Volcanoes

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This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox.

It is the last episode of the series, so we thought we'd return to our favorite subject, the end of the world.

Are you ready for the next mass extinction?

I said, are you ready for the next mass extinction?

The nihilist predominantly on the right there.

So

we are going to examine the main culprit for five out of six mass extinctions on the planet Earth, as well as the reason that Brian was delayed at the ChardeGauer airport for 17 hours in 2010, which he considers a greater tragedy than those five mass extinctions because they ran out of little brandy miniatures.

Today we are discussing the science of volcanoes.

How have they influenced the history of our planet from the origin of life to the great mass extinctions and do they still pose a threat today?

We'll also be dealing with forensic volcanology, which is basically somewhere between silent witness and up Pompeii.

Please yourselves.

Though, to be honest, the main reason we're doing this show is that last week Robin learned how to pronounce this Icelandic volcano.

Ayajitfale Jakol.

What is that again?

Ayajfal Jakol.

And that is, by the way, why in the next series we're going to be dealing with Minereta Taranika Zabayer Defusen Shanga Dune Kofuseneter malinger abrutter

is that Norwegian for a device that measures the distance between two particles in a crystal?

Yes, it is.

I think we should just check the pronunciation of that because we do have an actual Norwegian saying that word properly.

Nothing like it.

It is actually, it is genuinely Norwegian for a device that measures the distance between two particles in a crystal.

They've got a single word to it.

I got one of them for Christmas.

What do you call it in your hand?

When I'm pissed, I call it a cleanly jumping bomb.

And surely, Joe, you call it a miner, Jazzabar, distant Jernikerfed isn't that melling a

measure the distance between London and Lanfire Putwing.

That wasn't quite right in the middle.

After that, I'll tell you what, then we'll go off to AE, Yafo, Ye Cole.

So, to help us understand

the implications of volcanoes and their pronunciation, we are joined by three volcanologists of note, and they are.

I'm Clive Oppenheimer.

I'm a professor of volcanology at the University of Cambridge, and my favourite volcano is Mount Erebus in Antarctica.

It's a pretty chilly place, but I do go there in the British winter, so I escape the weather here for about six weeks by going way, way south.

I'm Tamzin Medo, I'm a professor of earth sciences at the University of Oxford.

My favourite volcano is Villarica volcano in Chile.

It's a stunningly beautiful volcano with an ice cap.

It's pumping out gas all the time, so you can make great measurements there.

And when you finish your day of measurements, you can slide back down the ice cap with all your equipment, which is a lot of fun as long as you don't get out of control and end up with a bruised bottom.

And hello, I'm Joe Brand.

I'm afraid the third volcanologist of note couldn't make it tonight.

So I've stepped in briefly.

And my favourite volcano is Poppa Cata Petal on the Isle of Wight.

And this is our pedal.

Tamzan, we always begin these shows, well, usually with a kind of definition.

Now, in some ways, people might think this is odd, but I do want you to define what is a volcano.

Well, I guess to have a volcano, you kind of need a source of heat in a planet and something to melt.

So, on Earth,

mainly volcanoes

are from melting the mantle, which is the layer below the crust in the Earth.

So, when you melt the mantle, you get magma, first of all, basaltic magma.

And if that magma then finds its way up through the crust, you get a volcano or volcanism.

And then you mentioned that the structure of the earth, you go the crust and the.

So could you, if you just describe a cross-section through the Earth,

could you just give us that sort of one-minute introduction to geology, as it were, Clive, and which bits are playing roles in developing a volcano?

Yeah, so when you see a volcano erupt, obviously it's telling you that it's hotter down in the Earth's interior than it is at the surface.

And that heat is coming from the radioactive decay of things like uranium and thorium and potassium inside the Earth.

There's also heat left over from its initial formation and very early history, from all the bombardments that formed it, and so on.

And volcanism is an expression of that heat getting out of the surface, as Tamzon was saying.

So you have the crust, which is this kind of thin layer at

the outer part of the Earth, and beneath that is the mantle, which is kind of the largest.

And then the core.

And then the core.

