Are We Ready for the Next Massive Volcano?

Mike Cassidy was there in 2010 when Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano-covering ice cap in Iceland, erupted. It shut down European air space for weeks, costing the economy billions. Cassidy, a Ph.D. student at the time, had been invited on a research cruise to the country by scientists studying the ocean. From the research vessel, he got an amazing view of the volcano as it was erupting. The scientists wanted to know whether the volcanic plume was fertilizing the ocean, making an impact on the small creatures, like phytoplankton. They asked Cassidy whether they should go underneath the volcanic plume, and what might happen. He didn’t know what to say—he hadn’t done it before—but let them know that it could either go one of two ways: They could go in and maybe not notice anything. They might get a speck in their eyes, might feel a bit of ash. Or the whole ship could be blackened with ash. “We went in,” Cassidy recently told me, “and the whole ship just went black. We had to drive straight out of the plume. They had to clear all the ship filters.”

Lately, Cassidy’s been mulling over the risks of large eruptions. He’s an associate professor of volcanology at University of Birmingham, England, and currently a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford studying what makes eruptions dangerously explosive. More recently, he went to Mount Rinjani, which is on the island of Lombok in Indonesia. “It was just quite humbling to be on top of that volcano,” he said. In the 13th century, Rinjani erupted, causing in the city. “It was fascinating to go there,” Cassidy said, to a place that “had such huge effects on the other side of the world.”