00:00The ground suddenly starts shaking.
00:03Clouds of gas start forming in the sky, making it dark during broad daylight.
00:08Bits of the ground start swelling, lifting, and even collapsing.
00:12These are the tell-tale signs of a volcano that is bound to erupt.
00:17And this is what could easily happen again with Mount Spur.
00:21It's only about 75 miles from Anchorage, one of Alaska's busiest cities.
00:26More than half of the population of the northernmost state of the U.S. live there.
00:32There's also a huge amount of air cargo that passes through its international airport daily.
00:37So anytime a volcano this close to such a vital hub begins to get restless, people start paying attention.
00:45Just FYI, approximately 350 million people in the world live within the danger range of an active volcano.
00:53That means that around 1 out of 20 people live in an area at risk of volcanic activity.
01:01Alaskans probably wish that Spur's reawakening was fiction, but it's actually true.
01:06The Alaska Volcano Observatory picked up on several of these, I'm about to erupt, signs from Mount Spur.
01:13So much so that they raised the alert level to yellow, which means unrest above normal background levels.
01:19Spur erupted twice in the 90s, and it was pretty intense.
01:25If we were ranking volcanic eruptions on a scale from 1 to 10, these eruptions would rank a 6 or 7.
01:32Not that terrible, but still worth 10 to 17 million in damages.
01:37However, these numbers are nothing compared to Alaska's 1988 Redoubt Eruption,
01:43another volcano that erupted and summed up a staggering $345 million in damages.
01:51Mainly because its ashes hit aircraft engines, such as the KLM 747 that lost power after all its engines went off due to the ashes.
02:01If people weren't paying attention to Alaska's unstable geology before that, well, they surely started to after it.
02:08When you think of the hazards of volcanic activity, the first thing that might possibly pop in your mind is Pompeii, Italy.
02:18Of course, that's the worst-case scenario, a city being engulfed by lava.
02:24Spur may seem innocent compared to Vesuvio, but it still took its toll.
02:28The last time it erupted in the 90s, and it threw volcanic aerosols over 60,000 feet into the atmosphere.
02:37Let's get our science straight here.
02:40Think of volcanic aerosols like liquid particles that are released into the atmosphere during an eruption.
02:46These particles are usually created when gases from a volcano, such as sulfur dioxide,
02:51combine with water and other particles that exist in our atmosphere.
02:54These aerosols can actually cool the Earth's surface, since they reflect sunlight directly back into space.
03:02And that's not the worst part.
03:04It can stay in the atmosphere for several years after an eruption, causing lots of health issues.
03:11The eruption unleashed blazing-fast avalanches of hot gas and ash called pyroclastic flows,
03:18along with thick, muddy floods known as lahars.
03:22Oh, and there were also the massive volcanic boulders.
03:27These rock chunks were huge, some over three feet long,
03:31and they blasted out from the volcano like nature's cannonballs, landing more than six miles away.
03:37All that volcanic heat melted part of a nearby glacier,
03:41kicking off debris flows that dammed up the Chakachatna River
03:44and created a whole new lake along the valley.
03:48Some good came out of Spur's first eruption, though.
03:52The main lesson was, volcanic monitoring pays off.
03:56The local monitoring was able to reduce the economic damage done by the eruption,
04:00especially for a city that has an intense air traffic.
04:05Spur is deemed as dormant for the moment,
04:07but it could go off any time soon.
04:11You see, volcanoes are classified as active, dormant, or extinct,
04:17depending on how much action they're putting on.
04:19If it's still active, it's still rumbling and erupting somewhat regularly.
04:24Dormant means it's had some recent activity, but it's still lying low for now.
04:28And extinct, that's when it's been quiet for such a long time that we figure it's done for good.
04:36One of the U.S.'s most dangerous active volcanoes is Mount St. Helens.
04:42This volcano is actually responsible for the most powerful eruption in U.S. history.
04:48Its last blast was so intense, it threw off about 1,300 feet off its summit.
04:55Basically, the top of the mountain vanished.
04:57And if you thought Mount Spur's ash cloud was impressive,
05:01St. Helens wins the competition, since it launched its ashes 80,000 feet into the sky.
05:07Eastern Washington plunged into total darkness.
05:12But it wasn't just that.
05:14In a matter of three minutes, the eruption hurled 3.7 billion cubic yards of blazing rock and dust,
05:21enough to fill a million Olympic-sized pools across 230 square miles of lush forest.
05:28Actually, the earthquakes that anticipated the eruption started weeks before May 18, 1980.
05:35A ground shake of magnitude 5.0 went off, triggering a landslide on one side of the volcano.
05:41By the end of the official eruption date, 57 people had lost their lives.
05:48Nearly 7,000 big-game animals like deer and elk were wiped out,
05:53and millions of birds laid scattered on the burnt earth.
05:57Researchers don't think St. Helens will blow at the same magnitude again anytime soon,
06:02but they're keeping an eye on it, because this volcano is not exactly finished.
06:08By the way, the word volcano comes from the Roman name Vulcan, which was the Roman deity of fire.
06:15And they often happen at the meeting point of tectonic plates,
06:18which are the pieces of the earth's surface that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
06:22The so-called Ring of Fire, located in the Pacific Ocean, is the world's danger zone when it comes to volcanoes.
06:30It contains between 750 and 915 active volcanoes.
06:37The largest volcano located in the Ring of Fire, also the largest active volcano in the world,
06:43is the Mauna Loa. It's over 13,000 feet high, and it's located in Hawaii.
06:50Researchers say that Mauna Loa has been erupting for at least 700,000 years.
06:55Its most recent eruption began on the 27th of November 2022, and it lasted until December 13.
07:03It's been quiet since the 80s, until it decided to wake up again.
07:08Thanks to constant monitoring by the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory,
07:11it didn't cause any casualties when it last erupted.
07:14Scientists have been investing big time on volcanic monitoring, not only to reduce economic hazards,
07:22but also to save lives. The most recent attempt has been to drill into volcanoes.
07:29Recently, a group of scientists went all the way to Iceland in one of the world's volcanic hotspots.
07:36There are around 33 active volcanoes in Iceland alone, but the one that is the most interesting
07:42to them the most is the Kraffla volcano. The Kraffla has erupted around 30 times in the last 1,000 years,
07:50and its most recent eruption was in the mid-1980s. The project named Kraffla Magma Testbed,
07:56or KMT for short, is hoping to advance the understanding of how magma behaves underground.
08:02The main advantage of this drilling research is predicting the risk of eruptions,
08:07but it can also help to push geothermal energy forward. I mean, can you imagine having electricity
08:14that is run by the limitless source of volcano power? The KMT team will begin drilling holes deep
08:21into volcanic ground in 2027. They're aiming at reaching over a mile into the ground. After all,
08:28it's different to monitor lava activity when it's on the surface than when it is still below ground.
08:34This will allow researchers to listen to the pulse of the Earth, according to them.
08:40They're saying this research is as revolutionary as the first time man went to the moon. Oh,
08:46and speaking of that, I was shocked to discover that volcanoes exist all throughout the solar system.
08:51Yep, other planets and moons have volcanoes too. The largest volcano in our solar system is Olympus
08:59Mons on Mars. It's a shield volcano, much like the ones that make up the Hawaiian Islands.
09:06It's about 370 miles wide. If we transported it all the way back to Earth, it would almost occupy
09:13all of Poland. Yikes.
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