StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Volcanoes, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

[Music] this is star talk i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist this is a cosmic queries edition in the coronaverse as we continue to have our guests join us from wherever they are in the universe uh but but first the way i got my co-host chuck chuck nice hey how are you doing chuck what's happening i'm actually all right breakfast neil i'm having okay they're very nice there's more than i cared to know about you this morning that's fine i know you don't care about my my nutrition you're tweeting at chuck nice comic always good to follow you there and so today's cosmic queries it's on a topic we have yet to really jump into hahaha we're talking about volcanoes ah i see what you did there you see what i did there wasn't that clever of me okay no none of us have any such expertise so we coned earth to find and there are a few of them out there a few i think they're called volcanologists um and we found one who works with the smithsonian institution uh in washington dc and a welcome janine kip kripner thank you very much for having me here um first of all please don't go jumping into volcanoes i do not recommend that is an important question clearly for 2020 we have not been appraising the gods [Laughter] so you're a volcanologist which has to also mean that you're fundamentally a geologist is that correct there are different types of volcanologists so gas physics but i guess i am a geology based volcanologist so i look at a lot of rocks a lot of rocks and the the smithsonian global vulcanism program like what is that so it's this really neat program where we're basically recording and keeping track of the world's volcanic eruptions i'm glad somebody's doing that that's right good good okay thanks for letting us in on this fact that somebody's taking care of business okay yeah i know there are um volcano observatories around the world they do the day-to-day monitoring um and making sure we're trying to make sure the communities are safe but we collate all of that data so that we have this wealth of knowledge about volcanoes so we can look back and study them and look for any patterns or have a better understanding of what volcanoes do so how many volcanoes are being actively sort of monitored at this moment oh actively monitored i don't know but do you guys know how many are actively erupting today no no no no what's your guess uh i'm i'm gonna say too many that's my guess that's where i'm too many many volcanoes i'd say 150. 44 ongoing eruptions but there are over 1400 volcanoes that we consider to be potentially active so that means they've erupted within the last 10 000 years so in the holocene um and that's that's a baby for a volcano that's not so the whole scene is is that what we're now calling our our time the time of civilization uh i've been on the scene the fringe of the debate on that um but hollistein is the last 10 to 12 000 so that's that's when humans have had agriculture and when we've been sort of doing our thing creating civilization right well we base it um we use that age because in the northern hemisphere that's when a lot of the ice sheets came down and actually removed a lot of the recent before that um records of volcanic activity so from 10 to 12 thousand thousand years onwards we have a much better record of what volcanoes have actually done oh i see so the ice age wiped your slate clean a little bit oh okay interesting so now where where do you stand on the anthropocene i'm just curious i'm just curious you're trying to pick a fight that's why i asked the question chuck step away from the microphone step away as this spokesperson today they would ask us to stop polluting the planet but they don't care about that okay that's a whole other show chuck talking about yeah the anthropocene yeah yeah so so with with volcanoes so i i can't with the number 150 because i i think there's active ones and then there's sure but then they're ones that like could blow at any moment that was that closer to what my number would be maybe um so the ones that could start an eruption any time would be that 1400 plus um so while they might not be showing any signs of erupting today or tomorrow even next year that can change very quickly so there are four we have to prioritize somehow which volcanoes we're going to put our resources and our monitoring into so that's a good start is looking at okay which ones have erupted recently which ones have young magmatic systems underneath them that might start anytime soon so magmatic means just molten rock magmatic that's the like the verb or another the adjective yeah it's like if you have a lava lamp above the surface it's a lava lamp if you put it below the surface it's a magma lamp so magma below lava oh interesting so so magma that's hit the surface it has a new name even though it's the same stuff yeah i mean it does change because now it's atmospheric pressure so it starts to crystallize and cool down and it releases a lot more gas very quickly so there are changes but it's the same stuff okay i i've never thought about that okay so you wouldn't speak you wouldn't speak of magma rivers flowing down a volcano those are lava rivers that moments ago were magma coming up out of the caldera yes okay and do you do you sell magma hats because i've been trying to get time i