - 00:23:28:21
Stephan Kolzenburg
How far do you think we are from being able to integrate all of our different subfields into a near-real-time response to the eruption forecasting?
00:23:28:21 - 00:24:12:14
Jane Scarrow
Great, great question. And that's really relevant in the context of La Palma because I think that we're really close because what we've been using is a lot of automated mineralogy. So it's almost now the logistics of collecting the samples, sending the samples requires more time than analyzing the samples, obtaining the data and interpreting the data. So we were you know, we've been doing some dry runs almost of, you know, how what's the quickest we can get from we collect the sample of the active lava flow to get in the data and we're talking about a period of three or four days so that their information can be fed back into the type of modeling work
00:24:12:14 - 00:24:22:02
Jane Scarrow
that you're doing. It can be fed back in and related to the geophysical signals that we're receiving from from the Magmatic system. So yeah, I think we're really close.
00:24:22:04 - 00:24:23:09
Stephan Kolzenburg
Great. That's very exciting.
00:24:23:10 - 00:24:40:03
Abigail Acton
Yeah, it's it's, it's really exciting. I mean, I find what you just said there, Jane, about the idea that actually retrieving the samples is actually another thing that takes longer than the analyzing of the samples. There must have been a moment where that switched.
00:24:40:05 - 00:25:02:14
Jane Scarrow
Well, the logistics of taking the samples and getting the sample of the laboratory. Yes. This is this is really innovative. Yes. What's what's been done on La Palma? Because the automated mineralogy, we can produce scans that give us the full, complete mineralogy of a sample in hours. Yes. Rather than days that would have taken previously.
00:25:02:16 - 00:25:19:00
Abigail Acton
Reminds me a little bit of sort of the work on DNA as well, the ability to analyze things in such detail so quickly. Just is is growing Wonderful. Okay. Huub, I'm going to turn to you now. VOLCANO considered volcanoes from a different angle. You were interested in what lives in what we can consider to be an incredibly hostile environment. Can you tell us a bit about the microbes in their habitats in the fumaroles?
00:25:19:02 - 00:25:52:13
Huub Op den Camp
Yes, the microbes we talk about and I'm interested in are in fact extremophiles, which means in a world that they like the conditions where they live and they don't see them as hostile as we do. So the human view is a bit different over there. So they really like to be at their places so they would not feel comfortable at the conditions where we live and in in my case, that my especially interested in the microbes that are living at low values and moderate to high temperatures, let's say up to 75 degrees.
00:25:52:15 - 00:26:29:07
Huub Op den Camp
And the volcanic ecosystems like Fumaroles passing rocks, mud pots and hot filled Gallic soils and these systems all are emitting gases like methane, carbon dioxide, but also hydrogen carbon monoxide. And the temperatures of a vent can go up to 100 degrees. But since they pass over stones and cooled down, then the temperatures of the biofilm that forms there is a bit less so and so mud spots are in fact rainwater filled.
00:26:29:07 - 00:27:03:15
Huub Op den Camp
And then also gas bubbling and the hot volcanic soils, they release gases. So it's slow release of gases and we have temperatures that go from 25 at the surface to 100 degrees at 50 centimeters depth. And within all this analysis that we did, the major finding was this biological role of rare earth elements like cerium and lanthanum. And that is very broadly used and all electronic equipment also the ones that we are using now.
00:27:03:17 - 00:27:05:20
Huub Op den Camp
So that was quite a discovery.
00:27:05:21 - 00:27:12:00
Abigail Acton
So what did you discover with regard to the interaction between the microbes and these rare earth elements? What are we looking at here now?
00:27:12:02 - 00:27:42:03
Huub Op den Camp
What what we in fact, that's so and our discoveries of a methane oxidizing bacterium from the sulfur tiger volcano and that put and Italy we isolated a bacterium that finally we could show that it only could grow if we added water from this mud pot to the growth medium. And it took some time. But finally we found out that, well, rare earth elements that we had to add to this media in order to get this bacteria growing.
00:27:42:06 - 00:27:44:05
Abigail Acton
So it was dependent on that.
00:27:44:07 - 00:27:50:23
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah. And finally, we also could pinpoint why, since it is really a cofactor in an enzyme.
00:27:51:00 - 00:27:55:04
Abigail Acton
Okay. And in terms of these discoveries, what do they lead you to understand?
00:27:55:08 - 00:28:07:03
Huub Op den Camp
Although I must say that this discovery on its own already results in a new field of research in which people are now adding rare earth elements to our enrichment media, which was.
00:28:07:03 - 00:28:08:02
Abigail Acton
To see what happens.
00:28:08:07 - 00:28:10:08
Huub Op den Camp
And what was never done before.
00:28:10:09 - 00:28:10:19
Abigail Acton
Right.
