Science Club: Rick Wunderman

Is that money in particular put toward the sort of preventative research you're describing?

Frankly, it's more than that—it's just basic. Even in the U.S. or Japan, where there's dozens of volcanoes active, there's only a few percent, on the order of 5 or 10 percent, that have a single instrument dedicated to them. The idea of dedicating more instruments and taking them out into the field and making sure they're robust and work and don't need constant care and feeding and the data are valid—it's expensive. It takes helicopters sometimes, it takes new instruments, it takes batteries. It's very real stuff. It's not just things that grow on trees that you can do, it's not a matter of looking more carefully. These are specialized instruments for seismology.

The entire Aleutian Islands chain, which are far from people, but yet tens of thousands of people go over them all the time in airplanes. We have actually an international responsibility to monitor and watch our volcanoes and try to steer the public away from hazard. You know, unfortunately, it's not as cheap as we'd like, but it's a lot cheaper than a single airplane running into one, one time, and all the people dying. Everyone would say, What could we have done to prevent that? This is the kind of thing we do to prevent that. You try to be proactive and try to think of logical ways to instrument dangerous volcanoes. It's a big job.

The irony in that coming from a Louisiana governor is that a lot of people said that after Hurricane Katrina. What could we have done to shore up the levees?

Exactly. I'm a geologist and I sat in many classes and we used to draw the meanders of the Mississippi River. They are incredible. The thing has wandered all over the place historically. Then they began to channelize it—built levees to keep it stable. That's great, but they're very expensive to maintain. Geologically, it's like trying to capture flies to maintain this thing. It's a huge maintenance expense to protect people next to a big river like that. So it goes with the Gulf Coast and hurricanes.

That's why I sort of see that he must have been coming from a basis that doesn't see science as a way to move forward. That's how I view the world, but of course, I'm a scientist. How would I as a scientist try to prevent this? I would instrument, monitor, put sensors, study how they failed in the past. The same thing goes for volcanoes. To protect human life and property is numero uno.

Studying volcanoes isn't about the end of the world. But we're talking about volcanoes around U.S. territory. Airplanes may leave with U.S. citizens, flying from Asia and back, and they're flying in the dark of night, and it's often foggy. And we don't know what the volcanoes are doing. There's no way from the cockpit to see an ash cloud. It doesn't look any different from a weather cloud. You can't fly over it—sorry, a big eruption flies higher than cruising altitude. The worst thing you can do is step on the gas and try to get through it, because you're just going to suck in more ash. Those [Survey] guys are in earnest trying to reduce risk.

I was a little saddened. It's both funny and sad. I have some sympathies for [Jindal's] views in the sense of not wanting to spend money. But from a young childhood I had a friend who was an economics nut and he used to tell me about John Maynard Keynes and the ideas of his, and that is, basically—in a time like this, there aren't many alternatives but to spend money. When the private sector stops spending money, the public sector has to take it up and start spending money and filling in the blank to stimulate the economy any way we can. I don't like going into debt, but what can I say? It was a Republican Congress that for a long time were in control—anyway. Back to the hardcore questions about volcanoes.

There are oddball things that you wouldn't expect. Lakes of green water in craters that are hot and boiling. Some of just humdrum and never even erupt, and some are doing incredible gymnastic things that you just never would imagine. For example, ice and lava interacting make for a lot of wonderful things. Iceland has subglacial, I mean continental glaciers, so they're a kilometer thick—subglacial volcanoes erupting under this ice cap. Often there's a sag that develops in the ice and very often a pit, and then you can see down and see the volcano. My favorite part is as much as a month later, out will coming rushing this gigantic—it's like the Mississippi River unleashed from under the ice where so much water was melted and held by what we call an ice dam. It's hard to visualize, but the ice closes certain closed basins because it's heavy. When you get enough water in the closed basin, it finally escapes. It's a catastrophic event called a glacier burst.

Volcanoes can be enormous drivers of destruction! Go to the Pompeii exhibit here in town right now in D.C. and spend one minute in front of those exhibits and say to yourself, My god, these were comfortable, happy, productive, artistic, cultured people, and they were buried by a destructive event that happened in stroke of time. It all was preserved and embalmed in this volcanic graveyard. It was 1,600 years or so before it was discovered. Now we can see it in an incredible moment of time. Some of the mosaics had over 1 million pieces in it, incredible stuff! And we can see it because a volcano buried them and preserved it. But let's not let that happen to us.

I'm very much against getting buried by volcanoes. To get back to the economic question, is this sort of research stimulative? The kind of research money that goes to the U.S. Geological Survey?

That's an interesting question. You maybe could say, how could we make it the most stimulative? I think that's worth asking, but to tell you the truth, I don't know. People who are a lot smarter than me in the Government Accounting Office or somewhere could say, Well, we could get an army of graduate students, and they could make equipment that's more robust, lasts longer, is cheaper to deploy, you could shoot it out from a helicopter and not have to land, and all kinds of improvements, and that might be better stimulus than buying over-the-counter hardware and putting it out in the field. But I don't know. It's hard for me to judge. I'm not an economist.