The core which is made of iron and nickel and sulfur.

And the outer part of the core core is really the only substantial region of the Earth's interior that is liquid.

And it's currents in the outer core that generate the Earth's magnetic field.

And then the inner part of the core is solid.

And over time, the core is solidifying and crystallizing, and that's another source of heat into the Earth's mantle from the latent heat that is released on crystallization.

And that's also helping the mantle, which is a solid rock, to convect on geological time scales and drive a lot of the volcanism that we see at the surface of the planet.

So it moves really, really slowly about the sort of speed that your fingernails grow.

So it's not convection, how we think of it, like in a cup of tea or a cup of coffee when you see you put your milk in and you get the swirling sort of sensation.

But it's

really, really slow movement.

That's what happened when I went in for the 5K charity run in my local park, two and a half centimetres a year.

I came last, but never mind.

Joe, are you someone who's we're talking about these kind of things, and obviously, both these guys, they've been traveling around, they go up close to volcanoes.

Are you someone who is one for an adventure holiday for snorking around thermal vents and climbing up volcanoes?

Love an adventure holiday.

No, it's an adventure for me going to the fridge, to be honest with you.

So, no, I am very interested in

volcanoes and kind of science generally, but I can't actually, I don't have a memory, so I'm very interested while people are talking about it.

And then, as soon as they've stopped, I'm on to the next thing because I've forgotten what they've said.

But I did actually do my research and I read up, but one of the things I love about science is abbreviations of scientific departments.

Can I just tell you,

there's an institute in the Philippines called Fivlox.

Do you know what that is?

Philvox.

Philvox.

Oh, I read it.

So I'm, I was going to say I'm anorexic, but that's the wrong word.

That's the other one.

Anyway, I was thinking, why, what's it called?

Fivlox?

Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

See, I think that's a bit of a ridiculous abbreviation.

Why can't they just call it the Volcano Department?

Oh no, that won't work.

Because it's in the Philippines.

Eh?

So it's the Philippines.

It's not ridiculous they called it the Philippines Institute of Volcanoes?

They need to say P P V D.

The Philippines Volcano Department.

I prefer.

I agree with that.

It sounds like a better job, doesn't it?

Where do you work?

Down the volcano department.

That sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?

As opposed to Pivlock.

Yeah, but if you're an international conference and everybody's there and everybody's just called it the volcano department.

Where do you work?

The volcano department.

Where do you work?

Ooh, the volcano department.

Yeah, well that's what we know.

That's fine, isn't it?

We don't care where they're from.

Well, then they'll tell me, just show me some slides of volcanoes.

Fine.

Then they'll tell me where they're from.

Well, you were saying before, weren't you, Claude, about the you, you've you have various acronyms, don't you, for the some of the organisations you have?

Yes, I try I try to think of what my

last grant proposal that I'll submit to a funding council will be, which really takes the mickey in the way that the acronym spells out.

I mean, I went, um, they're not all polite, so I won't

myself.

There was a conference that I was at where a team from another country had come up with the airborne remote sensing experiment.

What was this?

See, they're quick audience.

Radio 2 audience, they'd still be thinking.

Not a radio 4 audience.

Much quicker than I am.

If you had one, which you're very nice not to say, but it did start off with volcanic activity, and then you can guess the rest.

Anyway, it was involving volcanic activity and geology and

neologisms.

Can I be the first person to say this won't get into the edit, but when I was touring a very long time ago in near Newcastle, there was a college opening up and they were trying to call themselves the Central University of Northern Tyneside.

Unfortunately, someone noticed, but that's a bit that should we get back onto the site there.

Yeah, sorry, sorry.

Tams and volcanoes, I suppose they have a reputation for being a bad thing.

We think of them erupting and the damage that they cause, but they are

a necessary integral part of the Earth's

system,

the climate system, aren't they?

So they play a key role.

Well, they're

very long geological time scales.

They sort of played a role in maintaining our planet as well as sort of maybe the more headline grabbing, perturbing our planet.