just want one of those magma hats i love them so much um i might have to make them black like the rock once it's cooled down instead of red you had me at black janine and i and i wanted to make fun of the fact that you had two different words but in my world uh we have three different words for the same thing right so there's uh so there's an asteroid moving through space if it's visible as it descends through the atmosphere then it's a meteor and then after it hits the ground and you pick it up it's a meteorite yeah same damn thing and it's all the same thing same damn thing yeah you can actually be confused well yeah they're very complicated these astrophysicists so let's start with questions this must have been a very fertile topic because who doesn't think about volcanoes in our lives without a doubt yeah every day so you know what we normally do we go out to our uh various incarnations on the internet and we ask people to send in their inquiries uh we always start with the patreon patron because uh they give us money and uh quite frankly we just we love that transaction it's a lovely channel chuck we need a more a less crass way to communicate this information that's that's why i love it so much anyway okay here we go so let's start with christopher zappell on patreon and he asked uh are there any new developments with the super volcano under yellowstone and i will add to christopher's question uh as an addendum what is the super volcano under yellowstone so janine what's up with a super volcano i should have placed a bit that this would be the first question i knew it was coming so super volcano is actually what i don't like it's a word that means a volcano that can produce these largest style of eruptions what we call we have a vei or a volcano explosivity index which goes from smaller eruptions to the biggest of the big so this has been coined a super eruption the biggest style of eruption and a super volcano is a volcano that can produce a super eruption yellowstone has produced two of these and its entire history so while it may never do one again um and at the moment there's no signs that it even has enough magma to do that anytime soon it's just a word that says that it's capable because it has in the past of producing these very large eruptions as far as new developments go people are always trying to learn more about this volcano basically getting more understanding of the subsurface of the geothermal system which is not really related to the subsurface and the yellow stone volcano observatory which is part usgs part university is part of their organization so usgs united states geological survey yes usgs yeah but it's not just them it's a group of organizations that are monitoring this volcano and constantly looking at um the geology to understand what style of eruptions have happened before and therefore what it might do in the future but so how how when when was the last eruption however um the last eruption i think yellowstone the last eruption was about 70 000 years ago and that was just a lava flow um in fact the last 50 eruptions yellowstone most of them have just been lava flows in other words it's just the potential for the eruption it's i mean it's not that's it just it could i mean that's like and it has it has and therefore it could or maybe janine just just admit it say we have no idea yeah because i couldn't say it that's not a real thing it's just not a really good like descriptor because it's like me saying i'm a super dad i never met my kids i don't play child support but i couldn't most of the eruptions are much much smaller but it's become this it's like the adult version of the monster under the beard at this point all right okay let's move on let's next question let's go to christopher fowler dr tyson and dr krippner in regards to volcanic emissions and climate change does volcanic activity release more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than human activity now you know climate obfuscators often cite volcanic activity as one of the main contributors to greenhouse gases on earth so so janine where do volcanoes fit in the equation in the in the greenhouse equation so looking at carbon dioxide alone which as we know is a very large culprit humans were released through fossil fuels and our activities 40 to 100 times more than all volcanoes so under the ocean and on land there's a huge program and the deep carbon observatory that's been actually looking into this and no we are releasing so much more than volcanoes so volcanoes are not the problem they shouldn't even be part of the conversation because they're going to do what they're going to do anyway right yeah they are they helped us get our atmosphere in the beginning and they're a very important part of the carbon natural carbon cycle and our atmosphere and all these nutrients but as far as what we're seeing now with climate change or um global warming or whatever you want to call it they are not the culprit we are let me invert the question so if you could find a way to tap a volcano releasing some of the gas pressures so that it never blows and maybe use the energy from that tapping process to drive the power needs of a city that might otherwise be leveled under under a lava slide you're saying that's not good for the greater balance of the earth's ecosystem because earth needs some rate of volcanoes to sustain its balance is that is that a true