00:28:10:20 - 00:28:20:17
Huub Op den Camp
It gave really? Yeah. Dramatic changes in what was growing, right. that was that was really a new field of research.
00:28:20:19 - 00:28:32:17
Abigail Acton
And which volcanoes did you look at? I mean, you've just mentioned this one in Italy. Did you did you look at any other how did you actually capture the microbes? I know that sometimes that was also challenging since we're talking this. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us a bit about that.
00:28:32:19 - 00:28:52:23
Huub Op den Camp
There. There is a nice picture of my colleague Alan Paul, who is sampling this, but what that is, I think when I think back to that said, that happened several years ago, it's it was quite a tricky business to get something out if only a stick and something connected like to it to stick to, to pull out this or that.
00:28:52:23 - 00:29:38:16
Huub Op den Camp
That was really yeah, maybe not safe enough if we would look to real conditions. Yeah. So we did a lot of the research on the this of the volcano and especially the mud spot and also the soil. But I think I used the, the island of the area as another example. So we, we came across this possibilities by colleagues from Palermo, from the University and the Volcanic Institute and in fact this island, this top of an ultra guano and the part of the island called the fog icon Ghandour is still of show is geothermal features like Gaza meeting soils and also from oils.
00:29:38:18 - 00:29:55:08
Huub Op den Camp
So that that is well we we in fact went and together with the colleagues we start sampling over there and in our case we are sampling for two days and that was enough to work for four years.
00:29:55:10 - 00:30:10:12
Abigail Acton
Right. You got enough materials. So our team in the lab for four years, that's about the longest relationship that you found with regards to methane and the conversion of methane. Why does this matter in terms of climate science? Because we did talk a little bit about that in the past, you and I.
00:30:10:14 - 00:30:43:03
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah, I think that if you look to the methane and the increasing concentrations, it's good that we can make climate models and also models for this increase and explanations for the increase, and that you must imagine that there is, let's say, a hidden methane that we take out to heat our houses. So that's old methane. But if you bulla stick into a mud in a freshwater environment, it starts bubbling.
00:30:43:05 - 00:31:10:17
Huub Op den Camp
And that's that's new methane. So it also comes out. But if you would directly, without interrupting with analyze the methane that comes out, then it is much less. And that is also the way we discovered this methane eating bacteria in the soil for data. And geo geologists and geochemists showed that they expected more methane to come out from the data below than what came out.
00:31:10:17 - 00:31:12:18
Huub Op den Camp
So there must be something consuming.
00:31:12:20 - 00:31:14:07
Abigail Acton
Yeah. Missing methane. Yeah.
00:31:14:07 - 00:31:24:06
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah. And understanding this, a consumption can also be implemented in, let's say, climate models to better understand sources and sinks of methane.
00:31:24:09 - 00:31:28:17
Abigail Acton
Okay, great. Thank you. Any questions at all for Huub Yeah Stephan.
00:31:28:19 - 00:31:54:15
Stephan Kolzenburg
Yeah. So you mentioned area as a beautiful example of an island to work on. What's interesting there is that a lot of the rocks and Pennsylvania area are crystallized and others are quenched to the grasses. And so what I'm wondering is how are these bacteria dealing with the the accessibility of nutrients that might be in these rocks, whether they are in the glassy form or in a crystalline form?
00:31:54:17 - 00:32:15:16
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah, well, one of the advantages of the of some of the gases that are expelled by by this geothermal activities at the sulfur that it was very clear since there a lot of hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen sulfide is a very good energy source for bacteria. And if they use it as an energy source and burning it, they produce sulfuric acid.
00:32:15:18 - 00:32:31:19
Huub Op den Camp
And this or ferric acid, of course, helps enormously by liberating minerals for growth. And these organisms in total are all out of troughs. So they consume methane and they fix carbon dioxide.
00:32:31:21 - 00:32:33:22
Abigail Acton
Is that the definition of an outer trough?
00:32:33:24 - 00:32:40:14
Huub Op den Camp
Yes. Okay. Okay. Not not only methane, but fixing carbon dioxide. That's the definition of an out like a plant.
00:32:40:16 - 00:32:59:17
Jane Scarrow
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Jane, did you have a question? I think yeah, I was. I was interested to know you've been studying mud pools related to magmatic volcanoes, but what about the mud volcanoes that form in the sediment environment that are of such interest at the moment to the oil and gas industry?
00:32:59:19 - 00:33:35:05
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah, So that that's not my part of expertise. But I know there's a lot of research done for instance, by the Max Plug Institute and Plasma in which they use this underwater volcanoes and study also the microbiology of that because of the high concentrations of of sulfate at that places and the presence of so-called methane hydrates that that also resulted in a discovery of a quite new type of microorganisms that in fact can burn methane by reducing sulfate.
