A lava lake rises in a dangerous African volcano | Science

In a 2002 eruption, a lava lake inside Nyiragongo Crater drained within hours.

Carsten Peter / Nat Geo Photo Collection

By Roland Pace 13, 2020, 3:45 PM

In 2002, the last time Nyiragongo volcano erupted, lava erupted on its sides into the crowded city of Goma, on the border between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. About 250 people were killed, 20% of the city destroyed, and hundreds of thousands fled. Since then, the number of people at risk living in the shadow of the 3,470-meter volcano has doubled to 1.5 million.

Dario Tedesco, a volcanologist at Luigi Vanvitelli University in Campania, who earlier this year led a campaign into the cliff-crater, says conditions are now ripe for another disaster. He and his colleagues found the lava lake there is filling up at an alarming rate, increasing the risk that molten rock could erupt through the crater walls again. Their analysis indicates that the risk will peak within 4 years, although they believe an earthquake could trigger a crisis earlier. Adding to the concerns, the GVO Observatory (GVO), the only monitoring station in the region, is losing its financial support from the World Bank. Tedesco’s evaluation is straightforward. “This is the most dangerous volcano in the world!”

Tedesco began seeing the volcano in the mid-1990s, when refugees fled the genocide in neighboring Rwanda, causing Goma’s population to swell. The United Nations sought his advice about the volcano’s dangers, so he watched Nyiragongo’s mood in the years leading up to the 2002 eruption. He is disturbed by the parallels with today.

The eruption began in 2002 after an earthquake opened fissures in the south side of the volcano. The 200-meter-wide lava lake, the largest in the world, dried up in a matter of hours, releasing low-silica liquid lava that poured out at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour. Lava accumulated in layers up to 2 meters deep in Goma and created a new delta 800 meters wide in nearby Lake Kivu.

Once the fissures healed, new lava began to emerge and the crater lake refilled. The activity accelerated in 2016 when another vent began to flow into the hole. In February, in his most recent inspection, Tedesco and his colleagues – whom UN peacekeepers had flown in to avoid insurgents active in the area – found the lake rising faster than before. The second vent was flowing an estimated 4 cubic meters of lava per second, which is enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every 10 minutes. “As long as the volume is increasing, it increases the chances of a volcanic eruption in Goma,” says Kacho Karume, General Manager of GVO, who has also participated in the campaign.

Pierre-Yves Burgi, a geophysical modeler at the University of Geneva, says the level of the lava lake is an effective pressure gauge for the volcano’s inner tubes, like mercury in a pressure gauge. His model indicates the internal pressure is 20 atm, which far exceeds the mechanical strength of the volcano’s rocky flanks, Burgi and colleagues reported in August in geophysical research letters. “This situation is not stable,” he says. “The danger is an earthquake, which opens a new crack.”

They believe the system may reach a critical point, as it did before an eruption in 2002 and a previous third in 1977. In both cases, the levels of the lava lake had stabilized several years before the eruption, they say, as the mass of molten rock weighed on the magma below. The eruptions were delayed because the lava took time to impose the existing fractures, explains Andrew Bell, a rock mechanics expert at the University of Edinburgh who developed a model to explain the collapse of Mount St. Helens in 1982. Borghe predicts the lava lake stops will rise soon, in which case the peak period of danger will be On Goma from 2024 to 2027.

The 2002 eruption of Nyiragongo covered Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in lava 2 meters deep.

Karel Prinsloo / AP PHOTO

“They are right to worry,” Bill says. “Nyiragongo is dangerous in a way that there are not many volcanoes.” He adds, however, that the lava lake’s behavior does not say much about the immediate danger of an eruption. He says that small earthquake swarms or ground deformation are clearer warning signs of turbulent magmas. Cynthia Ebinger, an expert in Rift Valley geology at Tulane University, also has issues with the Burgi model, which assumes that the magma tubes that feed the lava lake in Nyiragongo are the main factor controlling a volcano’s eruption. It says that the expansion of tectonic plates in the region leads to earthquakes and new intrusions of magma that could also lead to volcanic eruptions.

The network of seismometers around the volcano, run by GVO and installed in recent years with the help of researchers in Belgium and Luxembourg, is showing significant seismic activity and several deep-sea swarms in Africa in Belgium, says Francois Kervin, director of the natural hazards department at the Royal Museum of the Central Center. He doesn’t know how weird the activity is because his team lacks old, comparable data. But he said that strong and continuous earthquakes had been recorded months before the outbreak in 2002. He wrote in an e-mail: “No such thing has been detected at this time.”

Due to vandalism, theft and lightning damage, the network requires constant maintenance, Kervin says. Many seismographs are currently offline. But civil unrest in the region is making reforms dangerous. Earlier this year, 13 park rangers were killed in an ambush in Virunga Volcano National Park.

The threat of violence is only one of GVO’s problems. Established in 1986, the observatory is set to lose the funding that it relied on for the past five years. With a crew of about 40, the observatory maintains seismic stations and monitors the lake and potential lethal gases emitted from the volcano. It also plans to evacuate Goma, and will issue an alarm in the event of a volcanic eruption.

Since 2015, the World Bank has provided the observatory with $ 2.3 million, as part of an aid package aimed primarily at rebuilding and protecting the city’s airport, which was severely damaged in the 2002 eruption. But that project ended. In an email, a spokesperson for the World Bank Group confirmed that “The World Bank Group is not envisaging any follow-up activities yet.”

The UN Peacekeeping Force is concerned with that. At the end of September, Tedesco returned to the city for further talks with the World Bank and other development agencies. A UN spokesperson said peacekeepers are considering supporting the GVO in the short term. “We understand the importance of monitoring volcanoes as a way to protect civilians and save lives.”

When science went to the press, there was no news of a solution. Tedesco planned to inspect the Nyiragongo Crater again, but bad weather forced to cancel a helicopter flight. “If things remain this way, then there is no reason to be optimistic,” he says.

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