statement oh yeah i think so i mean not that we can't we can't stop eruptions that's something we cannot do we are so tiny on the scale of these enormous enormous systems but they're a hugely important part of life on this planet um just for like for life for uh soils for the atmosphere for nutrients so no we shouldn't be stopping them that's just what our planet does that is part of us living here when it happens when people are involved of course that's heartbreaking and devastating but it is something that we have to live with i just love the fact that neil degrasse tyson turned into a bond villain just then it's just kill the volcano that's very cool yeah be careful what you wish for right if you get rid of all the volcanoes something else go happens down the line 2020 please stop saying stuff like that all right all right chuck one more question before we go to break okay all right um i love this this is karen netherland from facebook and uh karen says hi this question is from jackson who is six years old jackson would like to know why do volcanoes explode oh ooh that's a really good question yeah we actually don't have time to get to jackson's question right now but when we return we will find out why volcanoes blow in the first place on star talk star talk we're back cosmic queries the volcano edition of cosmic queries i got chuck nice and as always chad yes sir yes sir and we have our volcano expert they do exist in this world janine krippner janine works for smithsonian and if you uh heard our first segment you caught a little bit of an accent in her and you hail from originally where janine new zealand and when i'm in new zealand my accent is much stronger i promise so thanks for tamping it down for us so we can understand your english i visited new zealand a couple years ago it's a beautiful place and i would return in a heartbeat and of course i visited hobbiton yeah and we the whole family went and my son didn't he wanted to move there he just wanted to live in hobbiton i don't blame him that's actually just sort of up the road from where i live it's a beautiful place very cool very cool so chuck we left off with a question from a six-year-old kid named jackson and what was that question right and jackson wanted to know why do volcanoes explode back to basics janine what do you have for us that's a really great question so once we get magma high enough down way deep deep down below it's right magma is rising towards the surface because it's less dense than the rock around it so if you pour oil into water the oil rises because it's less dense same thing once you get it closer to the surface that magma has a lot of gas in it very very gassy stuff a whole lot of different kinds of gas chuck is gassy all the time i've known i i hope you're okay with that well i eat up it's because i eat a lot of vegetables that's all good it's healthy i'm just glad we're on zoom right now and not well thanks for playing along there to me okay go on so volcanoes can be just as dangerous if not more um once you get them closer to the surface there's less pressure because there's less rock on top of the magma everything's being pulled down because of gravity so that pressure is reducing so if you think of a bottle of soda when you get it straight out of the store you can't see the gas you know there's gas in it but that gas is under pressure it's inside the liquid it's in solution once you take the cap off that's releasing the pressure and that gas can start to come out if you shake it up and take the cap off that's essentially what an explosive volcanic eruption is you have this gas coming out so quickly that it's violently ripping apart the fluid or in this case the magma or the rock so that's why it's not just a single pop it's not just a single amount of pressure trying to pop a lid it's once that does pop all these gases now want to continue coming out yeah yeah it can be a bit of what we think can happen is it can be a wave that goes down that conduit of the magma once you have a more of an open system so it's already made its way to the surface you can have more discrete eruptions or explosions we call those volcanion or if you have runnier magma you can get strombolian eruptions but yeah if you have the magma coming up hasn't erupted yet it's essentially like shaking up a bottle of coke and taking the lid off so you've classified types of eruptions yes so volcanian is where you have these volcanic ash plumes and volcanic ash is not smoke it is pulverized volcanic rock and gases so that's when you have an ash plume that comes out and then it detaches eventually and then you range up to your very large eruptions which we call plenion which is from the vesuvius 79ed eruption but named after pliny the altar who was there um and scaling it back to the other end when we have runny of magmas we have strombolian eruptions we have hawaiian eruptions which is what we saw in hawaii when that was still erupting i was going to guess that i was going to guess that oh good good game the hawaiian eruptions yeah but we do have plenty of other other types of options too but those are the main ones okay all right cool so we tell jackson it's like open up the bottle bottle of soda outside please outside after you shake it that's popular but before we get to our next question um janine when i visited new zealand not too long ago just a couple of years ago i visited christ church