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Molly Magid: Welcome to UC Science Radio, where we conduct interviews with a range of scientists to learn about the big issues facing our world and what science is doing to help. I'm Molly Magid, a master’s student in the School of Biological Sciences.
Today I’m talking with Dr. Ben Kennedy. He’s an award-winning professor and internationally recognized volcanologist who travels to the world’s volcanic hotspots to understand the science behind eruptions. He says his research and teaching are “driven by a love of volcanoes and fueled by projects that are fun, exciting and important for society.”
Kia ora Ben! Welcome to UC Science Radio. I'm curious about your role at UC, so what do you do and what's your research about?
Ben Kennedy: Kia ora Molly! I am a volcanologist, so I research volcanoes and why they erupt. I also do a bit of research into how students learn, and specifically how students learn geology and volcanology in the field.
And what was your path to this research?
BK: I always say my path to this is that I'm a kid that never grew up. I always liked playing with rocks when I was a kid-- smashing rocks with a hammer, looking for crystals and fossils and things, and also blowing up and dreaming of lava running down the flanks of volcanoes.
Yeah so you've kept that energy up! And it seems like in your lab that’s sort of the methods you use, smashing rocks and melting them down. Could you talk a bit about how you create the conditions of a volcano erupting, but in a lab setting?
BK: Yep, we've got a few different labs here at the University of Canterbury. We've got ones that work at high temperature, so where we can actually melt rocks and create temperatures that you see inside a volcano and make our own lava, which is a lot of fun. We've also got high pressure labs where we can raise the pressure so it's equivalent to deep inside the Earth where gases and lava and magma is moving around inside the volcano. And we've also got specialist machines that can measure the exact amount of stress and strain that exist inside the earth to see how strong rocks are, to see when they break, to see when gas can travel through the rocks versus when they get blocked up.
I've seen that a lot of your current work has to do with drilling into the magma chamber of a volcano. So, first to back up a bit, what is a magma chamber, what part of the volcano is it, what does it do? And can you talk a bit about your work actually drilling into the magma chamber?
BK: Yep so under most of our volcanoes in New Zealand and all over the world, there is usually some magma which is kind of the fuel for the volcano, the lava that's underground. And this magma can be in various states, so it can be mostly liquid, it can be mostly crystals, it can have gas, it can have no gas, and that may depend how long it's been sitting there. So for example, under a very large volcano, you may have a very large magma chamber and under a small volcano, you may have a small magma chamber.
You asked me about drilling into magma chambers. We don't really know what magma chambers look like. It's kind of like the "final frontier" for geologists. You know, we've been to the bottom of the ocean, we've been to the top of the highest mountains, we've flown around in space and sent satellites out into the solar system and what have you. But we've never been into a magma chamber, so we don't know what it's like. There's a big international project to go to Iceland, to a volcano there where a geothermal company accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. So they drilled into it to extract heat and to generate geothermal energy. They initially did it by accident so they were not expecting to have magma rising up their drill hole, they were just trying to get hot earth fluids to run their power stations.
So sort of taking that initial mistake, and then saying can we actually do this for a research purpose?
BK: Exactly, yep. So they're trying to go back better prepared and they've got a big team of experts from around the world to help them with this project.
And you mentioned that they were actually trying to get geothermal energy from that volcano. Can you explain what geothermal energy is?
BK: Yep, geothermal energy is used differently in different parts of the world. So in some parts of the world, power can be generated by simply pumping cold water down into the Earth where it's warmed up by the fact that deeper in the earth temperatures are higher, so it warms up that hot water, turns it into steam, and that steam can then turn turbines and generate energy. In volcanic regions like New Zealand and Iceland, the water and the steam is already down there and is already very hot, and you actually just dig a drill hole down and out comes the steam and the hot water ready to directly generate energy.
So that's a renewable energy source we can take advantage of in areas with a lot of volcanic activity?
BK: Yes it should be sustainable and if operated properly you can keep these resources going for very long amounts of time.
Your work has taken you all over the world, seeing volcanoes in many different places. Could you talk a bit about your work globally and what has been the most interesting things you've seen in the field or that you've been able to do research on?
BK: I'm pretty lucky volcanoes tend to be in pretty exotic places. In the last five years, I've been out to Chile and hiked up active volcanoes in Chile with a group of my grad students. We were trying to work out whether certain eruptions were triggered by earthquakes or not. I've been out to Vanuatu and seen erupting volcanoes there, trying to help the Vanuatu team have a better understanding of where molten bombs land around a volcano that's a tourist destination there, the Yasur volcano on the island of Tanna. We were using drones to map where these bombs were landing. I've also been out to Japan as well, also thinking about where bombs have landed during recent eruptions again to help with hazard mitigation. Iceland, obviously, with the magma drilling project, and I had a lot of fun in Iceland since we did a virtual field trip with schools. So we had literally a backpack full of cuddly toys from various schools around New Zealand as well as six thousand students who would kind of ‘come along’ with us on the trip. And we had to have evening Zoom Skypes like this with various schools around the country and their cuddly toys.
That seems like something that could be used right now where people are all looking for something to do virtually, you know, these virtual field trips and seeing perhaps videos of volcanoes erupting or things like that.
BK: Yep, definitely. I mean this is something that me and the group here in the university are thinking a lot about is how to use these virtual experiences now in this time of lockdown and how to do it better. We actually just a few days ago I had a Zoom session with 230 academics from around the world where we gave a little webinar on how to do virtual field trips drawing on those experiences working with New Zealand school kids.
