A most dangerous volcano roars back to life

By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor

Volcanoes are surefire reminders that nature is a constant balance between creation and destruction. Eruptions bring mineral-rich magma to the surface, forming islands and nourishing the landscape with soil that supports some of the most lush ecosystems on Earth. That’s part of why people—for better or worse—have been drawn to volcanoes as ideal places to set up farms and build communities.

But life near a volcano is awash in hazards: explosive eruptions, high-speed avalanches of superheated debris, lethal gases, choking ash. It’s no wonder that scientists have set up all kinds of monitoring systems around volcanic hotspots to try to anticipate an eruption and give people plenty of time to evacuate.

This weekend, however, no one was ready for a sudden outpouring of lava from Mount Nyiragongo, a peak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo that’s among the most dangerous volcanoes in all of Africa. The volcano roared to life late in the day, local time, on Saturday, sending fast-moving lava racing toward the nearby city of Goma. While most of the city’s inhabitants were spared, at least 31 people lost their lives in the ensuing chaos, and thousands had to flee across the border into Rwanda. (Pictured above, a structure nearly surrounded by lava Sunday outside Goma; below, among those fleeing into Rwanda.)

As Robin George Andrews reports, this volcano is feared for a variety of factors, including some geologic oddities that make the lava especially runny and able to shoot down slopes at up to 40 miles an hour. But the most troubling aspect is the difficulty geologists face monitoring the mountain’s activity. While Goma has an observing station, set up in 1986, it faces funding issues, theft, and vandalism, and local conflict means many of the damaged seismic monitors around the peak go unrepaired. The observatory kept up its best monitoring efforts, “but in the end, the volcano erupted unexpectedly, providing no clear geologic hints that it was about to blow,” Andrews writes.

That’s a big contrast with the recent eruption at Geldingadalur in Iceland, which scientists had been anticipating for months, and even the more explosive burst at La Soufrière, on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, which offered at least a week of warning.

Nyiragongo will certainly erupt again, and historical precedent suggests it could flood the streets of Goma with blazing lava. The hope now is that scientists can use the data collected during this outburst to inform future mitigation efforts and risk assessments. And perhaps they can also use last weekend’s eruption to spur better support for the Goma Volcano Observatory, which is an important vanguard for a city of 1.5 million people.

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