and they were still recovering from a major earthquake that had occurred there and i'm just wondering does proximity to geologic activity enhance people's interest to want to study it well i always loved volcanoes um i'm pretty sure i was born that way i don't remember when i started but i'm the only person that i know from my hometown who's a volcanologist so while i'm sure it does in some ways we have an extremely active geologic country in new zealand we're actually on a major plate boundary but the plate boundary changes it's a subduction zone in the north island and there's more of a sort of it's moving it's a mountain building zone in the south island and then there's a weird transition zone in the middle and then in the north island we're also rifting apart so it's a very complicated region we have um the potential for a lot of different corruption centers as well as earthquakes and tsunamis and landslides and they're all related i mean the moving plates the existence of volcanoes tsunamis they all it's all a family of earth getting pissed off oh yeah big heavy family now if you were if you wanted to be a volcanologist from very early on you still have your eyebrows so it seems to me you would lose those every time you leaned into a volcano to look in these are painted on i've only nearly lost uh eyebrows or or you know i'm here once um but no i haven't leaned over a crater looking into lava yet so i'll let you know the eyebrow status after that gotcha okay i want a full report i'll let you know all right chuck what else do you have yeah that's pretty good actually that kind of um it's a perfect segue into um the jezreel addicts from instagram his question or her question not sure uh says hey neil big fan here and hey janine everybody seems to be asking about the volcanoes themselves uh but i'm more interested in the equipment what ways are there to analyze volcanoes and how far can we reach into a volcano thanks love love star talk and i'll just say thank you to his last statement because it was a compliment but i don't need to actually say it but withholding compliments from you yes i'm recording compliments from myself you know okay yeah you're tough too yes so janine are you in full moon suit when you go you know go into calderas what what's what's your standard equipment so going into cold air is so this i should probably say the difference between a crater and a cold air so going into a crater which i've done it did not have lava in it most of them don't have lava in it um where this is a caldera uh you mentioned you've been to yellowstone so most all of that area within the park is the cold air it's just so big you can't see it um but if you are sampling lava um you can have that space suit looking thing which is basically to protect you from the heat if you have to be there long enough but if you run up grab a sample of lava run away again there was some great footage of people doing that with their 2018 kilowatt eruption you don't need that so you just need to be quick um our technology i noticed that i visited vesuvius in italy and that thing i don't know when it last erupted if not pompeii but uh i didn't see any lava but it was hot it was it was hot i went down there to get a closer picture i said i can't get any closer and nothing was glowing nothing was flowing so i felt like the really inadequate stuff like i would never be a volcanologist no probably not you're not you're not tough enough sorry um i have been in a lava tube that was so hot my eyeballs were drying out that's the hottest i've been um near and that was two-year-old lava so it was mostly cool and solidified at that point but no they can get very dangerously hot um so floor is lava not a good game so you do have a special equipment do you uh do you have like um do you stuff to repel down the side of the wall that sort of stuff too like mountain climbing things yeah depending on the type of field work you're doing so there's a huge range in field work whether you're collecting rock samples whether you're collecting gas whether you're mapping um everything that's around there whether you're looking at temperature with your there are so many different things to do on a volcano and each one of them is their own specialty so it seems to me everything you just said can be done with drones and robots no no you cannot replace us with robots you got to qualify that i mean that's that's like me saying um no a robot cannot tell jokes you know like you don't want the robot right i don't want the robot to tell jokes but robots can't tell jokes so why why could you not why could you not replace you with the robot but i got one uh what college did the robot go to what college did the world go to solid state university that supposed to be geology jerk joke a bad one so there are a lot of things that we need to see in the field for ourselves so when we're going out there we're basically looking at everything around us to try and understand what this volcano has done before so if you have a drone and it takes even high resolution photographs or if even if it gets samples which would be very time consuming we do use drones when it's dangerous there are absolutely good uses for drones but there's so much more that we can do as humans with all of the experience that we have knowing what to look at when you have this huge area even when a crater craters are really really big you know you