The obvious danger, when you're working on a volcano, is dying.
We know that at any point things could go south in a bad, bad way.
We take respirators to deal with poisonous gases,
we take hard hats to deal with small ejecta from the volcano
...but there's only so much you can prepare.
When I've stood at the rim of an active volcano, I feel like I'm getting a window
inside the heart of our planet.
It's like looking into something from another world.
That is when you can get really great data
about the chemistry of the lava, about the makeup of the gases,
about how explosive the lavas might be,
and about how much pressure you're seeing in the magma chamber.
More people than ever before are living in areas that are volcanic hazards.
We have millions and millions of people who live around these amazing things, but that are also deadly.
My work involves looking at volcanoes in every different way you can imagine, to try to understand
what makes them tick, and help me someday predict how they're going to erupt.
I mean, that's really the holy grail of volcano research,
because we really want to save lives.
Field work when you’re studying volcanoes is different every single time.
First you’ve got to get to the area, and that may mean taking a helicopter in,
it may mean hiking through jungle-like vegetation or tromping through a desert.
Volcanoes are unpredictable, and that is because we don't have a good window inside of them.
It's not like you can drop a little robot down and have it measure everything that's going on.
What we're really looking for when we're out there collecting data
is information that shows a change.
Is the composition of the gas different?
Do we see that the volcano is inflating?
Is the ground actually moving up or moving down as the magma chamber fills or evacuates?
A volcano could be building up pressure inside of it without any outward indications.
We make hazard maps, we look at old lava flows, map out where the lava has gone previously,
and then say, “okay, worst case scenario, what could this volcano do?”
A lot of the data that we collect when we're out in the field is used to make models
and help to try to forecast eruptions.
We can't do that yet with any degree of certainty, but we're getting better.
There have been many deaths, actually, of volcano scientists while working on active volcanoes,
and it's very sad.
But we’re prepared to take that risk, because we think that what we’re doing brings value
to our greater society around us, and we want to add to
that body of knowledge out there about our planet.
All of us have a really healthy respect for all the different parts of the natural world.
It's some sort of hell-scape, but it's also beautiful.
The lava is this brilliant, brilliant red and orange and it's constantly moving.
It never stops. It's like an angry ocean.
You get to see the freshest earth on the planet.
So it really, to me, shows in the clearest possible way that we have a living planet.
And that is why I love it - that's why I keep coming back.
In another episode of Science In The Extremes, a biologist in Antarctica
vlogs about the extreme conditions in which he conducts research.
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