Cosmic Queries – Space Volcanoes: Fire and Ice with Natalie Starkey

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

We’re going to do another Cosmic Queries edition.

These are becoming so much the favorite of our listening and viewing audience.

Today, we’re going to do Fire and Ice.

I love it.

It’s literary, it’s scientific, and we’ll get into it in just a moment.

First, my co-host for this episode, Matt Kirshen.

Matt, welcome back.

Hey, how’s it going?

Matt, I love it when comedians are into science.

You’ve got your own podcast called Probably Science.

I think I get it right.

That is it.

I’m too confused.

I did it last time and I got it right.

I’m loving this.

Yeah, the probably is in there for good reason.

Don’t undersell what you got going there.

I like being described as a comedian that’s into science and not a failed math student who fell backwards into comedy.

That is exactly what happened there.

That is exactly what happened.

So it means you do have math fluency.

That’s always good.

And today, Fire and Ice, I love the literary reference that that makes.

It just makes you wonder, is it good, is it bad?

And we have someone who’s like an expert on the fire and ice of the solar system.

And that is Natalie Starkey.

Natalie, welcome back.

It’s so good to be here.

This is not your first StarTalk Radio.

Not at all, no.

Yeah, that’s excellent, excellent, you’re coming to us from the UK.

And let me get your official title, you’re a public engagement officer at the Open University, which is an institution just outside of London.

And you’re a science communicator.

That’s just a beautiful thing.

Because we need more of that.

Can we clone you?

You’ll be the first in line.

And it’s amazing, you know, when I’m in this field, all these other practitioners, there’s so many of us.

We can call it a field, right?

A place to be.

A place to be.

You’re a geologist, and you specialized in volcanoes?

Is that…

I did, yeah.

Yeah, back, you know, it feels like it’s decades ago now.

But I started out as a geologist because I was fascinated by volcanoes.

I’m just wondering, if you’re a geologist at all, how could you not be fascinated by volcanoes?

Because that’s…

Exactly.

I think the thing for me was that I didn’t even really know what geology was when I was at school, because you don’t really do it as a core subject.

And then I learned about volcanoes and was fascinated, and I read this amazing book called Surviving Galeris by this volcanologist called Stanley Williams.

And it was his story about how he’d gone up this volcano and it had unexpectedly erupted and he’d taken all these people with him and ended up in these dire circumstances.

And lots of people got killed and injured.

And for some reason, that really inspired me to study volcanoes and I was like, well, I don’t know why, because I don’t consider myself a risk taker, but I just really was fascinated by them.

And I then learned that actually, I needed to do geology to…

So the fact that volcanoes can kill you earned a certain level of respect from you personally, emotionally and professionally.

And just to be clear, Matt, in case you didn’t know, a volcanologist, it’s not about Spock or anything from Star Trek, just want to make that one clear.

But am I right in thinking that you also thought, in your career, that volcanoes on Earth are just a little bit too dull?

Well, you know, there’s always that, because we know so much about them.

No, it’s not.

It’s not true.

I mean, the thing is with my book, I’ve dedicated almost half the book to the volcanoes on Earth, because we know them so well.

Well, I didn’t mention that yet.

You have a book called Fire and Ice.

I know.

I don’t know if I got that in there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So let me talk about your book, not you talk about your book.

Fire and Ice.

It’s a great title.

And is it like, as Matt’s saying, you were not content with just volcanoes on Earth.

No, no, not at all.

Because after I did my geology degrees, I moved into space science.

So I was basically doing chemistry on volcanic rocks to understand how the Earth formed.

That was kind of my PhD thesis.

And then I discovered that actually you could do the same chemistry on rocks from space.

So that led me to analyzing pieces of comets and asteroids brought back by space missions.

And so it kind of broadened my horizons.

I’d never really thought about studying anything from space before.

I never thought that was really an option for me.

But then suddenly I’m combining all of these expertise.

And so it kind of led on after my first book, which was about comets and asteroids, and I wrote all about those first.

Then I was like, hold on, I’m going to combine this all and write about volcanoes in space, because it just seemed like the natural thing to do.

And let the world know, if they didn’t already, that you wrote the current space show at the Hayden Planetarium called Worlds Beyond Earth.

So thanks for agreeing to do that and bringing some of your expertise across the pond, as we say of the Atlantic Ocean.

And we were delighted to collaborate with you on that.

So thanks for bringing that collective expertise.

If you were just a geologist, no, we wouldn’t have had you.

Yeah, thank goodness.

Okay.

We needed that space dimension that you brought to the table.

And that was such a fun show to write.

Oh my goodness.

I learned so much in the process as well, like having to combine, you know, that kind of scientific expertise with, you know, basically space artists, people that can, you know, image this stuff that we write about and we talk about so much and using all that kind of real data from NASA and ESA missions and using it to create this beautiful show.

It was, yeah, it was a great experience.

Yeah, all your words on the page are actually happening visually on the dome, yes, yes, yeah.

And so, so I’m curious about something.

Is there a, you know, when we think of volcanoes, we think of hot things.

And so why is the word ice in your title?

Yeah, good question.

Okay, so a lot of people don’t realize that actually most of the volcanoes out in the solar system, particularly when we go past the asteroid belt out to Jupiter and beyond, most of the bodies out there are actually ice volcanoes, so these are these are active places.

Wait, wait, wait, you’re speaking like, okay, yeah, most of the volcanoes in the solar system, yeah, that’s cool.

Like, do people even know we have volcanoes other places than Earth?

Oh, I’m sure they do.

Really?

I’m sure they do.

I would say maybe a fair proportion, a large proportion of the listeners of this show would know it, but I think if you polled the average person on the street, I don’t know if you would necessarily think of a volcano as being on other planets.

I don’t know if you’d even necessarily think of…

Maybe I’ve spoken to so many flat earthers, but people think Earth is flat, they’re not thinking that they’re volcanoes elsewhere.

So I just have issues with believing that this is widespread.

Even people who have, you know, who have broad acceptance of science, but maybe aren’t as as embedded in it, I would even say this is this is even something it’s obviously I know that the heat from volcanoes and the molten rock isn’t fire per se.