So just to take an example,

there's a sort of balance in terms of the carbon cycle, the natural carbon cycle that is, not sort of since we've been, but for the last sort of 500 million years, a balance between volcanic emissions putting carbon dioxide out into the atmosphere and then weathering, taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

And if the temperature goes up, the weathering rate increases, you take a bit more carbon dioxide out, the temperature goes down, the opposite happens.

And you've got your volcanoes pumping out your carbon dioxide all the time.

So it's like part of a thermostat, if you like, that keeps the temperature much more stable than it would be otherwise over geological time scales.

Can I ask you, because you mentioned the carbon monoxide there, which is one of the things which is sometimes brought up by people who are arguing against a lot of contemporary climate change sciences.

Well, I don't know why they're going on about what humans do, it's all the volcanoes' fault.

We should be shutting them down.

I mean, can you kind of explain a little bit about why that thinking may not be...

Well, best of luck shutting the volcanoes down.

First thing to say, although I'm sure some people would like to feel they were that powerful.

But so, first of all, we can't shut the volcanoes down, so that's off the table.

We can do something about what we're doing to the planet.

Actually, carbon dioxide is a really interesting one from a volcanological perspective, or volcano perspective, is because it comes out really, really deep in the Earth's crust compared to the other gases that we have in magmas.

So it's much more difficult for us as volcanologists to measure.

But we're doing a better and better job at accounting for, if you like, all the carbon dioxide coming out of the world's volcanoes.

And we're still nowhere near the amount of carbon dioxide that humans' activities are putting out into the atmosphere.

So we're not off the hook, I'm afraid.

And how big a shift, Clive, did these big volcanic eruptions cause in the climate temporarily?

If we look at the last 100,000 years or so, there are a number of volcanic eruptions that have been considerably larger than things that we've seen in modern times.

And

these eruptions can change the climate, not from the carbon dioxide emissions, but from the sulphur dioxide emissions, which end up oxidizing in the stratosphere and forming minute particles of sulfuric acid that can intercept some of the incoming sunlight.

So there's a cool a net cooling at the Earth's surface.

And so this is something that we see with very large events like Krakatau in 1883, the eruption of Tambora in 1815.

But if we go if we look on geological time scales,

there are also huge lava outpourings that have modulated the climate on somewhat longer time scales.

So, what are the, in terms of, first of all, human history, what are the key very large eruptions that we've experienced?

We've been through quite a few, and in fact, one of our best archives of data on past volcanism is in the ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland.

And we see the fallout of this sulphur dust.

Sometimes we find the ash as well.

So an eruption in Indonesia, the dust will be transported in both hemispheres, it'll rain out over the polar regions, and we can find these layers of sulphur or acid layers in the ice cores.

And

these show that there are many events that were colossal in, say, the last two thousand years, and we have no idea which volcanoes produced them.

So we know a handful, we know Krakatau, we know Tambora.

In Indonesia, we've recently identified a volcano responsible for a huge sulphur layer in the ice cores in the mid-13th century, and that's another Indonesian volcano.

But by colossal,

can you give us a picture of what those eruptions were like?

Yeah, so in fact, we use colossal as a technical term in volcanology.

Some of those technical terms.

It's a technical term.

It is.

You see, we're trying to do what Joe's asking for, just to get rid of all the jargon and just use everyday words.

So colossal.

A colossal eruption will

involve, we measure the size of an eruption by the amount of pumice, ash, lava that it produces, how much volume or how much mass.

And

one of these eruptions, like Tambora in 1815, is producing something like 100 cubic kilometers of pumice that is showered across the land surface and the oceans.

And to put that in context, if you piled all of that up within the M25,

it would kind of cover the houses of parliament.

A big Ben would poke out of the top.

I like it when people do explanations like that.

If you piled it up, it'd be the size of something you know.

And it wasn't a swimming pool.

Yeah, I wondered whether it was going to be the size of whales.

That's the usual unit of disaster.

Yes, it is.

Can I just ask a five-year-old Div's question?

Can you envisage a scenario when all the volcanoes go off together?

Yes.

Really?

Is that.

Oh, just envisage the benefits.

when we are.

