Campi Flegrei: The Supervolcano that Threatens All Europe

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Vesuvius's big daddy: The supervolcano that threatens all life in Europe

2nd January 2011
Two thousand years ago Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii. Today, a larger, far more deadly supervolcano lurks on the other side of Naples. If it erupts, Campi Flegrei could wipe out all life in Europe. So why are British scientists battling the Italians for the right to poke at it with drilling rods?

NAPLES, ITALY, THE NEAR FUTURE
It begins with a swarm of 1,000 small earthquakes that ripple under the pavements of Naples. Air-conditioning units fall from the sides of buildings and tiles slip from the walls. Inside the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology’s control centre, a bank of screens indicates that the quakes aren’t being generated by the giant Mount Vesuvius, which looms over the city.

These quakes are coming from something far bigger, from one of the largest and most dangerous volcanoes in the world: the Campi Flegrei caldera. Vesuvius, which destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii, incinerating and suffocating thousands, is nothing more than a pimple on the back of the sleeping dragon of Campi Flegrei, an active four-mile-wide sunken volcano. A call is quickly put through to Civil Defence and the Italian Ministry of the Interior: the city must be evacuated immediately.

A short distance away, the ground around the ancient town of Pozzuoli is stretching, swelling, doming. Fumaroles – vents emitting columns of steam rich in CO2 – open up in the broken Tarmac. Four-and-a-half miles below the surface a bolt of magma has escaped the main reservoir and is rising upwards, changing and solidifying. As it reaches groundwater, it’s converted into a sponge-like stone. As the water boils away it feeds critical amounts of gas into the sponge, and the pressure builds until finally it explodes like a malfunctioning boiler.

Hundreds of billions of cubic feet of volcanic rock blasts up into the atmosphere: an explosion 200 times greater than that of the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which brought chaos to Europe, grounded planes in the UK for a week and is said to have cost the world economy in excess of £3 billion.

Back on the streets of Naples, it’s too late to run. Bumper-to-bumper traffic comes to a halt as drivers grind on their horns. They watch helplessly as a boiling black cloud of hot gas and rock rolls over the horizon at hurricane speed, suffocating everything in its path. In this area inhabited by millions, built in one of the most dangerous volcanic regions on earth, all life is over.

The Campi Flegrei caldera is a supervolcano. Although there’s no picture-postcard volcanic cone, hidden beneath the seemingly placid landscape lies a volcano of immense power. While a new eruption here would be more likely to result in the creation of another Vesuvius-like cone, the worst-case scenario could see it obliterating much of life in Europe.

In this eventuality the Earth’s surface would swell and crack and a series of small eruptions would cause the four-mile-wide caldera floor to collapse into the larger magma reservoir, which would in turn push more magma to the surface.

The last time the ground gave way like this, 39,000 years ago when the caldera was formed, it created the cliffs that the postcard town of Sorrento stands on now – volcanic deposits over 300ft deep. If the same kind of eruption happened today, this part of Italy could cease to exist, and the ash clouds would blot out the Sun and lower the Earth’s temperature. Life in the UK as we know it would end. We would lose our livestock, crops and three-quarters of our plant species, plunging us into a new dark age of rioting, starvation and perpetual winter.

Now an international team, including scientists from the UK, wants to drill down inside the caldera to try to better understand exactly why part of it has risen 10ft since 1969. The area at the epicentre of the swelling has seen whole streets of houses crumble and collapse. The threat is imminent. The last time the ground rose like this (between 1430 and 1538) there was an eruption that caused the formation of a new volcano.

Key to the operation is British volcanologist Chris Kilburn, from University College London, who lived in Naples for 20 years. He’s part of a long tradition of UK volcanology, which stretches back to the grand tour of the 18th century, when Sir William Hamilton provided some of the first scientific observations of Vesuvius. The UCL group are now world leaders in rock physics – especially in understanding how the Earth’s crust deforms and breaks – which makes Kilburn a vital member of the drilling team.

‘Right now we may well be in another period of uplift,’ he says. ‘If it occurs as before, we might expect another 60 years’ worth of unrest, and possible earthquakes and eruptions, with two or three more episodes and uplift to occur in the next ten years. We have to presume we have a few more decades of unrest, and if this is going to be the case, then we have to get more data about the volcano now.’

Kilburn and the other scientists’ work may well be crucial if the people of Naples – and the rest of Europe – are to avoid another Pompeii scenario. Yet despite the urgency, the mayor of Naples has just dramatically halted the project. Drilling was to begin this month on the site of the old Bagnoli steel mill, on the eastern part of the caldera, but was stopped following the very public objections of a sole local scientist, who has warned that the drilling itself could actually trigger an explosion that could destroy the city.

The people of Naples seem to be damned if they do and damned if they don’t, but is it really possible that one simple drill hole could cause an eruption that could end life as we know it in Europe? …

…The only thing standing between the 25-strong team of scientists from the ICDP and the pilot hole they need to drill are the complaints of a solitary scientist, geochemist Benedetto De Vivo. Though his arguments aren’t well supported by the wider scientific community, De Vivo maintains that even a 1,700ft-deep pilot hole could wipe out Naples, and his fears of catastrophe have been widely publicised in the Italian press. Fearing a public backlash, the mayor of Naples has delayed the start of drilling on the site in Bagnoli pending further technical reports.

I ask De Vivo if he really thinks the drilling would cause an eruption. ‘The drilling could cause an explosion – not an eruption – caused by the supercritical fluids, and could trigger small-magnitude earthquakes. This has already happened in other similar projects in other parts of the world.’…”

See:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1342820/Vesuviuss-big-daddy-supervolcano-Campi-Flegrei-near-Naples-threatens-Europe.html


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