said you looked into vesuvius that's you know they get much much bigger than that and we are tiny if you look at photos of people on craters so there are more um there's much more analytical thinking that we can do with our experience instead of sitting in a drone saying look at that go look at that get that sample and things like collecting gas you need to get it at the vent in a lot of cases and you can get samples using drones higher up but by then you have the gases are diffusing and so drones are absolutely useful but it's still very important that we get in the field as well chuck sounds to me like janine wants to keep her job [Laughter] you're welcome to come and tell jerks [Laughter] sounds good sounds good all right um let us move on to uh i just like the name this is a do russell okay and do russell says from instagram can a mountain ever form into a volcano well a lot of volcanoes are mountains right um and if you have a mountain area that is a volcano you can grow new cones which some people might call a new volcano if you're looking at mountain building ranges often those are made of things like older granite or the areas that aren't really volcanically active that might be more difficult to get a volcano to form there because the bag may still make its way through the subsurface and everything's under pressure down there so it's going to find the easiest way to the surface so yes it absolutely could um it really depends on the easiest way that the magnet can get to the surface in that area so i mean the magnet is opportunistic is what you're saying yeah yes i mean it's already come all this way like hundred tens to hundreds of kilometers towards the surface right yeah so pretty hard working but when it gets to that point it's like i can't do no more i just i just can't so i got you you know if you look at all the granite in the world that's failed eruptions technically that's granite is magma reservoirs that froze that stopped that didn't erupt and slowly crystallized below the surface so if you look at granitic mountain chain ranges all of that is a magma that never managed to make its streams as an eruption isn't mount rushmore grant what's mount rushmore made of i don't actually know her sorry i think mount rushmore is made of american exceptionalism [Laughter] lost dreams all right let's get one more before the break okay here we go this is um this is diego herrera from instagram he says greetings from colombia uh how does the temperature see what he says that's what he says he said it's just like that too that's how he said he said greetings from colombia anyway he says how does the temperature distribution of flowing lava change as it comes out of the erupting volcano specifically how long does it take for the lava to solidify so jeannie i've always wondered that because you see the lava come out it looks like it's hardening in situ right for the part that's but then it breaks and keeps going so uh what what's going on there as this thing is flowing but hardening at the same time yeah so that's a really good question um so first of all starting out in celsius because again sorry from new zealand um magma or lava at the very beginning coming out the more sticky more explosive style of lavas we call rhyolites those are around 800 degrees ish and then we go all the way through 800 degrees celsius celsius just like a million degrees fahrenheit basically i got to take a quick break we'll come back to learn more about the temperature of the lava that comes out of volcanoes when star talk returns star talk we're back cosmic queries the volcano edition so we're learning about what happens to lava magma becoming lava is it freezing is it flowing what's it doing and tell me that temperature that it is temperature takes to liquify rock what temperature is that so it depends on the rock it depends on the composition of the rock your lower temperature compositions like rhyolite around 800 degrees ish it will take a few hundred when you we're looking at our basaltic lavas like a kilauea 1000 to 1200 degrees celsius so extremely hot so when you have those lava flows or um across the entire range all of it can form lava flows when you come up when it comes out of the surface as the crust is cooling very very quickly that's when it turns to black or grey of some kind very quickly if you have a really thin lava flow it will cool a lot um faster it can still take i don't know i don't actually know i'm going to guess days to weeks if it's a thinner lava flow of a few meters and you can get lava flows that are tens of meters and those can take months to years wow and so it really depends on how much lava you have the thickness of the lava and how much of it is coming out but it can take a very very long time it's amazing wow well so this is cool then uh uh because kf k uh fudge uh asked this it's perfect tie-in if lava moves so slowly why is it so destructive i mean you know i guess you know get out of the way is really not not the way to hang out in the cartoon and i never understood the cartoons where there's a ball rolling down the hill and they're just running away from the ball rather than just stepping to the side never understood that right that's a very good hazard's advice away from the hill but you might is that because of these temperatures is that really the big i mean aside from the fact that you basically have slow-moving rock that's going