Can I ask you, by the way, Joe, in future not to ask any five-year-old div questions, because that is very much my job.

Oh, sorry.

That eruption in 1815, what effect would that have had on the climate?

So, would we have seen a one-degree, two-degree drop in average temperatures?

What would it have been?

The 1815 eruption

had

a global impact that if you average the temperatures over a year, so the year 1816 was popularly known as the year without a summer in North America,

the

globally averaged reduction in temperatures is a fraction of a degree, maybe 0.8 degrees, something like that.

But it's masking much stronger regional variations in space and time.

So in many parts of Europe, Eurasia, Scandinavia, the cooling in the summer was a few degrees, similarly in North America.

So what this does is to affect agriculture, and thereby it affects the crop yields, that affects the grain prices, and then that affects human society, people having to spend more on the basic staples.

Some of the more fascinating

work of, I think, both of you that I've read, where you try to correlate the eruptions with things that happen.

Yeah, so I think what we're trying to do here really is to contribute to understanding history and what were the impacts of these volcanically mediated environmental changes on human society.

And so this takes you into kind of the general questions of history of how do you explain things with the evidence that you've got.

There are always so many factors.

And actually in this case of the eruption of Tambor in 1815,

the grain prices are very high.

and there were protests in England.

People went

on the streets uh chanting bread or blood because people were really suffering.

Uh in Switzerland many people died from famine.

There were migrations.

Um so you know on one level you can come up with a chain of causality.

The eruption changed the climate, the climate affected crops, this affected people.

But then you also have to look at what else was going on in history at that time and the Napoleonic Wars had just finished.

So Europe was in disarray and this is also part of the kind of the template by which environmental forcing

plays out.

Tamsa, can I say, we're talking there about the kind of some of the more deathly sides of volcanoes, but also in terms of undersea volcanoes, which you've been talking about the majority, how much do they play a part perhaps in life as well?

The idea of thermal vents, etc.

Do we do we have volcanoes both giving life and taking it away?

It's a good strapline.

Well, it's one of the theories, you have these

wonderful kind of ecosystems that grow up around the black smokers, and you've obviously got so that's where you've got the plates spreading apart under the oceans, you have the pressure dropping on the mantle, which causes it to melt, and then you have volcanism happening at the mid-oceanic ridges.

And as you say, that's where actually the majority of volcanism on our planet is, but it's of but it's kind of hidden from us underneath the oceans.

And when you get seawater circulating through those types of environments, you end up with

these really sort of strong temperature and chemical gradients.

And that's really one of the sort of prime candidates for where you might have ended up with the sort of weird and wacky chemistry of life evolving first off on the planet.

There are other candidates as well, but that's one of them for sure.

I remember when I was a kid thinking, I don't understand why if a volcano starts under the sea, the sea water doesn't put it out.

And I still don't really understand that, if I'm perfectly honest.

Well, I mean Joe actually hits the nail on the head with these questions because you know

it's not obvious really why why

why the sea doesn't put the volcanoes out.

I mean actually one of the very amazing bits of film I've seen is is of Hawaii where the lava quite often flows straight into the ocean and it just pours in and often you look at this film and and nothing happens and you you expect there's gonna be a lot of fizzing and and banging and explosions and so on.

And what what happens is that a layer of bubbles instantly forms at the surface of that lava and it insulates it from the water.

So it doesn't have so much interaction.

And there's a very characteristic kind of lava that you find in the deep oceans.

The pressure, it's worth saying that the pressure of the overlying water stops the lava from really fizzing violently and being explosive.

So you tend to get lavas that are made up of toothpaste-like squiggles that all pile together.

We call them pillow larvas.

Yeah.

All right.

Can I ask

one more?

Why don't people that live near active volcanoes move?

Well,

have you been to Naples and had the mozzarella, tried the mozzarella there?

I mean, it is.

Funnily enough, my daughter went on a school trip to Aetna when it was actually

know, erupting, and said that it was very entertaining watching all the BBC staff getting hit with bits of, she's not very nice.

No, she is, she's lovely.

But yeah, no, I haven't been anywhere near a volcano, weirdly.

