[Rockhounds] It's our moonshot': Why scientists are drilling into volcanos

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

I'm in one of the world's volcanic hotspots, northeast Iceland, near the
Krafla volcano.

A short distance away I can see the rim of the volcano's crater lake, while
to the south steam vents and mud pools bubble away.

Krafla has erupted around 30 times in the last 1,000 years, and most
recently in the mid-1980s.

Bjorn Guðmundsson leads me to a grassy hillside. He is running a team of
international scientists who plan to drill into Krafla's magma.

“We’re standing on the spot where we are going to drill,” he says.

The Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) intends to advance the understanding of how
magma, or molten rock, behaves underground.

That knowledge could help scientists forecast the risk of eruptions and
push geothermal energy to new frontiers, by tapping into an extremely hot
and potentially limitless source of volcano power.


https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e8q4j1yygo