to consume whatever's in its path but is it the temperature primarily that makes it so destructive and so dangerous some of it is pretty quick we saw that with the fissure eights um kilauea 2018 event that was very rapidly moving lava but even with the very small slow moving ones you can usually out walk um lava but it will bulldoze everything in its path so if you have a town in the way it's going to go through everything but with the fast-moving lavas it can destroy everything and create can create fires it can have a lot of very dangerous gases coming off it and it's also extremely hot so there's a there are a lot of hazards that are around lava flows tell me about pyroclastic flow oh goody yeah i will so when you're talking about pyroclastic flows lava flows are very slow pyroclastic flows are essentially these exploding rapid avalanches of solid rock and very hot gas that race down the volcano or away from the bin very high speed you cannot outrun them and they will destroy everything in their path so they are like the nightmares of volcanoes these things so is that like in the movies when you see the big cloud that goes down the side of the volcano first that's the pyroclastic flow yes like dante's peak they actually did a really good pyroclastic flow in dante's peak um so they're incredibly dangerous so that'll kill you too even though it's not lava it's it's very hot and that'll kill you too many ways would you say very volcano when you say very hot what's the temperature we're talking about am i going to get like burned alive i mean how exactly am i going to die am i going to be covered and encased in an ash am i going to burn up and all my flesh is going to peel off or chuck [Laughter] janine how will chuck die yeah and i'm not talking about anybody else janine i'm just talking about me um you can we can have a longer conversation about this later if you'd like but specifically with pyroclastic flows the temperature is extremely dangerous um so if you do survive that you're looking at intense third degree burns over much of your body especially anything that's exposed and you're looking at lung damage especially if you're not wearing any kind of proper gas mask so the damage to the lungs and the esophagus can be very dangerous as well that can kill you um and you also have a lot of rocks unless you have a very gassy gas rich low rock content pyroclastic flow which we call a surge if you have a very um rocky kind of pipelines that flow with huge amount of solid rocks they can be quite big too these rocks can be the size of a car then the impact is very dangerous as well so every part of these things is dangerous so chuck you'll die 12 ways i was going to say i'm just dying every way that i just asked i guess you didn't outside in i'm dying on every single level okay all right good to know good to know we'll be doing a very efficient job all right what more do you have okay um we kind of got to this but um i think we can get into it maybe a little deeper because it's a great question from whoopsiedoodle on twitter and whoopsieddildo says hi dr dr tyson and uh janine i would like to ask what role does volcanoes play in our ecosystem and what do they tell us about the earth we got into the ecosystem a little bit but what are we learning about us and this planet from volcanoes there's a lot volcanoes can teach us um like we can as magma is coming up from very deep especially hot spot volcanoes which we have mantle plumes coming up so that's magma coming up or at least hot rock coming up from very very deep below it can grab chunks of that rock and bring it up to the surface so we can actually learn about the insides of our own planet that way and without having to dig without having to dig you'd be taking a long time yeah so yeah much more efficient um they also tell us about how our atmosphere formed so looking at how our planet actually evolved um looking at areas like um geothermal areas can tell us how life evolved on this planet and how like things like extremophiles have actually managed to survive in these areas so there's a lot we can learn about our planet how it's evolved through time but also how we have evolved through time i think we also learn from metals that come out of volcanoes that harden in with their magnetic domains aligned to earth's magnetic field it tells us that earth's magnetic field has flipped that was i think the earliest evidence of the flipping reverse magnetic field over the um over the millennia yeah that can even help us understand when things erupted so we can line those up with different polarities and understand the ages of eruption deposits she really wants to stay employed that's what it sounds like [Laughter] she loves loving all right this is angry scientists um at erie edition of life uh every edition life on twitter says the light produced by magma and lava is that red hot glow or brightness because of photons and does the magma and lava create their own photons so it's it's light that we see coming from it uh with that yeah is that yeah i can take this one janine if if you let me try it yes i'll let you answer a volcano question go for it uh yes is is the answer no it's very simple as you everything even at room temperature is emitting infrared light but your eyes are not sensitive to that so when you turn out all the lights you can't see anything but you take out an infrared camera and it can see which