I don't know why not, really.

You're going to now, of course.

I am because I'm going to measure things.

Yes.

I just wonder what.

You have a special instrument

that I can't pronounce.

Just while we're talking, we want to move on to the big mass extinctions, but just you mentioned your favourite volcanoes.

And so, could you just very briefly fill in

what it's like and why, what it's like to be, to experience a volcano when it's not only when it's erupting, but these lakes of lava.

And if you just choose your favourite volcano and just tell us what it's like to visit.

So, Mount Erebus is in Antarctica on Ross Island.

So, it's kind of due south from New Zealand.

And it was where Scott and Shackleton had their bases for their attempts to reach the South Pole.

So, the first thing actually is that you're quite connected with that relatively recent, you know, it's only just over 100 years ago they were there, they were the pioneers.

They were doing all the geology, the mapping that we rely on now that enables us to do our work.

And you find very tangible evidence.

We found some of the campsites from Scott's men who climbed Erebus in 1912.

How high is it?

It's

nearly 3,800 meters above sea level.

So it's very high.

And

we go out there typically for about a month or so,

six weeks, in November, so in the austral summer.

And the fortunate thing is that for us, Erebus is only 35 kilometers from the largest scientific base in Antarctica.

So although you'd think, well, why do you go all that way when you could go to Aetna or Iceland or somewhere, but we have fantastic logistical support in Antarctica.

If we need liquid nitrogen for a spectrometer, it arrives in a helicopter.

If we need

fancy lettuce, that arrives in the helicopter.

So we're very well looked after and

it's been incredibly scientifically rewarding to work there.

It's a volcano which has a lava lake.

So you look into the more

of the volcano in the crater and you can measure everything very, very directly-the gas emissions, the heat emissions, and so on.

And you can work 24 hours because it's always sunny.

Well, it's not always sunny, but it's always daylight.

So, if the weather's good, you can really work hard and get fabulous data.

And then, I'd say the other thing, which is probably true of many field volcanologists, is that you're just

out in the elements, and you really are out in the elements in somewhere like Antarctica, and you're always thinking,

How can I today, given where the wind is blowing and what the volcano is doing, how can I get the best measurements I can?

So there's something you're quite, you almost embody the volcano in your scientific work.

So there's a very, yeah, something very visceral about that.

So, Joe, have you found that alluring, the idea of having no sleep for 24 hours and standing next to a lake of fire?

Sounds like my student years.

No, I do.

I'd love to go to a volcano in the Antarctic.

I doubt very much I ever will, but I'd still like to go.

Sounds amazing.

And if anyone from BBC Two's listening, what a lovely Christmas special that would be.

Joe and the volcano.

I was just wondering, who could I take with me?

The Chuckle Brothers.

Maybe.

That's no way to refer to Clive and myself.

Your favourite volcano.

Can we hear a little bit more about that?

So Villarica is in the Lake District in Chile, which is a bit like the British Lake District, apart from it's sort of peppered with plenty of lakes, as the name suggests, but peppered with these volcanoes with these ice, these gorgeous ice caps.

And we arrived there and it was pouring with rain, very much like the British Lake District.

So you couldn't see any of the volcanoes at all, and all the locals were saying, Are you not going to see the volcano?

And we were there for 10 days.

It was part of my PhD.

I was really hoping to get some data.

And so I felt a bit despondent.

And the second night we were there, we'd been invited to a barbecue with a rather frightening Chilean man

with a bottle of pisco sour and a very large knife, and an animal on a spit.

We were just on the edge of the volcano, and suddenly the clouds parted.

Maybe it was the Pisco Sar, but it was a kind of biblical moment, this beautiful volcano suddenly presenting itself.

And we had a fantastic week climbing up the ice cap.

Unfortunately, we had to carry everything on our backs.

Because you'd killed the only thing that could carry

on the first day.

In retrospect, it was a tactical error.

But

you hike up

this ice cap, and you get to the top.

And we couldn't actually see the lava lake at the time,

but you could certainly smell the gas, sort of a mixture of burnt matches and rotten eggs, that's a lovely sulphur smell.