00:33:35:07 - 00:33:47:20
Huub Op den Camp
So that regenerates sulfide in that places and methane is oxidized to carbon dioxide. So a lot of very exciting metabolism of microorganisms.
00:33:47:22 - 00:34:06:18
Abigail Acton
It seems like every time you look again, there's something else to discover. And all these discoveries seem to be really tip of the iceberg discoveries, because, I mean, that's the definition of a discovery. Of course, I'm being told a lot, but yeah, well, what is it? Well, why is this possible now? Is it is it because we've got different equipment or people looking at things differently, asking different questions?
00:34:06:20 - 00:34:28:22
Huub Op den Camp
Yeah. A lot of the things that are really important in that aspect is what you already mentioned and the improved DNA technologies that we have. So also in sequencing and becomes much cheaper and cheaper, the first human genome sequencing cost millions of dollars. If you now sequence your genome, you can do it for $1,000.
00:34:28:23 - 00:34:29:18
Abigail Acton
Yes. Amazing.
00:34:29:18 - 00:34:40:18
Huub Op den Camp
Is that that's amazing difference that also that makes it of course also sequencing DNA from the environment which learns is a lot about the bacteria living there without culturing.
00:34:40:24 - 00:34:41:15
Abigail Acton
You're right.
00:34:41:17 - 00:34:43:10
Huub Op den Camp
That's a very big advantage and.
00:34:43:10 - 00:35:04:09
Abigail Acton
That makes it faster, obviously. Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit what we were talking with Jane Jane, with regards to the the that the new abilities to to analyze so quickly. Fantastic this wonderful technology shining showing all sorts of insights into into things that were closed doors before and maybe prohibitive with cost and so on. Okay. Well, listen, I want to thank you very, very much for your time today.
00:35:04:09 - 00:35:20:02
Abigail Acton
That was very interesting. I particularly like the notion of the fact that we are moving so much closer to the ability to analyze this in real time and, maybe maybe limit the extent of devastation on communities living in or around areas of eruption. Fantastic. Thank you very much.
00:35:20:03 - 00:35:20:21
Jane Scarrow
You're welcome.
00:35:20:23 - 00:35:21:10
Huub Op den Camp
Thank you.
00:35:21:12 - 00:35:22:14
Stephan Kolzenburg
Thank you. Pleasure to be.
00:35:22:19 - 00:35:23:09
Stephan Kolzenburg
Nice to do.
00:35:23:15 - 00:35:41:05
Abigail Acton
Good. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thank you. Are you interested in what other EU funded projects are doing to uncover the secrets of what's going on beneath our feet? The Cordis website will give you an insight into the results of projects funded by the Horizon 2020 program that are working in this area.
00:35:41:07 - 00:36:00:05
Abigail Acton
The website has articles and interviews that explore the results of research being conducted in a very broad range of domains, from pollinators to pollution. There's something there for you. Maybe you're involved in a project or would like to apply for funding. Take a look at what others are doing in your domain. So come and check out the research that's revealing what makes our world tick.
00:36:00:07 - 00:36:13:07
Abigail Acton
We're always happy to hear from you. Drop us a line. Editorial at Cordis Don't Europa dot EU. Until next time.
The underwater explosion off Tonga on 14 January 2022 sent a shockwave travelling faster than 1 000 km/h, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology: almost as fast as the speed of sound. Sonic booms from the eruption were heard across the Pacific, including in Fiji and Vanuatu, and as far as Alaska, more than 9 000 km away. In La Palma, the volcano that erupted last year has spewed lava that swallowed over 1 000 homes and continues to hold temperatures of more than 500 degrees Celsius in some parts. So, what can the latest research into what have been called ‘Earth’s architects’ tell us about the lead-up to an eruption? Are we close to being able to track the evolution of an eruption in real time? Can we trace the mechanisms by mapping the crystals that appear in lava? And how can the organisms living in some of the most inhospitable parts of our planet help improve climate models? Stephan Kolzenburg took part in the DYNAVOLC project. When not monitoring volcanic activity in the field, Stephan is recreating lava flow in his lab, to model and predict how lava and magma will behave during an eruption. Jane Scarrow is also working on ways to predict eruptions and how they will evolve. Her VESPER project looked at processes in magmatic reservoirs beneath active volcanoes and she has also been involved in the response to the La Palma eruption. Huub Op den Camp explored how bacteria live in acidic volcanic ecosystems during the VOLCANO project, and how they use atmospheric methane. His work can help us understand how microbes mediate the flow of methane between the atmosphere and sources such as wetlands, which could improve climate models.
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Keywords
CORDIScovery, CORDIS, Volcanoes, DYNAVOLC, VESPER, VOLCANO, lava, magma, La Palma, Tonga, extremophile, bacteria, methane, eruption