What Could Possibly Go Wrong: Deep-Drilling a Supervolcano | Popular Science
Fire Bomb There are few good ways to deal with living atop a supervolcano, but critics worry that drilling deep into one to study its composition could, in the worst case, cause an earthquake or eruption. Jamie SneddonWhen Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, the people around it had little warning, and more than 10,000 of them died as a result. Bad as that was, an eruption of neighboring Campi Flegrei could be worse.
As a supervolcano, it’s in the same category as Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora, whose eruption in 1815 killed 92,000 people and caused the “year without a summer.” Campi Flegrei’s eight-mile-wide caldera is so low and unassuming that much of metro Naples was built on top, and yet a full eruption would be one of the largest in human history, the kind of geological event capable of plunging the world into a minor ice age. This time, scientists are determined to give the three million residents of greater Naples abundant warning.
That’s part of the motivation behind the Campi Flegrei Deep Drilling Project. Co-sponsored by the European Union, a coalition of scientists from 18 countries plans to drill deep into the volcano and implant sensors that will measure changes in [...]
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