[Rockhounds] Scientists in Iceland want to drill straight into an underground magma chamber

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Scientists in Iceland want to drill a hole into a magma chamber
<https://www.businessinsider.com/grindavik-iceland-magma-volcano-under-home-poised-for-eruption-evacuation-2023-11>
about
a mile underground in an attempt to generate limitless energy.

The Krafla Magma Testbed <https://kmt.is/about/> (KMT) aims to create the
world's first research center above a magma chamber to monitor, sample, and
test the molten rock in situ for the first time.

The center, it hopes, could offer unprecedented insights into how volcanoes
work and open new avenues for limitless geothermal energy
<https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-geothermal-energy-google-2017-7>.

"Magma within the Earth is the last unexplored frontier," KMT's Hjalti Páll
Ingólfsson, told Business Insider.

Research into magma chambers is crucial. These pools of molten rock,
located in the Earth's crust, can create volcanoes if they find a way to
reach the surface.

But they are fiendishly difficult to locate with surface equipment and hard
to track
<https://www.businessinsider.com/muons-help-map-magma-inside-volcanoes-predict-eruptions-2021-11>
ahead
of an eruption.

"We don't have any direct knowledge of what magma chambers look like, which
is crucial in understanding volcanoes of course," Paolo Papale at Italy's
National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Pisa, who has written
on the subject, told New Scientist.
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy/>

https://www.businessinsider.com/iceland-scientists-drill-magma-chamber-source-kmt-geothermal-energy-limitless-2024-1