With a Better Understanding of Physics, We Could Predict Volcanic Eruptions

As part of this work, hundreds of seismometers, as well as networks of fiber-optic cables, will be used to record even the tiniest of earthquakes during periods of tranquility and unrest. This monitoring effort will be aided by machine learning programs that will be taught to identify minute shifts in the seismic soundtrack of these volcanoes. In recent years, these programs have been used to process a huge volume of data far more proficiently and efficiently than scientists can manage alone. This work has already revealed myriad previously hidden magmatic pathways beneath volcanoes while also permitting scientists to track, almost in real time, magma barreling through the crust.

The idea of Ex-X is to gain unprecedented detail on how tiny changes in the behavior or position of magma can lead to eruptions. Those insights can, in turn, illuminate some of the underlying physics. All these Caribbean volcanoes, diverse though they may be, could have a shared set of fluid dynamics equations.

However, seismology won’t be enough by itself. “We lack the physical understanding of what exactly is going on in a magma chamber,” Poland says. What causes the unstoppable nucleation of bubbles within a body of magma, which can propel hot, buoyant magma through the crust above with soda can-like effervescence? What combination of molten rock, crystals, and gas is primed to trigger an eruption? What drives an eruption to switch from expelling oozing lava to blasting ash and rock into the sky?

Geochemistry is essential to this effort, too. Today, scientists scoop up lava or ash, fresh or ancient, around volcanoes—both during an eruption and in the interregnum between them—to identify subtle changes in chemical makeup. Scientists use sophisticated numerical models to simulate volcanic viscera, but this is still educated guesswork. Laboratory experiments, though, may be able to ground these models.

Replicating the most extreme phenomena in laboratory settings is not easy. But in successful experiments in the fall of 2025, scientists re-created the conditions present at the birth of planets, complete with simulacra of magma and miniature hydrogen atmospheres. “You can’t just make a magma chamber at the surface of the Earth,” Poland says. “But we’re a heck of a lot closer to that sort of thing than we were a while ago.”

Ideally, volcanologists want to try something else truly ambitious: “Drill all the way down to where there is some magma sitting at depth, and really see these processes in situ, rather than just seeing the results of them,” Winder says. That is one of the objectives of the Krafla Magma Testbed in Iceland. This literally groundbreaking facility is set to become the world’s first direct magma observatory.

“There’s no reason we can’t think that, at some point in the future, we can have volcano forecasts that are like weather forecasts,” Poland says. But deriving a unified theory of volcanism will require a geologic Manhattan Project.

First, a constellation of highly diverse volcanoes will need to be slathered in geophysical instrumentation and consistently monitored over multiple eruption cycles—meaning many decades. “You would like to think, ‘OK, volcanoes are pretty well monitored.’ But they’re not,” Roman says. “There’s a handful of Cadillac volcanoes that have permanent networks.” Even many of the United States’ most dangerous volcanoes, along the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest (home to the notorious Mount St. Helens, for example, and the precarious Mount Rainier), are only partly covered in a limited number of sensors.