But the idea of something that looks like fire coming in a vacuum in places that don’t have air, that seems strange to me.

So all of this.

Okay, so we have fire in vacuum and we have ice in volcanoes.

So explain yourself, Natalie.

Yeah, so I mean, I used fire, you know, to kind of just represent the fireiness of volcanoes.

And it’s something I go into in the book a lot.

But we can also use it to represent, you know, there are lots of fiery volcanoes out in the solar system.

We had active worlds around us.

Mars was massively active kind of three billion years ago.

Venus, our next door neighbor, is probably still active today.

It’s probably got volcanoes erupting today, we think, but we just can’t see them happening.

But there’s a lot of evidence that it probably is happening.

Well, there’s lots of issues with Venus.

It’s not a very nice place, basically.

It’s really hard to see.

It’s covered in this shroud of gas, basically, of carbon dioxide, which means, so its atmosphere is really, really thick and dense.

So it’s really hard to see through it.

You can’t see through it with visible light.

You need like a radar to see through it, which we’ve done.

We’ve sent spacecraft up to look through that really dense atmosphere, and we’ve looked at the surface of Venus, and we can see it’s just covered in lava flows.

So everything that’s on its surface is basically basalt, which is the same kind of stuff that we find in places like Hawaii and Iceland, very, very standard volcanic rock that we see a lot on our own planet.

But the whole of Venus is about the same age.

It looks like it’s about 500 million years old, which sounds really old, but actually in kind of the age of the solar system, that’s not very old.

It’s been active quite recently.

And just to be clear, you call Venus our neighbor, but Mars is our neighbor too.

Yeah, so the thing about Venus is that it’s a similar size.

Yeah, it’s just the important thing is that it’s a similar size to Earth.

And it was made of the very same ingredients as were all the terrestrial planets, all the ones within the inner solar system.

So it should be very similar to Earth.

Like we should expect it to be very similar to our own planet.

But it’s not for some reason.

It’s turned into this hellhole.

It’s got a surface temperature of 450 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead.

It’s got horrible pressure on the surface.

So, you know, the Soviets sent spacecraft to land there decades ago.

And these spacecraft lasted just a few hours on the surface before being crushed to death.

So it’s not a place we’re going to be sending humans anytime soon.

But it’s a fascinating world because what we want to do is understand why it’s ended up so different to Earth.

Like, why hasn’t it got oceans on its surface?

And that’s one of the big questions that we’re actually trying to look at now.

We’re sending some missions there.

NASA are going to send two missions there in the next decade.

ESA are going to send one mission.

I think the Indians have another mission going.

ESA, the European Space Agency.

Correct.

Yeah.

And so we’re going to find so much about Venus now.

So it was Mars.

I feel like Mars has had its day now.

Like, we’ve done it.

No, we haven’t.

There’s lots still to find out about Mars.

But Venus is going to be the next planet we’re really going to delve into.

And just a shout out to India, who’s joining the fray there with sending probes to planets.

So yeah, they’ve done some amazing work there.

You know, their space agency is doing great.

So there’s going to be so much information coming back.

It’s really exciting.

It’s just amazing, though.

Now, where does ice fit into this?

Oh, yeah.

I went off on a tangent.

The ice part is going to represent all those volcanoes that are past the asteroid belt.

So we’ve got basically a lot of moons around these giant planets out in the outer solar system.

So we take Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

They’ve all got lots of moons around them.

Like, Jupiter has about 79 moons that we’ve found so far.

So it’s just loads of them, you know, we’ve just got one.

And I’m like, okay, Jupiter is kind of greedy, but it is a big planet.

Aren’t many of those moons kind of lame excuses for moons?

No, not at all.

I would say ours is a bit lame now.

Now we’ve learned about all these other ones.

I meant just in terms of how tiny they are.

No, no, no, no, not at all.

So some of the moons out there are actually as big as Mercury.

No, I meant among the 79 moons of Jupiter.

Some of them are not potentially so interesting, but if we take the Galilean moons, we’ve got Io, we’ve got Ganymede, Europa.

These are all really cool places.

Io is hot.

It’s very much like Earth was kind of 4 billion years ago.

It’s the most volcanically active object in the solar system.

So it erupts these plumes of rock almost continuously off its surface.

In fact, every space mission that’s gone by has seen it erupting.

But then all the other moons there are kind of icy moons.

So they’ve got these rocky interiors, but then they’re either ocean worlds with an ice cap on the outside, or they’re just made of ice.

And these are the really interesting ones because in order to have sort of an ocean underneath the ice, we know that they must still be warm inside.

That rocky interior must still be warm somehow.

It must be warm enough to heat the ice to turn it into a liquid.

And so this instantly tells us that these worlds are active and interesting places to go.

And sure enough, the more we’ve looked, the more we’ve discovered that they have volcanoes on the surface.

So they have plumes of material shooting out from their oceans, which shows us that there’s a lot going on beneath the surface.

So we can call those ice volcanoes, I guess.

Is that right?

Yep.

So they’re all, the ice volcanoes are cryo volcanoes, cryo being the cold part.

So, and there’s loads of them.

They’re everywhere.

They’re everywhere we look.

So actually it’s almost like the ice volcanoes are more common than the kind of the hot ones that we see in the inner solar system, particularly more active.

Somebody should have been talking about this long ago.

It should be like in all the classes.

Well, this is the thing.

It’s quite, it’s always quite recent that we’ve really learned about all of these places.

In fact, you know, the Voyage missions went out in the kind of 1970s and 80s.

And before that, we had no idea that these places were active.

In fact, we didn’t even know some of these moons existed.

And as we got out there and we started to photograph them, we were then very surprised by the results.

So I was at school during that time.

And of course, that was, you know, cutting edge research happening at the time.

That’s not gonna be in the school curriculum.

So it takes a while for that to kind of filter down.

But what we then discovered was actually some of the data that Voyager got.

We didn’t see some of this stuff at the time.

So it needed kind of reprocessing.

So we go back with other missions later, and we spy this plume shooting off the surface of Enceladus or somewhere.

