They drilled into a volcano in Iceland. What they found could help power the world
Laura Paddison, Max Burnell, Lewis Whyld, Mark Oliver, Carlotta Dotto, Marco Chacon and Lou Robinson, CNN
Iceland is used to volcanoes. It experiences roughly one eruption every five years, though most are in uninhabited areas. Some are even described as “tourist volcanoes,” relatively accessible and typically non-disruptive. These new eruptions are not that; they are violent, dangerous and could last centuries.
They could also hold the key to a new future. As this new volcanic era upends lives in the southwest, hundreds of miles northeast at a volcanic caldera called Krafla, there is an audacious plan underway to drill directly into a magma chamber.
In 2009, Bjarni Pálsson was an engineer with Iceland’s national power company, Landsvirkjun, running a deep drilling geothermal project at Krafla. They were trying to sink a borehole nearly 3 miles into the ground, but the drill kept getting stuck. “Again and again, at exactly the same depth,” he said.
When they were eventually able to free it, they found glass chips — cooled, crystallized, molten rock. It was proof of what they had stumbled upon: a magma chamber.
Pálsson was shocked. These reservoirs of super-hot molten rock exist everywhere there are volcanoes, but are very hard to find and usually much deeper. The team rushed to control and cool the borehole, pumping in around 1 million tons of cold water before closing it.
Fifteen years later, Pálsson is standing in the exact same spot, his high-viz jacket the only splash of color in Krafla’s stark, white landscape. Armed with new technology and know-how, he is going back in….
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2024/10/climate/solutions/iceland-volcanos/
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