And then

wearing gas masks and helmets to protect ourselves, there's sort of beautiful ice sculptures around from the wind and the ice.

And then there were small explosions going off, very small explosions, I hasten to add, you know, weren't doing anything too risky, but with very light volcanic rocks, a volcanic foam rock or reticulite actually falling on us, and ash, and very small pieces of a bright glassy scoria.

And then, as I say, at the end of it, you've got to pack all your rucksack and sit in an ice chute and

slide your way down the volcano.

I was just wondering how risky a job it is being a volcanologist, because it does sound do volcanologists ever fall in?

Yeah, I think it's up there with working with sharks.

There is an occupational risk, and obviously, we don't take that lightly.

We do, you know, think quite seriously about what could happen, what could go wrong.

But I mean, a lot of the places that you work, it's not necessarily the volcano, it's the helicopter that you're going to the volcano in or a TV.

See, when you said the barbecue, that first bit, I was imagining you just on the room of a volcano with like, you know, stick with marshmallows on it.

It's great, isn't it?

Oh, that's how it's caught fire.

I've always wanted to do that.

I've always wanted to cook my breakfast on a lava flow.

I've still never ever got to do it.

So you've mentioned.

Well, if you do that PBC2 documentation,

we could do extra slice on

you said that the little ice age may have been caused by volcanic eruptions.

But if we go back further,

mass extinctions, so the really big, threatening explosions, we said in the introduction that it's thought that five out of of six of the major mass extinctions came from or were caused by volcanic eruptions.

So, could you speak a little bit more about what they would have been like and what and also why we think that they were the cause?

So, this is

when we're talking about this type of volcanism, this is large igneous provinces.

So, it's not volcanism like Krakatoa or Tambora that we've been talking about, it's these really extended periods of Earth history where we have for a million years, it's the peak of it, we have these enormous outpourings of largely basaltic magmas out onto the surface of the planet.

So, perhaps the sort of most famous that's linked with is linked with the demise of the dinosaurs, so the end Cretaceous, and that's the Deccan traps in India.

But with the end of the dinosaurs, you've got this sort of also got this major impact event near in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time.

So, we've got these two things happening.

But

something something that is very interesting is that we actually find coincidence not just with the N-Cretaceous mass extinction,

we also find coincidence, for example, with the end-Permian mass extinctions, that's about 250 million years ago,

and the end-triassic mass extinctions about 200 million years ago.

And those

were with other periods of really heightened volcanic activity.

So, for the end-permium, it was the Siberian traps.

So, if you fly on a daytime flight from London to Tokyo and you happen to be lucky enough to get a window seat, you know, put the blind up and have a look.

You fly over an absolutely enormous

area of basalt.

Very exciting.

I mean, who couldn't be excited?

These enormous stacks of basalt,

the trace of this enormous period of roughly a million years of heightened volcanic activity.

We don't really exactly understand why, but they seem to line up in the geological record with these mass extinction events.

So, Clyde's already talked about the effects of putting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere.

So, if you get it high up into the atmosphere, it can form this veil around the planet that cools the planet down.

But volcanoes are also putting out loads of other stuff.

So, they're putting out toxic trace metals, they're putting out carbon dioxide, they're putting out lots of ash that has, and all of these things have interactions with the environment.

So,

we don't exactly know

what the kill mechanism is, if you like, but there seems to be this correlation with these periods of really big changes in biology in Earth's history.

What about because we kept saying five out of six of the mass extinctions?

What was the other one then?

What was the one the volcano?

What was the kind of the equivalent of, I suppose, you know, Leicester at the top of the Premier Division?

This kind of, you know, this moment where this was not expected, and suddenly

an extinction came out of nowhere with no volcanic hint.

We often call them the big five, so it's actually five major mass extinctions in the geological record, not six.

But so I've mentioned three of them, and then actually the others are sort of going further back into geological time.

So

the next one back is like the late Aldovision mass extinction.

And there might have been a big volcanic event going on there, but it's

so far back in the geological record, we actually might have lost

by the plate movement or by erosion the evidence for that major volcanic activity.

