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KAYLA IACOVINO: People tend to think
that we know everything about volcanoes and how they work.
But the truth is, they're a huge mystery.
All of the explosions at the surface
are driven by forces down in the guts of the volcano.
I want to take that eruption, rewind it
back into how it started, and to understand forces deep
within the belly of the volcano.
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Each of these rocks is telling us one story of one explosion.
And the geochemical clues left inside of these rocks
helps us understand what the volcano is capable of and then
what it might do in the future.
My name is Dr. Kayla Iacovino, and I'm
an experimental petrologist and volcanologists at Jacobs
and NASA Johnson Space Center.
An experimental petrologist rewinds the Earth's processes
to understand how the Earth makes rocks.
Geologists are storytellers.
That's our job, learning how to use
the tools that we've developed in order to tell the stories.
We try to tell the story of the Earth
or the story of the planets.
I grew up in Arizona where the geology is fabulous.
You can go anywhere in the state and see
textbook examples of any kind of geology that you want.
I also grew up watching "Star Trek" with my dad, with my mom.
There were big "The Next Generation" fans.
As I got older, I really realized what amazing stories
the universe of "Star Trek" tells.
Here's myself and some of my friends
a "Star Trek" convention in Las Vegas.
They have people in character walking around in costume.
It was awesome.
I'm a huge "Star Trek" fan.
That idea of exploration not only as a frontier
but as exploration of human nature
itself was really appealing to me.
SPEAKER 1: I've never seen anything so wondrous.
KAYLA IACOVINO: When I got into the science program
at Arizona State, I realized I wanted
to be able to physically explore these new places on our planet
that are completely foreign and other-worldly.
I've traveled to the southernmost active volcano
in the world, Erebus volcano in Antarctica,
a volcano called Mt.
Paektu which is on the border between China
and North Korea, central Africa, where there's a volcano
called Nyiragongo, which hosts the world's largest lava lake.
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Costa Rica is a wonderful place to study volcanoes not only
because it has a lot of active volcanoes,
but because it's one of the only places on Earth
where certain parts of the volcanic system
are accessible and exposed.
Turrialba and Irazu are both these incredible,
diverse landscapes.
In some areas, they're lush farmland
and in other places, completely desolate and devoid of life,
eerie and covered in dead trees and foliage that used
to be a thriving rainforest.
It shows you the stark power of destruction
to wreak devastation and bury entire towns,
cover towns in ash.
You know, people can lose their lives.
I realized that I'm privileged to come into these areas
and do something as esoteric as take a rock back
to a lab and measure what chemicals are in it
when these are the people who are
living with the outcomes of what the volcano is doing day
to day.
We're here in Costa Rica to collect
rocks that can tell us the story of these volcanoes, what
they're doing right now and what they've done in the past.
My particular focus is on what we call volatile elements.
So everything that you might find in a gas plume
coming off the top of a volcano before it leaves the volcano,
it's inside the rocks.
And these are things that turn into gas
when they reach to the surface.
Hydrogen, water, CO2, carbon, sulfur--
those things get locked into the rocks
that are then belched onto the surface by the volcano.
What we want to look for is pieces
of the liquid magma that was in existence in the magma chamber.
And how can we do that?
Luckily, we have these things called melt inclusions.
A melt inclusion is a little blob
of what was once liquid magma trapped inside of a crystal.
So you could think of a melt inclusion like a time capsule
or like a message in a bottle or even an insect trapped
in amber.
It's this thing that was there for a moment that's
now encapsulated and preserved for us to study later.
We need to find a sample that cooled very,
very quickly once it erupted.
Ash that has loose crystals inside
of it, that's the best stuff you want for melt inclusions.
We usually try to take samples from different parts
of the volcano so we're getting different pictures
of the story.
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We take all that stuff back to the lab.
And there, we can start to really dive into the details.
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These are some of the rocks we collected in the field
in Costa Rica, and that becomes starting material
for our experiments.
We load it into a very small capsule,
and now it's ready to become a miniature magma
chamber in our lab.
In order to create a magma chamber in the lab,
we use big machinery that can simulate the conditions
of the deep Earth.
So I'm talking very, very high pressures and very, very
high temperatures.
We can understand how the rock changes
if we increase our pressure and decrease our temperature.
If we can build our roadmap in pressure and temperature
space of where we think those rocks came from,
it now allows us to tell the story of the volcano
and of the plumbing system and where a magma chamber is.
Science is about plugging smaller puzzle pieces
into increasingly large puzzle pieces
and how everything fits together.
All of the volcanoes in Costa Rica are related to subduction,
and that's when you have two tectonic plates on the Earth
and they come into contact and one of them subducting
or slides underneath the other one.
We want to understand how carbon is
moving through our ecosystem.
We were able to discover that a tremendous amount of carbon
gets stored not just within the volcanoes,
but actually within this chunk of crust
and within microbial communities that sit right
above the subducting plate.
This has huge implications for the existence
and the proliferation of life on planets.
Are there organisms that are living off of the carbon that's
coming up in these systems?
If we want to say, which planets do we want to target for life,
maybe we should look for a planet
that has active subduction.
The majority of my career has been in studying the Earth.
And now, I work for Jacobs and NASA Johnson Space Center,
where I'm studying how all of these processes
work on other planets.
Planetary geology, as it's called,
is really pushing the limits of what we
know how to do as geologists.
When I want to say something about a volcano on Mars
or Venus or Mercury or even a planet outside
of our solar system, it's not as easy as just going there
and picking up a sample.
In most cases, we don't have a physical rock.
Instead, we might have sent a satellite to another planet,
and it's taken a picture of the surface.
And we can look at that picture and try
to estimate what we think the chemistry of the surface is.
One of the things we want to understand
is how elements are distributed throughout the universe
and throughout our solar system.
And how did they get distributed when our sun was born?
So applying all these skills to other planets
is fun and challenging because it really
makes you push the boundaries of what you think you can do.
When I pick up a rock in the field,
I get really excited because I know
that that rock has a tremendous number of stories to tell.
It's traveled maybe millions of miles and millions of years
to get to where it is today where I'm picking it up.
And it's sort of like the geologist in that moment,
you become a part of that rock's story.
You get to unlock this vast history of this rock
with the tools that we have available.
And I think a lot of that spirit of exploration
came from watching television shows like "Star Trek."
Keeping those things alive in the spirit of my work
is what really fuels it for me.
I think I could look back at myself as a 10-year-old girl
and tell her what I was doing and why I was doing it,
and she would approve.
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