It's been a very depressed sector for a long time. For a while, there was this huge slump in seismic exploration for oil, which drives a lot of the product sales. I think the government would be better off saying to a lot of agencies, We want to support your endeavor, we want to give you a certain amount of money, we'll make it vary a little bit, but we want to fix it so that you get better every year. What happens instead is a decay. After the last volcano eruption, the amount of funding decays and, frankly, it often falls to zero after a certain point. Instead of that sawtooth pattern, I'm a believer in a more level funding. Proactive leadership, which I hope we have now, can hopefully be more insightful in that way.

You mentioned the United States's responsibility to monitor our volcanoes for air traffic. Do other nations live up to their responsibilities in this regard?

It's as variable as the number of countries. Some countries have only one active volcano and they put up a flag that says, Always active, stay away from it. And that's how they deal with it. Other countries have an enormously variable thing with real-time—the Japanese I'm thinking, who are very proactive and careful to monitor. African countries and poor countries as you might imagine don't have a lot of infrastructure and they can't afford it. So it's a burdensome thing to have to have them do it. When an eruption comes, they're afraid to pick up the phone because their boss told them never to make a long-distance call—this kind of stuff.

That said, as the Internet and more tools are around, I think it's getting better and better. But a lot of countries don't have access to the Internet at all. I know a guy from Cameroon who was here a few years ago, a full college professor, he didn't have access to the Internet, studying an active volcano. He could see something and would want to advertise that this is a hazard, but he'd have enough trouble getting his own country alerted, let alone the rest of the world.

About this anti-science sentiment that persists on the American political right. What about the serious anti-science views? Is there a fundamental discrepancy between the tenants of geology and the beliefs of Creationism?

Of course. I wish it wasn't so. I have to respect their religious beliefs, but to confuse that with public education in schools and museums is a very different thing.

It's interesting with the big anniversary of 200 years from Darwin that it's been that long and it's still a raging battle. I think of Darwin as a geologist, by the way. He got involved in biology and he made a huge impact there, but we still revere him as a geologist. He had a lot of great insights in that realm. For example: coral reefs growing in a ring around a volcano that subsiding leaves an atoll shaped coral reef system. That's sort of mysterious if you don't think of the whole process. That's a remarkable insight.

Have you ever heard an ultra-conservative explanation for why volcanoes work the way they do?

I have. I went to school in a place where every laundromat was littered with literature from religious extremists. Watchtower was one of them. I grew up in a town in California that had a press of this kind. They had a lot of extremist cartoons and vignettes about what these things were.

What was the explanation?

You know, sinners, this sort of thing, not going to church enough, gays. We weren't following some religious doctrine and so we were being punished and we needed to atone. This is difficult—I'm a government employee. We have to talk about volcanoes.

I don't know, what do you think? Do you see this as an anti-science thing from Jindal?

I think he picked up on the volcano research probably because he had assistants looking for something that lent itself well to a metaphor. Certainly the image of pouring $140 million in cash into a burning furnace is striking. What would happen if you poured that much money into a volcano?

You mean dollar bills? What form of currency?

Say single dollar bills.

Most volcanoes are not actually hot at any one moment. Kilauea has lava flows. If you went and poured that money into a lava tube or lava flow, probably before those dollar bills even hit the lava, they'd be on fire. Many volcanoes that are active are erupting from one vent, and it comes out sporadically. The money would mostly be litter.

The furnace is a common metaphor. Even with technical people, when I say, Let's make an instrument to put on the volcano, they say, "Oh my god, what temperature does it have to be able to withstand?" It's not like we're putting it in lava.

Actual lava flows are sort of a special case. Many of the most dangerous volcanoes in fact are doing things that spread materials vast distances. Lava flows aren't going that far—a mile, maybe, several miles.

For example, Chaitén in South America has been having explosive eruptions that go 600 to 800 miles, something like that. Big plumes of ash, visible from space. That's a more explosive phenomena that disperses the stuff over wide areas.

How is global warming affecting volcano activity?

That's a question we don't know the answer to. The deal is sort of this: If you have big eruptions—like Pinatubo was a big eruption, and that was in 1991 and so we had good instrumentation—it cooled the globe a degree or two Centigrade, you know, 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

It cooled the globe? The eruption?

Yes. It's actually heating the upper atmosphere, but that's screening the heating of the land's surface. People living near the land's surface, the oceans, etc., get a cooling effect. That wasn't even a particularly big eruption. A really big eruption, 500 times big or something, would have a bigger impact. It wouldn't be 5 degrees Fahrenheit, it would be 20 degrees or more. And sustained longer, too, especially if the eruption kept going for a long time.

Even when big eruptions erupted and there was cooling, there were a lot of—I would use the word perturbations. There were a lot of unexpected things. There were a lot of places that seemingly got hotter than usual. All kinds of non-intuitive things went. It's pretty safe to say that big eruptions would probably lead to cooling. Some people would say we need a volcano to erupt.