Wow, that's really cool. You said that you were working in Chile trying to figure out whether earthquakes could trigger volcanoes, can they trigger volcanoes? What did you find?
BK: Yeah it's a very good question and we're still actually struggling to answer it. What it looks like is that certain volcanoes under certain conditions can be triggered by earthquakes, but it's actually rarer than you might expect. Yeah, I’ve got some of my grad students here who've been looking into exactly what type of volcanoes are most likely to get triggered. And it looks like this one in Chile that were working on which is Cordón Caulle, that this had a very big eruption just a day after one of the biggest earthquakes in human history, so that one's a good candidate. We were actually looking at the bubbles in some of the bits of pumice, to work out whether there was something special about these bubbles to indicate that they'd been shaken.
How well can you predict certain things about a volcano? It sounds like you may be able to say where lava's more likely to land but what about predicting when a volcano's going to erupt or when we might expect something like that to happen in certain places?
BK: My research is pretty useless at predicting when. What we've focused on is looking at where things have happened in the past. But we do work a lot with the teams like GNS science who are the ones monitoring the volcanoes. It's that monitoring which is used to then say if we're getting more and more earthquakes, this may help forecast that an eruption is more likely at this time. We work closely together, but it's that real-time monitoring data that's used to predict when.
I know you've done some work on White Island and have looked at the eruption in 2016, but I'm interested in what your response to the recent eruption was both as a scientist and also as a person?
BK: It was really weird for me to be honest, a little bit emotional. I've been working on White Island for more than ten years, and I knew the guide Hayden who died, so it's been quite hard for me to separate those two things. But now I've kind of processed it a bit more, I was out of the country when it all happened as well, which made it also weird for me. But now I'm getting back into looking at my research there and working again closely with GNS science.
In fact I just finished off the work. There was an eruption in 2016, and I worked with a bunch of students on that, and we worked out that there were cracks inside the volcano. A lot of blocks of material got thrown out in 2016 and landed as blocks impacting all around the crater floor. We collected some of those blocks and did some tests on them and discovered since they were all encrusted in minerals from the hot hydrothermal system of the volcano and they were all cracked. We worked out that some of these cracks were working like valves, so opening and closing again: this was one way that the volcano had been modulating, releasing pressure. And it was also an indication that some of these minerals that were growing were blocking these valves so the pressure couldn't be released. So yes, it's nice to finally finish that work from 2016, and now we'll be looking at the data about the 2019 eruption and obviously the tragic events that surrounded that, so that's to come.
And in more of a lighthearted tone, I know that some of your work has been developing games to help students, but also just people in general, learn about science. So what is that process like and how do you think there's a role for fun and games in learning?
BK: I think I'm probably unusual compared to a lot of scientists, but I really am motivated by fun. I do my research on things that I find fun and I think a lot of people are also motivated in the same way. If we can make learning fun and make research fun, then more of us will want to spend more time and energy doing that. So yeah, we have fun developing these games that make learning about science more fun!
Can you talk specifically about the game, I think is it called "Drilling into Magma" is that one of the games that you made?
BK: Yeah we've got a game called "Magma Drillers Save Planet Earth." That was a game that we originally developed for school children, but it actually turns out that university students also enjoy it and can learn a lot from it as well. I managed to persuade a bunch of my colleagues to dress up in crazy outfits from the 70's and the future and role play what it might be like to take part in drilling into magma. Then we made students also role play those roles. They have to work as a team to try and drill in the right place to get out magma thermal energy and save the planet, and not start an eruption that might destroy the planet.
It sounds like it's not just fun, you're actually using real scientific knowledge to back up these cases and scenarios because clearly people are thinking about how do we do this safely, what's the best way to proceed?
BK: Yeah, we use actual data, and the decisions that the students are making are the exact same decisions that we the scientists are making now and this is a real project. I mean, it lends itself so much to a game because it sounds like a bad science fiction movie, so that's ideal for a game to get kids excited about science.
One story that I've heard that I'm just curious to hear whether it's true or not is that the Prime Minister thought you were a first-year student when she visited the university. Is that true?
BK: Yep, that is true. Yeah that was an entertaining moment. That was when she was here opening the new science building, the Rutherford building. And I was doing a demonstration for using basically a sand volcano with some Lego men, but I was wearing a volcano hat on my head that one of the students had made for me. I think I was probably characteristically wearing shorts and a t-shirt. And then when the Prime Minister was giving her speech, she asked “Can someone volunteer to help me open the building?” and nobody did anything. And she said “how about you, we need a first-year student,” and pointed at me and then dragged me up on stage. And I had to help her set off the fireworks.
That's pretty funny. That’s probably has something to do with you just really having fun and engaging with projects, she thought you must be a student.
BK: Yeah, yeah exactly. I think it's a bit of the way I dress and the way I behave and the way I look.
So my last question is, when we're able to get out of lockdown and return to the university and resume more usual activities, what's next?
BK: Catching up on all my work that I'm behind on is probably the first thing that needs to be done. I'm a little bit behind. But we do have plans to go back to the volcano in Vanuatu, to Yasur. And then we want to test out methodologies to remotely sense the thickness of ash. There’s a student I'm working with on this project, to work out remotely how thick the ash is. And continuing to work with GNS science on White Island, on Whakaari, I think that’s pretty important. I'm looking forward to keep pushing that research forward. Then I guess talking to students in person rather than through a computer screen. So I’m looking forward to that too.
Thank you so much for your time and thanks for talking with me.
BK: No worries, thank you. It was fun!
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