Then we can go back to earlier data that is still sitting in the archives and reprocess it and go, oh, look, we would have seen it there if we’d looked more carefully.

We now have loads of evidence that these things have been active for decades.

So really it just takes incremental steps of missions going out and discovering this stuff.

But we’ve barely been out to the outer solar system many times.

We’ve been there just a handful of missions.

So there’s still a lot of work to do.

There’s just an interesting fact that if you do flybys, you just have these snapshots of a moment in time where you then have to generalize what the thing is doing all the rest of the time, which could be very hard.

Like, I’m trying to think of an alien flew by Earth and I just happened to be in the bathroom when that happened.

They would generalize my whole life.

Oh, he lives in the bathroom.

Like, you need at least another data point or something to capture that.

Matt, did you collect questions for us for today?

We’ve got a bunch of questions from Patreon patrons who’ve messaged in.

But I just have to announce you also have a Brit accent here.

I’m surrounded by a Brit.

I do, yeah.

When I go back to London now, I get called the American because my accent has imperceptibly changed to American ears.

But as far as Brits are concerned now, I might as well be from Texas.

I can definitely hear a twang in there.

I think he’s somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic at the moment.

Oh yeah, it hasn’t fully crossed one way or the other, but he’s wrangling there.

All right, what question, what do you have for us?

Well, so I think you’ve sort of half answered this already, but I just want to pin down this question from Adam Smith, just to kick things off, because he says, is there such a thing as cold volcanoes or ice volcanoes?

I imagine ice being spat out like in the way Mr.

Freeze did in the 1997 Batman and Robin film, character play by Arnold Schwarzenegger, or is this illogical due to pressure causing heat?

I mostly wanted to ask that question because of how detailed he went in with the specificity of the film.

He needed us to know exactly which iteration of Batman and Mr.

Freeze he was doing.

Yeah, because you don’t want to get confused with some other rendering and play by a different character.

Actually, we got to take a quick break, but when we come back, we’re going to get Natalie to explain to us how an ice volcano actually works, because that’s a mystery to all of us here when we come back on StarTalk.

Hi, I’m Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re back, StarCock Cosmic Queries.

I’ve got Natalie Starkey, has a book with that title, Geologist Turn Astro Person.

What she worked on became interesting when she stepped out into space.

That happens whatever you’re doing on Earth.

If you add space to it, it’s more interesting.

That’s my bias.

I bet that’s your bias too, Natalie, isn’t it?

Okay, there you go.

All right, Matt, you left off with a question about Arnold Schwarzenegger, was it?

Yes, this is from Adam Smith, who is one of the many Patreon patrons whose questions we’re answering today.

And there’s a lot of Batman-specific parts to the question, but the main part is, what is the deal with ice volcanoes and does ice get spat out from these volcanoes or is this illogical due to pressure causing heat?

Yeah, yeah, because pressure, whether or not pressure even causes heat, pressure wouldn’t have to cause heat.

It just has to be pressure, right?

I mean, if something gets spewed out of a volcano, it doesn’t have to be heat that does it.

Is that right?

So, no, yeah, this is kind of a tricky one to answer.

It’s a great question for that reason, but basically there’s lots of different ways that volcanoes can erupt.

And I think what we need to get away from is thinking, having to think of a volcano as a conical-shaped mountain like we see on Earth, because actually when we go out into space, we don’t need that.

We don’t need a conical-shaped mountain to have a volcano because we have to just define better what a volcano is.

We’re sort of skewed towards what we have on Earth because that’s where we first studied volcanoes.

So we think they have to look a certain way, but we go out into the solar system and we look at these other objects around us and we start going, okay, well, this is a volcano.

This is material coming out from the inside of this world and it’s spewing out onto the surface.

And that’s happening because there’s heat with inside that world and it’s producing a molten material or gas and it’s forcing it, ejecting it out.

And that is basically a volcanic type of activity.

So we see this at Enceladus.

Basically, what’s happening there is that there is heat generated within that world because as Enceladus goes about its orbit around Saturn, it’s sort of pulled and pushed on the inside by the gravity of Saturn.

So it kind of gets a bit closer, a bit further away from Saturn.

And so it’s called tidal heating.

It’s very much like we get with the earth and the moon and that we kind of squash slightly and our tides move.

But within Enceladus, for example, they actually the insides of it are squashed.

So it’s rock creates friction and heat and that then heats the ocean above it.

And eventually kind of opens cracks in the surface that then allow material to escape.

So you’ll see it as a plume, that material ends up raining back down onto the surface of Enceladus and resurfacing that body.

But not only that, but these are kind of what we’re actually spewing out is basically gases, ice particles, little pieces of silica grains, which come from the very bottom of that ocean.

And some of these ice particles actually start to make Saturn’s E ring.

So they get sent so high up into space that that is the reason we have Saturn’s E ring within which Enceladus kind of orbits.

So that’s, yeah, a much longer answer.

And that’s only one way that we can kind of make volcanoes on these bodies.

But yeah, in a way, I kind of think that’s like the Mr.

Freeze character that we’re spewing out ice particles into space.

And that’s by sampling those, which we did with the Cassini mission, we know where they’re coming from because they’re salty.

We know they’re from a salty liquid ocean below the crust.

So that’s really cool.

Well, so if there were fish there, could fish be spewed out too?

You could have fish in the E ring?

Yeah, exactly.

I love this.

Now we need to do that because…

I was just kidding.

You’re telling me…

I know, it’s like, well, maybe…

But living things could be shot out.

Anything could.

So whatever’s down there is going to come out in these plumes.

Now the thing is, when Cassini went, it didn’t know it needed to measure the stuff that was coming out in the plumes because we didn’t know they were happening.

So this is one of these things with space missions.

We then learn stuff and we go, oh, we need another mission.

We need to go back and specifically look at these plumes and the material that’s in them.

What we do know is that there’s all the right materials for organic content being there.

So we know that there’s chemical reactions happening within that ocean that can create organic molecules.

Now, it’s a step then to say, okay, we need to find life, but there’s every chance that it could be down there.

It’s got all the right conditions for life to form.

Okay, not human like life, but other kinds of life that we might find at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, for example, which is going to be a very similar environment.