NewScientist ran an article this week about geoengineering—whether we should hack the planet to stop global climate change. One of the possibilities the article proposed is firing fine dust into the atmosphere. Is that modeled on volcanic activity?

I think it is. Nuclear winter is like that, too. There's a Carl Sagan warning that a bunch of nuclear explosions would trigger a time when the climate would change dramatically as a result. People have proposed even triggering a volcano or seeding dust purposefully.

I think it's very interesting and provocative. The problem I've seen that most scientists have in responding to surveys is this great reluctance to tinker with big-scale things. It'd be one thing to do an acre, but we live on the planet. We don't have many chances to get it right. I heard another one, by the way, that was sprinkling reflective materials on the ground's surface.

I've also heard launching an array of mirrors into space.

These are all really interesting ideas, and I'm glad people are thinking about it and proposing it, but the public at large has to be sold on it. I'm sure you can make a stab at getting a volcano to erupt. But there were polls and much to my surprise, I found a lot of people weren't even interested in doing any tinkering at all. They felt there would be a lot of blame, we couldn't really win, even if we learned a lot of things. It's sort of a Frankenstein metaphor.

Polls of scientists or—

Polls of volcanologists, actually, about taking a volcano in a remote place and wiring it—so you could study it really thoroughly—and doing things like injecting water way down deep into it, to prod it, to shake it awake, so to speak.

Is that how you get a volcano to erupt?

I forget now if they posed one that was already erupting mildly or slumbering. In any case, I was surprised to see that most of the respondents were quite negative about the idea of getting into this sort of thing. I myself—my dad was an electrical engineer. So I have a little more willingness to experiment in that kind of way than most.

To a layperson it does sound like evil mad scientist territory.

How many James Bond movies seem to have someone hanging out in a volcano with deviant motives? It's got a negative association.

What about the real danger associated with volcanoes? When was the last time an American was killed by a volcano?

I don't know, but it may have been 1981—57 people at Mount St. Helens. Fortunately, most of the urban areas are not too close to erupting volcanoes, but there are other parts of the world where you don't have to walk very far to be standing on one.

A surprising danger is just going into a low-lying area and being smothered by CO2 or other volcanic gases.

There is a suggestion that beneath Yellowstone, there is a supervolcano—

—No doubt about it. It exists.

Is there a chance it could erupt soon?

Yes, but low probability. I visited the park when I was a kid, but I never even knew it was a volcano. It was one of my epiphanies as a volcanologist. People should know that there's some risk going there and some risk driving on the road, but it's probably lower than the risk of walking down the street in D.C.

I should dial back here: What is a supervolcano?

It's a lay term. It hasn't been defined in precise science. Mount St. Helens erupted on the order of a cubic kilometer of the dense stuff that came out. It got inflated in terms of actual volume of pumice.

That includes ash and—

Mostly ash and molten material. It came out pretty passively in these domes that look like ice cream scoops in the middle of the crater now.

Pinatubo was about 12 or so times that. The big eruptions that we talk about in the geologic record start at 10 times that big.

How do we know about them?

The big ones left ash a foot thick in Los Angeles, Texas, Nebraska, and all around Yellowstone. You trace these back to Yellowstone and you say, my god!, these were huge, thousand cubic kilometer eruptions, on that order. It went to every part of the continent, more or less.

Another thing that's poorly recognized is that when a volcano does that, it doesn't form a huge majestic peak any more. Crater Lake is a good example of that—it's a stump of a majestic peak. But inside is a giant crater. That's because so much stuff came out that the rocks collapsed back down into kind of a void, and it formed what we call a caldera. That's a different kind of volcano.

These calderas are extremely large eruptions—when they form a caldera, it's a whole class of eruption to itself. By supervolcano, people usually mean a big caldera. There are a whole bunch of them in the United States, by the way, and fortunately—thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey in good part—we understand how they evolved, what their roots are, their lifespan, and all kinds of things. It turns out that many of them are in the Rocky Mountains and they're much older. They were uplifted by the Rocky Mountains, so we can see the roots of them. And, amazingly enough, they created huge ore deposits. That was a major driver to understand them. What's the story here? What's all this ore doing, and what's it doing by this weird old volcano? The Survey scientists figured it out and they deserve a huge amount of credit.

The whole Sierra Nevada is kind of like this, too. It's a whole bunch of roots of volcanoes that are now gone. They've been eroded away; now you're looking at stuff that was miles down in the ground and cooled as granite. It never erupted, in other words. This is the stuff that was molten once. This just gets geologists all excited. The USGS had some brilliant people working on it: Very well funded, did research explaining processes that we never would have been able to see just looking at the current manifestation. It's near and dear to the hearts of everyone in volcanology.

Image of the Ijen volcano complex in Indonesia (top) used with permission under a Creative Commons license with Flickr user flydime. Panaramic image of the crater of Rano Raraku on Easter Esland borrowed with permission under a Creative Commons license with Flickr user iko.