things are slightly warmer than others if you keep raising the temperature okay they become more and more visible to the infrared camera eventually the glowing object no longer only emits infrared it'll begin to emit red light and this is what happens if you have an electric stove if you put it on low you don't see it if you turn out the light put a little higher begins to glow red and the temperature at which things glow red that's up around the thousand degrees celsius that janine was talking about if you want to raise the temperature some more it'll glow white hot and i don't think magma gets to white hot does it janine i don't think it gets that yellows you get some yelling okay yeah and so in transitioning to white hot you go through a yellow hot phase um and then the hottest of all hots is glowing blue hot and but apparently you're melting these rocks at red hot so we're good to go there yeah you can get burning gases that come out blue yeah so that's great and they're for a different reason not it's not because they're thermally glowing blue just because they're emitting blue lights specifically but yeah they're photons they're actual photons being given and it's no different from the photons of an electric stove that's on high yeah oh i write you a 10 out of 10 for that volcano answer good job oh well thank you thank you i get him the honorary volcanologist right okay um um this is irene polly plug-in polly actually from facebook uh she says greeting doctors here is what that kind of left me out here is one question for you guys how many dormant volcanoes with potential to cause now here's the qualifier mass devastation are there here on earth so you know that that that excludes a lot um what's the definition ginny what's the definition of dormant dormance i would say is something that hasn't erupted recently but really i don't we don't really have like a this is what dormant is this is what activities okay what does recently mean to you is it 10 years 100 years a thousand years well we call a volcano actively erupting if something hasn't generally there are exceptions to this but generally if it hasn't erupted within three months so after that three month markers and we go okay it can be considered not actively erupting now but you can still have active systems so we have a few crossover terms there but um i think the important thing there is how devastating are we talking about so i see a lot of questions about can we wipe out life on earth no um but devastating can be extremely devastating with a much smaller eruption if you have a city on the flank of the volcano oh like pompeii for example like pompeii exactly and there are some cities living in volcanoes like kempley flagray right next to pompeii so but if you're talking about like impacting a large area i don't know how many we have um so we could look at how many we know that have erupted those lifestyle eruptions i don't know either but that doesn't say that volcanoes that we know now that that haven't done that in the past might not do that in the future so there have been some volcanoes that people didn't even really know of volcanoes before they produced extremely large eruptions and pinatubo in the philippines in 1991 was kind of an example of that was the locals didn't really see it as a volcano it was just like a low-lying hill and then it had the second largest eruption of the last century so good question don't know the answer by the way over uh during pinatubo i had observing time allocated for me completing my phd thesis in chile in the andes mountains and pinatubo's ash crossing the pacific ocean interfered with my observations through the telescope the quality the the transmissivity of the air of this starlight that's been coming from the center of the galaxy for 30 000 years and it's got to slam into pinatubo ash pissed me off yeah i was totally in charge of that thing that's so funny well there you go um uh irene uh and by the way irene is coming from helsinki finland just wanted to let you know and she also gave me a a a friendly little troll by saying chuck my name is pronounced irenae so there you go um the arena yeah helping you out chuck no no she's she's mocking me uh neil she's mocking me her name is irene oh she's mocking me yeah she's totally mocking me man oh okay does that happen a lot what's that does that happen a lot chuck is still learning how to read yeah listen um i think as a person who has suffered uh tremendous head trauma all my life that i do a fantastic job reading these names and questions okay you do you've done great i'm proud of you okay we might have time for i think just one more question chuck oh wow okay um what do you have okay here we go here we go here we go uh this is uh hussain uh that ain't right uh from um oh hussein uh says from twitter if this ever happened or has this ever happened and if it does how much are we prepared for a super eruption that would a cause global darkness for months first of all is that possible that's not here but one is that possible two uh would there be any contingency plans for something like that so as far as a volcanic eruption um there's a lot of misunderstandings about that so yellowstone is usually one people refer to as saying that would destroy the entire united states but with the recent very large ones we've seen where i am in d.c we'd get about a centimeter or less of volcanic ash so this wouldn't