So yeah, every chance we need to get down there and have a look basically.

So it must be hard enough for a fish in an Earth ocean to be caught, you know, with a line and then thrown back and have to explain to other fish what they saw.

That’s got to be hard enough.

And now we’re going to have a fish spewed into orbit around Saturn when they were happily swimming beneath the ice.

Yeah, just be sort of orbiting around the fish on the ground.

It’s like, get back, get back, get back here.

Stop messing around.

All right, so there you go.

All right, so Matt, what more do you have?

That was a great question.

My biggest takeaway from your answer there is that the Batman and Robin film was scientifically accurate.

So that’s nice to know.

I always love it when a question comes from the children of listeners.

I like the idea that there’s some young kids who are interested in this stuff.

So this is from Wes Denham’s seven-year-old son Silas who asks, what is the process that magma goes through to be able to rise to the surface before it explodes?

Oh my goodness.

What a question.

That’s amazing.

I always love the ones from the kids because they’re always the hardest to answer.

You’re like, oh, it’s, you know, everyone’s like, oh, it’ll be a really simple question.

Like, no, that’s not simple to answer.

But just to be clear, what you call magma, we call lava.

Is that right?

So yeah, basically magma is before it’s erupted.

So below the surface, if we have molten rock, it will be called magma.

As soon as it goes above the surface and is erupted out of a volcano, it becomes a lava.

Even though it’s the same stuff, we just have a different word for it.

It’s exactly the same stuff.

And then after it hardens, then you call it basalt.

Well, yeah, it will be a basaltic lava.

And then when it hardens, it’s a basaltic rock or basalt.

I know, I know.

You just like to make life complicated.

And who asked this question again, Matt?

This is young Silas, seven-year-old Silas.

She’s seven.

When we go to the outer solar system and go to these icy worlds, remember our view of volcanoes is skewed towards what we have on Earth.

So we think volcanoes need to be rocky.

And then we go out there and go, oh, no, they don’t.

They can be icy.

So basically, when we talk about magma or lava on, for example, Pluto, let’s take Pluto because that’s a great example, it’s not rocky.

The stuff that Pluto has made is all ice.

So when we talk about Pluto’s magma, it’s basically just the molten version of whatever it’s made of.

It’s bedrock is water, ice and ammonia and methane and nitrogen.

So when we melt those materials, which it’s easier to do because they have lower melting points, we basically make magma or lava of those materials.

So that’s their magma, that’s their lava.

So it just depends where you are.

We just need to center ourselves on the right world.

So whatever happens, basically, you need to heat the stuff.

So if you’ve got rock with inside a planet, which we do, if you delve down into our planet, it’s hard and it’s rocky, we need to melt that stuff in order to make it rise.

As soon as you make a liquid of a solid thing, then it’s more buoyant and it just wants to naturally rise through that body.

So that’s generally what happens.

Now, the other thing with magmas is that they often contain a lot of gases and these gases just want to escape.

So they kind of overpressure this magma as it rises up and that causes it to just keep rising and keep rising and melting its way through the crust until it gets to the surface.

And then basically what happens is those gases want to just erupt out of that lava very quickly.

And that’s generally what makes the explosion at the surface.

If we see something, you know, like Mount St.

Helens or somewhere, that was just that magma basically exploding as it got to the surface and blowing that mountain apart as that pressure is released when you get to that.

So if the explosion blows a mountain apart, how do we get the mountain in the first place?

So the mountain initially was built up from very continuous eruptions of lava and ash.

And so we call these stratovolcanoes.

So they generally build up quite slowly over years and years.

And then, you know, trees grow on them and they look just like a mountain.

And we don’t think they’re scary.

And this is partly why volcanoes are very dangerous because they don’t…

It’s like Mount Fuji has a very nice shape.

Oh, it’s beautiful.

Yeah.

You know, I loved with the Olympics coverage.

Yes, it was gorgeous.

It was beautiful.

They used that image all the time.

Snowcat Mountain.

And I think that…

It’s the volcano that looks most like a child’s drawing.

Exactly.

It doesn’t even look real, right?

It’s beautiful.

And I think that’s why we sort of forget as humans because these, you know, volcanoes can erupt not very often, but they’re still classed as active.

So 10,000 years is usually the timeframe where we say, if it hasn’t erupted for 10,000 years, then it might be not active any longer.

But the problem is we don’t, as humans, remember that kind of timeframe.

So people live close to volcanoes for many different reasons.

The land around volcanoes is often very fertile, so it’s really good to make crops and everything and grow stuff.

And also the land is cheap because it is known not to be very safe.

Really, you think?

But people have to live in these places.

Exactly.

And they’re beautiful.

This has good schools, it’s got good roads, but you’re on the side of a volcano.

As much basil as you need.

We went on a trip to Italy and visited Vesuvius, famous for Pompeii.

And no, there’s no lava there that I saw, but it was hot.

We went near the caldera.

It’s like, oh my gosh.

I was like, whoa.

And that obviously is very famous for Pompeii.

Did you visit the ruins?

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.

And there are vineyards on this side of Vesuvius that are thusly identified on the label.

So if you want to get it.

Zoe, taste a bit of ash.

That’s the thing about ash.

It’s really, really good for soil.

So, you know, whilst a huge amount of it coming down the mountain like at Pompeii, you know, is rather devastating.

Small scatterings of ash quite often are really great for soil.

And it has this great ability that it can absorb water into the soil.

So it acts as like a fertilizer in the soil and helps to create these amazing crops.

Fertilize and irrigate it.

Very interesting.

Matt, give me some more.

Yeah.

Well, so this is Nicholas Godlove.

And along these lines, Nicholas is asking, should we be worried or afraid of the supervolcanoes on Earth?

And what is the most menacing volcano to you in our solar system?

Good one.

So, yeah, supervolcanoes, that’s a great subject because we hear about, I think Yellowstone is probably the most famous one we hear about because it’s always in the media, oh, it’s going to erupt, you know, it’s going to erupt next year and it’s going to devastate everything.

But the reality is that thing of like it’s due is how it’s always described, like we do an eruption.