I don't know if that's good for your Leicester City analogy or not.

Well, no, I think what's good now is you explained exactly why the sixth mass extinction had no volcanic involvement, was because it didn't happen.

You made it a lot clearer.

Why did you tell me there were six mass extinctions, Brian?

So, does that mean our introduction is actually technically incorrect?

Oh, it has been for 98 other episodes as well.

What do we know now?

What is changing our technology for being able to predict when there could be catastrophic events?

I mean, what have we learnt in the last few decades?

I think some of the big advances, I mean, there have been a number of big advances, but maybe the ones that I would highlight have been the sort of satellite technologies.

So

part of the challenge with volcanoes is there's so many of them around the globe.

And you know, if you want to invest in putting like a seismic network in or putting GPS receivers on to look at the way the volcanoes are changing shape, that's great if you've got good resources and you can actually get to the volcano relatively easily.

And the real power with the satellite techniques is that we've got the the potential to have a much more global coverage.

And we can also look at what's going on at volcanoes where they're quite remote.

There may still be a population there.

And in countries where they don't necessarily have massive resources to pour into monitoring networks.

The one you read about a lot is the Yellowstone volcano, which is a super volcano which is monitored quite closely, isn't it?

And that's considered to be something that could be a danger at some level.

Yeah, I mean, of course, there are many volcanoes that are potentially dangerous because of their proximity to large populated areas around the world, whether it's in Latin America or Japan, so on.

And then you have volcanoes like Yellowstone, so-called super volcanoes, because they've produced really

whatever is the next thing up from colossal eruptions.

I wondered if it was being used in the same way as colossal.

But I mean, one of the things that is quite instructive when you look at the largest eruptions of the last decades, one of them is Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which taught us pretty much everything we know about how volcanoes can change climate and Fivolks.

The Fivolks people were involved, that's true.

Now they're the ones who work for the volcano department

in the Philippines.

And another one is El Chichon in Mexico.

These volcanoes were not even in our gazetteer of volcanoes of the world.

They weren't recognized to be potentially active volcanoes.

And in some ways, it makes sense, because if you think that it will take some time for a volcano to accumulate the volume of molten rock to produce a very big eruption, maybe it takes thousands or tens of thousands of years, then these are volcanoes that are maybe not going to erupt very often.

And

we won't have had any

historical evidence.

So the next big eruption on Earth might be of a volcano we've never heard of.

It's just not on our scientific radar.

And you are watching at some level.

There's nothing we can do about this.

That's what our planet does.

It's an active planet.

Well, I think

there is room for human action because

it's how you prepare for things.

We can't stop the volcano erupting, but we can prepare better for what it does.

We can look at how the global food system works and look at where the vulnerabilities are.

What if it takes a major hit in terms of reduced grain production in North America?

How much resilience is in the food system to accommodate that?

And, you know, so I think we can engineer ways to get around some of the challenges that we might face.

I mean, we sort of saw this not in terms of food security, but in terms of aviation safety.

I'm not going to do as good a job as you, but after the IFAT Yurkut eruption in 2010,

I've got another black mark.

In 2010,

the aviation authorities had a zero tolerance policy to ash,

and that was found to be unworkable.

And

they had to think

much more detail about actually

some ash might be okay, because otherwise, we're just shutting down the whole of northern European airspace.

And all the economic loss, perhaps when we think of it in more of a cost-benefit manner,

then we have to think about risks in a slightly more holistic type of sense.

Well, there was the famous British Airways flight.

I'm wondering who should read this.

It's British Airways Flight 9 that I typed in here, which was 1982 near Jakarta.

This is the captain's announcement

on that flight as he flew over the volcano in Jakarta.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

We have a small problem.

All four engines have stopped.

We are doing our damnedest to get them going again.

I trust you are not in too much distress.

That's quite a real announcement, isn't it?

Absolutely genuine.

Here's one we haven't tried before, but good luck, everyone.

It's a British sort of announcement.

Very, very quickly.

A friend of mine was on a plane trying to land at Athens Airport that

kept getting blown away from the runway.