cause darkness around the world um that's not what blocks out the solar radiation that's the gases and as you pointed out those can reduce visibility but not cause darkness as far as how prepared we are and it's a complicated question because in volcanology what we do is we learn as much about volcanoes as we can to understand what they've done and therefore what they might do and where they might do it we also put a lot of effort into volcano monitoring using technology and building experience to understand when volcanoes start giving us signals that hey i might be doing something soon right because you're not useful to us unless you can make an accurate prediction you need us but we don't we don't do accurate production you need us but we're not useful at all we are very useful excuse me we give forecasts so just like the weather who they're not going to say like it's going to rain over your house at 3 p.m on friday i'd be nice if they could yeah come on meteorologists and my friends be nice so we say like we might have an eruption of this this style or this big within this amount of time which is incredibly important in this saves lives now as far as is society ready that's not a volcan volcanology question that it's a political question that's a community question and you can look at some of the big disasters we've had recently even the pandemic and say with all the knowledge that we have have we been prepared okay well so let me let me uh go out with this slightly nuanced version of that question if you say this could blow any minute between now and 10 years from now and okay that's not very precise but suppose 10 years go by and it doesn't blow do you lose credibility to people who are trying to make business decisions on statements that you make that's a big problem and generally if you're going to have unrest that's that long we're going to the longer time goes the more information we're getting we're getting more information the more we're monitoring it so we're gonna understand more what might happen but you absolutely have volcanoes that are magma is actually moving towards the surface and then it slows down and it stops and then it moves again and then it stops and this can go on for weeks or months so it's really important for us for people for us to communicate and have people understand the uncertainty you know the magma could be racing towards the surface and if it keeps going the way it is it could produce a very large eruption but that can slow down it can stop and not all of that magma can erupt so it's a constantly evolving system um but yeah so people need to know that so they can work along with you when you make your best guess prediction based on the data well i'm not going to say guess what i'm sorry your best estimate is forecast yes um and it saves a lot of lives doing that and knowing when people need to evacuate you know that's we don't want people evacuating and not living in their homes for weeks and months of the year that's that's horrible we want to help people not harm them but getting them out of the way in time you know not getting them out of the way might kill them so now it's a very difficult area of helping communities is when do you evacuate when do you tell people like this might happen and we are very you know we tell people everything and we know as soon as we know it as we get more information that updates constantly just like this pandemic our information has been changing and our our estimates of what might happen has been changing the more data that we get and that's with any scientific field and the public of course wants a level of certainty that rarely the scientist can ascend to so well sometimes we can sometimes we can say this is probably going to erupt in the next day or the next hours and it does there's a lot of different things um like how well we know that particular volcano their own hair pool have their own personality how well we've been monitoring it to understand its background level of activity so what's it normally doing when it's not erupting and the more we do that the more we can understand when things are really ramping up or when they're changing all right we got to actually end it there janine give me one last words of wisdom in one sentence that we can take with us and gives us hope that doesn't start with you need me volcanoes are an incredibly beautiful amazing and important part of life on this planet so it's up to us to learn how to live with them and how to keep safe when they decide to do what they're going to do beautiful lovely love that thanksgiving [Laughter] well janine krippner it's great to have you back on star talk and for this very important topic and uh maybe we can uh tap you again for some more volcanic wisdom and contribute to the show chuck always good to have you all right this has been star talk cosmic queries neil degrasse tyson here getting you to keep looking up you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 143,803

Rating: 4.9211659 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Chuck Nice, Janine Krippner, volcanoes, volcano, Smithsonian Institution, Global Volcanism Program, Ice Age, volcanic record, magma, lava, super volcano, Yellowstone National Park, eruptions, geological activity, robots, climate change, pyroclastic flow, Earth

Id: 8UuubbOMonw

Length: 47min 42sec (2862 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020