And it is always due, you know, but because we don’t have a huge amount of data of how often it’s erupted.

But the thing is with these supervolcanoes is if they do go, it would be massively devastating and they create caldera eruptions.

So you don’t really see anything on the surface initially.

You don’t see a volcano like Mount Fuji.

What will happen is that the ground will literally just explode and you’ll end up with this massive caldera left behind.

And that has happened throughout history.

But the thing is with these supervolcanoes…

It could blow up completely, but before that happens, you’ve got…

The thing is with supervolcanoes, whilst they have the potential to do that, and we think there’s a massive magma chamber sort of under the surface that could be bubbling away, let’s say, and potentially going to erupt.

You’re a geologist.

Why don’t you know this?

Well, we do, but there’s smaller eruptions.

We can thump the ground and find oil.

Why can’t you thump the ground and find where the magma chamber is that might bust?

So we know that.

We can do the seismic surveys.

We know sort of where the ground is hotter and where there’s molten material, but it doesn’t mean it’s all going to erupt in one go.

It could be that it has smaller eruptions and lets off a bit of steam, and then it has another one, and so they wouldn’t be devastating, and therefore it lets off that steam, and then it’s not going to erupt for another million years.

So then they’re almost never as bad as we think they’re going to be.

And if one is really going to erupt, then we’re going to know about it, because we’re studying them in detail, and we’d have a good idea if it was going to do something.

Okay, that’s encouraging, because otherwise you’d say, oh, it might erupt in the next 4,000 years.

That’s not helpful.

And how about the other half of that question?

What was that?

I’ve already forgotten.

Oh, that was, what is the most menacing volcano to you in our solar system?

Menacing?

Oh, but I don’t like to give the menacing titles, because either they’re all lovely, but no, I don’t think…

You’re not supposed to feel for the volcano.

They don’t have feelings for you.

They will melt you in an instant.

Okay, vaporize you.

I guess I wouldn’t want to be sitting on Io, because I think on Io you’re almost certainly going to be captured by an eruption somewhere, and even if not, you’ll have probably lava spattered on you from one of its erupting volcanoes, and its surface is just incredibly hot.

I know it’s not active, but Olympus Mons on Mars, isn’t that the biggest volcanic mountain in the whole solar system?

Yeah, it’s massive.

It’s like three times higher than Mount Everest.

It’s absolutely enormous.

But the thing is, it’s not much different to Hawaii.

So the volcanoes that we see on Mount Aloha and Mauna Kea, it’s a very similar type of volcano.

And actually, they’re not particularly scary.

When it erupts, I think the most recent big eruption was kind of 2018.

People were able to out walk the lava most of the time.

Yes, it was devastating.

It covered houses and land, but you could out walk it.

I never heard that sentence before.

Matt, let’s out walk the lava.

Let’s go for a nice stroll.

Morning constitutional away from the burning rocks.

Very cool.

So Matt, let’s slip in one more question before we take our second break.

Given that we’re talking about Olympus Mons, there are two different people who have written in questions that include that.

Cameron Bishop asks, what properties determine the size of a volcano and how did these properties allow Olympus Mons to get so big?

Could such a volcano form here on Earth?

And Jared Sorba says, if Olympus Mons was able to grow so large due to Mars’ weak gravity, why don’t we see even larger volcanoes on other active bodies, such as some of the larger moons?

Yeah, brilliant.

So yeah, and that second question has got it exactly right.

So Mars is about half the size of Earth, so it has less gravity, so it means that things can simply just grow bigger.

So if we took an Olympus Mons-sized volcano or mountain and put it on Earth, it would basically collapse under its own weight because it would just be too heavy.

And so it just couldn’t form here.

It would literally just wouldn’t be able to get that big.

The other way that Mars has been able to grow such a large volcano is because it doesn’t have plate tectonics.

Now, I’m hoping most of the listeners are going to know what plate tectonics is.

It’s a thing that’s very unique to Earth, we think, and it’s where the outside crust of our planet is basically broken into pieces which move around in relation to each other, and they can kind of knock into each other or they create earthquakes when they slide past one another, and they are what creates many of our volcanoes.

And by the way, just to be clear, y’all only fully embraced that within the last 60 years, right?

That’s not a forever-ago thing.

Yeah, I think it’s the 1960s, wasn’t it?

When it was first suggested that it was a thing, and people were like, no, the man’s crazy.

Yeah, no, I think the suggestion predates that, but before the evidence really gathers to start.

I didn’t know that, and I also really didn’t know that Earth was the only body that we know of that has this.

I thought it was a fairly universal thing.

No, so that’s how we get lots of our volcanoes, but the other type of our volcanoes, luckily, come from mantle plumes, and this is the type, again, Hawaii is the classic example.

This is a big chimney of hot rock that rises from the interior of the Earth, possibly as deep as the core, and it comes all the way up through the planet and then erupts molten lava at the surface.

And these are very long-lived features on our planet.

Now, if you just imagine this chimney of rock in the planet, and these plates are moving over the top of that.

So what happens at Hawaii is we get this chain of volcanoes.

This, you know, chimney of rock keeps erupting, and the plate moves over it, and we get volcanoes, you know, going along in a linear chain.

So the most recent ones are around a lower amount of kaia.

Now, in Mars, we’ve got exactly the same thing happening here.

It’s an archipelago, right?

Isn’t that what an archipelago is?

And many of the Caribbean islands are…

So what you’re saying is it’s not a continuous busting through of the plate.

It busts through, and then it stays calm for a while, and over that period, this plate shifts, and it’s, okay, time to bust through again.

Bop, there you go.

That completely…

That’s fascinating to me, because in my head, these sort of chains of volcanoes, I assume they were like all along a fault line or something like that, but you’re saying it’s almost more like a factory line, where they’re moving along, like the Earth is moving along on a conveyor belt, and every so often, it punches a hole through it, and it moves on a bit more and punches another hole through it.

Precisely, and so if you go to Honolulu, and people are like, oh, it’s volcanic, could it erupt?

You’re like, no, it can’t, because it’s nowhere near that plume now, so that is almost certainly not going to happen.