And the pilot went down about three times and pulled out of it at the last minute.

And then he did it a fourth time.

And on the intercom, he said to all the passengers, I'm really sorry about that.

I just bottled it.

They all sort of did that airplane.

How professional that you're doing.

Really got what you want to hear from your pilot.

And final question:

in terms of mass extinctions, in terms of the end of civilization,

what do you reckon?

Is it volcanoes that are going to do it, or is there going to be something that gets in our way before then?

I don't think it's going to be volcanoes.

No.

I mean, we've lived through some very big events as a species already, and I think, yeah, we're probably a greater existential threat to ourselves.

Andy?

I think I'd probably agree with that.

The

volcanoes would be more spectacular, though, wouldn't they?

Yeah, it's nice if you're kind of going woo

as you go.

Joe, do you think that volcanoes would be a nice way to

go?

Volcanoes plus raining doughnuts.

I know we tried to draw it to a close, but I just want to say, Clive, because you'd

looked at how volcanic eruptions have influenced art and actually

inspired some of the most beautiful paintings in history, which can be correlated to volcanic eruptions.

I think Turner is an example.

That's right.

The sulphur dust that conveil the planet in the stratosphere leads to amazing atmospheric optics.

So very, very vivid sunsets.

Even after the sun has set, the sun will then light up this dust maybe half an hour or so later.

And this is said to have inspired Turner, who was painting after the 1815 eruption of Tambora.

And the other one that is

often suggested to be volcanically

stimulated is Monk's Scream, which of course has these very lurid colours.

Some people reckon that's

also volcanically influenced.

See, so it's not all bad.

So, if a volcano ends the world, we might get some really good artwork out of it first.

So, we asked the audience a question: if your final act could be set in stone for all eternity as a result of volcanic eruption, how would you like to be remembered?

And most of them we have been unable to read.

Carving the words, nothing is set in stone.

To have a strawberry with me to see if it survives.

Ah, there's a niche joke from the WikiK audience.

At a computer, pressing control, alt, and delete.

Punched over my still incomplete thesis, my bosons still stubbornly insisting there's infinite energy.

That's a technical joke from Will, who's clearly a physics PhD student

who is struggling with the infinite energy of bosons.

This is what I love about physicist joke.

Now the next punchline will not necessarily be effective but it is intellectually rigorous.

In a D-ream like pose knowing things can only get better.

Thank you very much to our panel Tamzo May the Clive Oppenheimer and Joe Brand.

And

remember if you've been affected by all this talk of the end of the world then you shouldn't be, because the laws of nature dictate that existence is necessarily finite and you're lucky to be here.

There is the other helpline number if you want to ring it.

That's what it's going to say.

It's going to say, you're lucky to be here.

Very upbeat ending.

This is the end of this series, and this is episode 99.

We will be back with a new series with...

Can you work it out, Brian?

Using your math, episode 100, yes.

And we'll be asking, what do humans know that we we didn't know when the show began in 2009?

So that will include the confirmation of the existence of black holes for detection of gravitational waves, the Higgs field, the wave function of the strawberry, and the pronunciation of Minnarette, Ladis, Ningerbara, Diffieldsen, Jaken Skerthet, Senta Marling Se Apparata.

Goodbye.

In the Infinite Monkey Cage.

In the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Now nice again.

Well, Adam Rutherford, that was a marvellous episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage, wasn't it?

It was, Hannah Fry.

Not necessarily the best ones, because I think the best ones are the ones that you were on.

I like the ones that you were on.

Yes.

But if you enjoyed those episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage that I, Adam Rutherford, and you, Hannah Frye, were on, it turns out

that we've got a whole eight series worth of just us.

We do.

The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry,

our very own science podcast in which we investigate your questions.

Questions like, does Kate Bush have a secret sonic weapon that she's trying to use to kill all of humanity?

We did answer that question.

What about what would happen to Hannah if we threw her into a black hole?

Specifically me.

I wasn't particularly happy about that episode.

That's the Curious cases of Rutherford and Fry, which you can download from your podcast providers.

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