Santorini volcano probed for clues about next big explosion

Perched on high of Santorini’s sheer cliffs is a world-famous vacationer business value hundreds of thousands. Beneath is the fizzing danger of an almighty explosion.

An enormous historical eruption created the dreamy Greek island, leaving an unlimited crater and a horse-shoe formed rim.

Now scientists are investigating for the primary time how harmful the subsequent huge one may very well be.

BBC Information spent a day on board the British royal analysis ship the Discovery as they looked for clues.

Simply weeks earlier than, almost half of Santorini’s 11,000 residents had fled for security when the island shut down in a collection of earthquakes.

It was a harsh reminder that underneath the idyllic white villages dotted with gyros eating places, sizzling tubs in AirBnB leases, and vineyards on wealthy volcanic soil, two tectonic plates grind within the Earth’s crust.

Prof Isobel Yeo, an professional on extremely harmful submarine volcanoes with Britain’s Nationwide Oceanography Centre, is main the mission. Round two-thirds of the world’s volcanoes are underwater, however they’re hardly monitored.

“It’s kind of like ‘out of sight, out of thoughts’ when it comes to understanding their hazard, in comparison with extra well-known ones like Vesuvius,” she says on deck, as we watch two engineers winching a robotic the dimensions of a automobile off the ship’s facet.

This work, coming so quickly after the earthquakes, will assist scientists perceive what sort of seismic unrest might point out a volcanic eruption is imminent.

Santorini’s final eruption was in 1950, however as just lately as 2012 there was a “interval of unrest”, says Isobel. Magma flowed into the volcanoes’ chambers and the islands “swelled up”.

“Underwater volcanoes are able to actually huge, actually damaging eruptions,” she says.

“We’re lulled into a way of false safety should you’re used to small eruptions and the volcano appearing protected. You assume the subsequent would be the similar – but it surely won’t,” she says.

The Hunga Tunga eruption in 2022 within the Pacific produced the biggest underwater explosion ever recorded, and created a tsunami within the Atlantic with shockwaves felt within the UK. Some islands in Tonga, close to the volcano, had been so devastated that their individuals have by no means returned.

Beneath our toes on the ship, 300m (984ft) down, are effervescent sizzling vents. These cracks within the Earth flip the seafloor right into a vivid orange world of protruding rocks and fuel clouds.

“We all know extra concerning the floor of some planets than what’s down there,” Isobel says.

The robotic descends to the seabed to gather fluids, gases and snap off chunks of rock.

These vents are hydrothermal, that means sizzling water pours out from cracks, they usually typically kind close to volcanoes.

They’re why Isobel and 22 scientists from around the globe are on this ship for a month.

To date, no-one has been capable of work out if a volcano turns into roughly explosive when sea water in these vents mixes with magma.

“We are attempting to map the hydrothermal system,” Isobel explains. It isn’t like making a map on land. “Now we have to look contained in the earth,” she says.

The Discovery is investigating Santorini’s caldera and crusing out to Kolombo, the opposite main volcano on this space, about 7km (4.3 miles) north-east of the island.

The 2 volcanoes are usually not anticipated to erupt imminently, however it’s only a matter of time.

The expedition will create information units and geohazard maps for Greece’s Civil Safety Company, explains Prof Paraskevi Nomikou, a member of the federal government emergency group that met day by day throughout the earthquake disaster.

She is from Santorini, and grew up listening to about previous earthquakes and eruptions from her grandfather. The volcano impressed her to develop into a geologist.

“This analysis is essential as a result of it’s going to inform native individuals how energetic the volcanoes are, and it’ll map the realm that shall be forbidden to entry throughout an eruption,” she says.

It can reveal which components of the Santorini sea ground are essentially the most hazardous, she provides.

These missions are extremely costly, so Isobel crams in experiments evening and day because the scientists work in 12-hour shifts.

John Jamieson, a professor at Canada’s Memorial College in Newfoundland, exhibits us volcanic rocks extracted from the vents.

“Do not decide that one up,” he warns. “It is filled with arsenic.”

Pointing to a different that appears like a black and orange meringue with gold dusting, he explains: “This can be a actual thriller – we do not even know what it’s manufactured from.”

These rocks inform the historical past of the fluid, temperature and materials contained in the volcano. “This can be a geological surroundings completely different to most others – it is actually thrilling,” he says.

However the mission’s beating coronary heart is a darkish transport container on deck the place 4 individuals stare at screens mounted on a wall.

Utilizing a joystick that would not look out of a spot on a gaming console, two engineers drive the underwater robotic. Isobel and Paraskevi commerce theories about what’s in a pool of fluid that the robotic has discovered.

They’ve recorded very small earthquakes across the volcano, brought on by fluid transferring by means of the system and inflicting fractures. Isobel performs us an audio recording of the fractures reverberating. It sounds just like the bass in a nightclub being amped up and down.

They determine how fluid strikes by means of rocks by pulsing an electromagnetic area into the earth.

That is making a 3D map that exhibits how the hydrothermal system is linked to the volcano’s magma chamber the place an eruption is generated.

“We’re doing science for the individuals, not science for the scientists. We’re right here to make individuals really feel protected,” Paraskevi says.

The latest earthquake disaster in Santorini highlighted how uncovered the island’s residents are to the seismic threats and the way reliant they’re on tourism.

Again on dry land, photographer Eva Rendl meets me in her favorite location for marriage ceremony shoots. When the so-called swarm of earthquakes hit in February, she left the island together with her daughter.

“It was actually scary, because it received increasingly intense,” she says.

She’s again now however enterprise is slower. “Folks have cancelled bookings. Usually I begin shoots in April however my first job is not till Could,” Eva says.

In the primary sq. of Santorini’s upmarket city Oia, British-Canadian vacationer Janet tells us six of her group of 10 cancelled their vacation.

She believes extra correct scientific details about the probability of earthquakes and volcanoes would assist others really feel extra reassured about visiting.

“I get the Google alerts, I get the scientists’ alerts, and it helps me really feel protected,” she mentioned.

However Santorini will at all times be a dream vacation spot. In Imerovigli, we see two individuals climbing onto the curved rooftops to get the right shot.

The couple – married for simply quarter-hour – travelled from Latvia and weren’t postpone by the island’s underwater dangers.

“Really we wished to get married by a volcano,” Tom says, his bride Kristina by his facet.

Further reporting by Tom Ingham and Kevin Church, Local weather and science staff