But that other island, that’s the one.

That’s the one we need to worry about, with the molten lava crater at the top.

And also, I think I’m right in that the big island of Hawaii would not be sustainable were that fully on land.

That the buoyancy of rock and water allows that to build as high as it did from the bottom of the ocean through the ocean surface and then above the ocean surface, because it doesn’t weigh as much simply because half of it is sitting in water.

Yeah, exactly.

Because I think people forget with those islands that what we see above is not even half of it.

And in the middle of the freaking Pacific Ocean, right?

Yeah, it goes really deep.

We got to take another quick break, another quick break, and when we get back, Matt, you got more questions for Natalie Starkey, our geologist-turned-astro-person, Star Talk.

We’re back, Star Talked.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

Matt, where can we find you on social media?

You can find me at Matt Kirshen on the various things, and probably Science is my podcast.

And that’s on all the podcast.

Wherever podcasts are sold near you, yes, okay.

Yeah, ask at your local bookshop for my podcast.

There you go.

And Natalie, where can we find you on social media?

I’m at Starkey Stardust on, yeah, all the platforms, and yeah, I think that.

Starkey Stardust, S-T-A-R-K-E-Y.

Starkey Stardust, I love it.

So I think we had to take a break before you completed the answer to why Olympus Mons is so big on Mars.

So we learned that the Hawaiian chain of islands, they’re all volcanic, and that’s just magma punching through in a new spot as the plate tectonics take it by.

So Mars, I think, doesn’t have plate tectonics.

So is that what happened there?

Yeah, we don’t think it does.

We haven’t got any evidence for it there.

Now, obviously, it’s not an active planet today, so we know it’s not happening today.

Trying to work out whether it happened in the past, we just don’t have any evidence for it, so we don’t think it did.

So we call it a stagnant lid planet, basically just one big crust and it didn’t move.

So what happens there is if you’ve got one of these mantle plumes coming up from the interior of the planet onto the surface, that plate isn’t moving anywhere.

It’s just gonna carry on erupting for millions of years.

Through the same hole.

Through the same hole.

Through the same hole, maybe even a billion years or more.

So yeah, it just grows larger and larger and larger in one place and that’s exactly what happened with the Olympus Mons.

All right, cool.

Which is the largest volcanic mountain in the solar system, I think?

I think it’s the largest mountain, isn’t it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, Matt, keep them coming.

Okay, well this is a question Chester Lipschitz has sent in that touches on both of your areas of expertise.

Do today’s volcanic activities have much of any impact on the cooling down and gradual solidifying of the core?

If so, how long would it take?

Would we lose our ability to maintain a stable magnetosphere and atmosphere before we even have to worry about the problems the sun is going to give us in a few billion years?

Oh, wow.

What an apocalyptic, does he get any sleep at night?

Right, so I think he’s basically then asking, as heat is coming out through these volcanoes, is it cooling down the inside of the earth and is it doing it at such a rate that it’s going to start changing how the earth is?

Let me simplify that question to Natalie.

Why is earth still hot?

Yeah, no, that’s exactly it.

So the volcanoes are basically just a manifestation of a planet cooling itself down.

So it has all this internal heat and it needs to go somewhere and volcanoes let that heat escape into space.

Which means we are cooling down.

We are cooling down.

But luckily we have plenty of heat.

So we’ve got two main two types of heat in most of the planets will be the heat that was left over from the formation of the planet.

So that when the planet’s formed, it was all a bit chaotic and things were colliding with each other.

And basically kinetic energy of two objects colliding into each other turns into heat energy.

And so it gets trapped within the cores of most of the planets or all the moons in fact.

So we’ve got a lot of heat from four and a half billion years ago and it’s been trapped in ever since.

Outside of the core, we’ve got a mantle which is made of silicate rocks.

So these are kind of the basalts and stuff we were talking about.

That’s a really good insulator.

So it keeps that, it’s kept that heat inside the planet.

The larger you are, the more heat you can retain.

Now the other way that we create heat is actually continuous process and it’s nuclear heat.

So we’ve actually got radioactive decay going on within our planet.

Basically atoms that are unstable decay to more stable atoms and they release heat during this process because they release little atoms that then collide with other things inside the planet and create heat.

Now it sounds like it wouldn’t be very an important process, but actually there’s so much decay going on in the planet that we’re creating about half our current day heat from that process.

So why isn’t Mars also creating heat?

So it is, but it’s cooled down a lot more now because it started off smaller, so it never had as much heat to start with.

And then because it’s mantle is smaller and it’s crust where it has all these heat producing elements, it then has just lost that heat.

Okay, so we have volcanoes and Venus still has volcanoes.

And we’re sister planets for all the same reasons.

Yeah, Venus is probably a similar temperature inside.

We talk about the surface temperature of the planet, so it almost doesn’t really relate to what’s going on inside.

So Mercury being right next to the Sun can even have ice on its surface.

And another side of that question was, if it does cool down, we might lose our magnetic field because you drive a magnetic field by the movement of conducting materials.

And when you move charges within an electric field, you can generate a magnetic field.

And so we rely on a molten inner region of iron itself, a conducting material, to generate a magnetic field, which shields us from certain forms of solar wind that could then strip our atmosphere of molecules that we care about, including the water molecule.

So did I characterize that accurately there?

Yeah, perfect.

See, our outer core is actually molten, and our inner core is solid.

So it’s that molten iron rotating around inside the planet that keeps our magnetic field alive.

And without it, we wouldn’t be here, because life, we just would be bombarded with radiation.

Or we’d be living just underwater.

We’d maybe be living underwater, because if you had an ice cover, like you find at Europa, which is obviously sitting next to Jupiter, which has this horrible magnetic field, if you’re alive, it could be that life underneath, if you’re alive.

Otherwise, it’s just fine.

If you’re a rock, what do you care?

I mean, if you’re a robot, then you might be in trouble as well.

So that’s worth considering.

We do have to really protect space equipment that we send out there from radiation in space, because all this can damage cameras very easily.

So yeah, it’s something we have to worry about.

But Mars, if we go back to Mars, it was, it did have a molten interior, and then it no longer does, so it’s lost its magnetic field.

So this is why we talk about life might have been there in the past, because it had all the right conditions.

But it also means terraforming Mars might have bigger challenges than we think, because you might be able to turn it into Earth, but to sustain it requires the rest of this shielding to happen.

Yeah, we probably have to live in caves, and I think it would be miserable.

But, you know, maybe people want to go and do that.

But we would need to live underground to protect ourselves, using the rock to basically shield us from the radiation.

So my favorite thing about this show is I can make a stupid joke about robots in terms that I actually don’t need to say something smart.

That’s a very insightful point, Matt.

Thank you.

That’s what I was going for.

I appreciate that, two scientists there.

What else do you have?

We have a few more questions.

This is also touching on Neil’s expertise as well.

Because Marcus Gustafsson from Sweden asks, can asteroids develop volcanoes?

And would that make its orbit unpredictable because of the thrust it would generate?

Oh, cool.

That’s really cool.

And yes, yes, yes, it can.

So we’ve actually discovered that some of the asteroids, some of the Ceres, and actually that’s what ice volcanoes on it.

And there’s a mission called Psyche, which is a NASA mission, I think, I don’t know when it’s launching, not long now, it’s going to this asteroid called Psyche 16.

And they think it had iron volcanoes on it, potentially, way in the past.

Now, when are those volcanoes affected?

Well, just to be clear, I don’t want to be pedantic or anything, but Ceres got upgraded in its designation in the solar system.

This is true, unlike Pluto.

So Pluto got downgraded from planet, Ceres got upgraded from asteroids, and they’re both dwarf planets now.

So I will not accept you to cite Ceres as a place for asteroid volcanoes.

I’m going to call it an asteroid.

I guess this location does matter to geologists because magma outside of a volcano is called lava.

So that’s how you roll.

Also, of course, comets, as they come near and far from the sun, plumes will develop that do alter their trajectories, right?

And so with comets, predicting their orbits is a highly uncertain activity simply because you don’t know where the next plume is going to come out that will then have the comet recoil and give you a different kind of orbit than you were expecting.

Yeah.

And when they go near the sun, they can explode or pieces can come off.

And then obviously they have a different size and shape to what it was before they went around the sun.

We’re going to explode, disintegrate, or get eaten by the sun entirely.

Matt, time for a few more.

Well, this is obviously the counterpart to this question from, and I hope I’m getting your name close to correct, Zenkurti Bentz asks, can an eruption have such power to send rocks to space?

If a giant eruption happened in Yellowstone, would it send rocks to space, which would then fall back down on Earth, is the second part of that question.

And that question comes from Hungary.

Yeah.

So I guess once you’re in space, you’re in space, you’re not going to probably come back very easy.

But that wouldn’t really happen on our planet because we’ve got so much gravity that I just don’t think we could have a strong enough, powerful enough eruption that you could get out into space.

But obviously in other places, we know that in Saladus, its plumes go 200 kilometers high and make the E ring of Saturn, so sure enough, that is eruptions going into space.

But I may be wrong, but I don’t think that could happen on Earth.

But sure enough, our eruptions do go very high into the stratosphere quite often with these plinium style eruptions, which is what happened at Vesuvius.

And the material then, the ash and the gases kind of encircle the planet, but within our atmosphere and can block out the sun for weeks and months to come.

And that can create lots of kind of long term damage to the planet in a way.

Also, even if it did eject from the volcano at escape velocity, the atmosphere is going to tamp that down and it will not likely ever escape the Earth because it won’t maintain that velocity as it ascends or maintain the velocity necessary to continue to escape the Earth.

But there’s more than one sci-fi film where we have astronauts on comet surfaces and on astroidal surfaces where it rotates into view of the sun.

There’s a plume that busts forth and people, hardware, get kicked completely off the asteroid, never to return.

Yeah, and that is something they worry about with comet missions, with the Rosetta mission.

They landed on that comet and they had to choose somewhere that didn’t look very active, didn’t have an active plume coming out because they were genuinely worried that the spacecraft, the little lander would get shot off the surface and be lost into space forever.

So, it is quite a worry.

That’d be a cool video, though.

Like R2, you know, getting kicked out of the thing.

I guess, in the CIFO world, if you’re thinking about it, if you do have an ability to predict where these plumes are going to come from, that’s a possible launching site.

You can save fuel by using that as a…

Very good, Matt!

Oh my gosh, so that would have to be a desperate situation where, oh, we’re out of fuel, how are we ever going to get back?

Wait a minute, there’s a crack here.

Let’s do that, and then that saves them.

That reminds me, there’s a movie called Marooned, where, back in the 60s, before we landed on the moon, and there’s some astronauts in space and something goes wrong, and they have to be rescued, but a hurricane was coming through Florida and over Cape Canaveral, so they couldn’t launch a rescue mission.

And then someone figures out, wait a minute, the eye of the hurricane is going to go over Cape Canaveral.

So they connected the countdown to the…

I was very young, so I didn’t know hurricanes had eyes.

I didn’t know any…

Or that it’s beautiful in the middle of a hurricane.

I didn’t know any of this.

Or that Florida was hurricane-prone, right?

And so they actually launched it until you see this launch coming out from the center of the hurricane.

It was beautiful.

It was a beautiful concept.

I’m not sure how exactly they wheel the rocket out through the hurricane waiting for the eye to get it.

If I know anything about rocket launches, they’re quite easily postponed.

It doesn’t take much for them to say, like, this isn’t safe.

We need to wait another couple of days.

Yeah, but it was cool.

It was a cool move, though.

Yeah.

Okay, time for a couple more questions.

Maybe one more question.

Time for one more question, Matt.

Okay, well, I like this one because there’s been some other questions that I think we’ve covered anyway, just through things that have come up naturally.

So Boris McGannick, again, I’m McGannick.

I hope I’m getting your name close, says, okay, here’s a silly and possibly ignorant one.

I say it’s not ignorant.

I’m the one who asks the ignorant questions here, Boris.

Stay in your lane.

But there’s only one room for one ignorant person on the show.

Boris asks, is it possible that a regular mountain can become a volcano or are 100% of volcanic mountains, shapes and mass created by the first eruption itself?

Yeah, yeah.

So once you, if you’ve just got a normal mountain that is created through normal mountain processes, which is usually from plate tectonics, so you’ve got two plates colliding and nothing gets melted, they just kind of crumple up against each other because they’re being forced together at a few centimeters per year, that’s how we get the Himalayas.

So those mountains in Mount Everest are not volcanic, they never will be.

They’re just getting taller and taller every year because those plates are crushing together and pushing up crust above the surface.

So the subcontinent, it didn’t get the memo that Russia is in the way, right?

Yeah, exactly.

It’s like, I’m still moving, I’m still going.

So Natalie, I’m wondering in the vein of that question, could we actually take a spot on Earth and drill to where the molten rock is and sort of force a volcano to erupt?

Where we choose it to?

I guess if we knew the magma was there, that would technically, not technically be possible, because that would be really hard to do.

You’re a geologist, you know where this stuff is.

Drilling into hot stuff is never going to be easy because everything’s going to melt anyway.

But if we knew there was a magma chamber there, we’d probably know a volcano is there anyway.

You’re not going to just get a magma chamber without a volcano.

But actually what we do do a lot is kind of use the heat that’s given out by these magmas sitting below the crust to generate electricity.

So in Iceland, they do this a lot.

Iceland is obviously all volcanic.

It sits on the mid-ocean ridge, and it’s also got a mantle plume there.

So it’s a massively volcanic place.

And they generate…

We film many scenes in Cosmos there.

Oh, it’s a beautiful place.

Because you aim the camera this way, it’s like Earth is forming.

You aim it here, it’s like there are these plumes.

Where’s the dinosaur?

We had all manner of Earth formation scenarios, all without any kind of set design.

It was all already there.

And the great thing is that there’s so much heat just literally just under the crust there, that they just generate all their electricity for free because they can use geothermal energy.

So they pump down water into the crust, it gets heated up and gets shot back up, and they can use that to build power lines.

As I learned, that was only in recent decades until the 80s, I think.

They were still using fossil fuels, and somebody said, what the hell are you doing?

I think they actually sent heat on their roads.

I was going to say, because it is cold.

Yeah, they sent heat on the roads, and it melts all the ice, so nobody has to shovel.

Yeah, they don’t have to grit the roads.

I found out recently that Iceland has the highest electricity use per capita of any country in the world, by quite some way, which makes them sound like they’re not green, but it’s the opposite, because they do everything with basically fossil fuel free electricity.

Yeah, and if you just tap and heat out, you can leave the lights on, who cares?

And then you can have all these saunas everywhere and hot swimming pools and everything, so they have loads of swimming pools, just because they can heat them really easily, and they’re all outdoor pools, and when it’s really cold, and you’re like, oh, that’s going to be horrible, but it’s great, because it’s just warm water.

So let me, just to end with, can I reverse that question?

And if, I heard the name of a fraternity, I mean, it was a joke name, it was called I Tap a Keg, right?

OK, so can we, can there be a volcano that we think is going to erupt, and then can we tap it off the side and have it kind of like a release of the pressure to delay what might be a larger singular eruption of the cone?

No, I think the problem is we just still don’t know enough about volcanoes to be able to predict their behavior.

Damn, Natalie, I thought you knew, Natalie.

But basically, with a lot of volcanoes, like there’s the Montserrat in the Caribbean, as a classic example, it’s this volcanic dome which sits above the surface, but it’s really unstable.

So even a lot of rainfall can destabilize the slopes of that volcano because it’s just not very well consolidated and mashed together.

And that can destabilize the magma chamber underneath and then create a massive eruption.

So basically, you’re taking off kind of the lid of the pressure cooker a little bit.

You’re just releasing a bit of pressure, and then it can then erupt really badly.

So we wouldn’t want to meddle.

I think we have to leave nature to do its thing, and the best way for us to get away is just to move people away.

That’s so defeatist.

Wait till your kids become geologists.

They’re going to say, Mom, that’s so old-fashioned.

We just tap this energy here.

We run the energy needs of the town.

The volcano will never erupt, and we’ve got to work good.

Wait till the next generation.

They’ll figure it out.

There is one possible, I don’t know if you have time, but just to squeeze in one extra question from Moses Conrad Norman who asks, can you have a planet that is entirely volcanoes and volcanic activity?

Yeah, I guess Io is the closest one to that.

And it’s almost like our planet four billion years ago.

So our planet four billion years ago was almost certainly covered in volcanoes and most of the surface was just very hot, probably molten, and volcanoes were going off all over the place.

So that is what’s happening at Io still.

It’s not quite that bad, but it is very, very active.

So yeah, like, definitely, it’s just, it’s got, again, it’s got that kind of tidal energy inside because it’s right next to Jupiter, this massive planet.

So it’s being squashed and squeezed, friction is happening inside and it’s creating heat and that’s just a continuous process.

And let me just put this to bed right here.

So in the old days we would, well, maybe even in modern times, we would see drawings of dinosaurs and there was always a volcano on the horizon, as though dinosaurs, which was 100 million years ago, somehow Earth was covered with volcanoes 100 million years ago.

But that’s like yesterday compared to the geologic time scale.

So that’s all wrong, I guess, is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, there were volcanoes obviously at the time, but not like that kind of era that we see where they’re just, you know, it’s all volcanic.

Right, right, it’s not every direction you look.

There’s a dinosaur chewing the…

No, it’s actually, there are plants to eat and stuff, and plants don’t like volcanoes very much.

But there are dinosaurs on Io?

That’s not what we said, Matt.

We need to get back.

All right, we got to call it quits there.

Natalie, it’s always great to have you.

And again, thanks for being the author of our current space show at the Hayden Planetarium, Worlds Beyond Earth.

Matt, we’ll find you on Probably Science, still waiting for my next invitation to appear as a guest.

The second you have anything you want to come on and talk about, your next book, or just a whim, the door is wide open for you.

I’m very pleased to hear that invitation get extorted from you.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of that planetarium, where Natalie Starkey wrote the latest space show, as always for StarTalk, I dig you.