A
new
volcanic
era

For Klara Halldórsdóttir, the volcano that has roiled southwest Iceland for the last year is both awe-inspiring and devastating. She has hiked to a crater to marvel at the fiery eruption and the river of cooled lava stretching down toward Grindavik, the town she has lived in her whole life.

But this volcano also forced her from her home.

Last November, she was at the beach letting her dogs run wild when the ground started moving and did not stop. It was a swarm of earthquakes, the warning signs of an imminent eruption.

Her family packed swiftly and joined a line of cars rolling out of town. It was “like a terrible movie,” she said. No one knew whether they would be able to come back. Nearly a year on, only a handful of the 3,600 residents have returned.

Vikings roamed the last time the volcanoes on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula raged. Now, eight centuries later, this slice of land close to the capital city Reykjavik is one of the more densely populated parts of the country.

Icelanders like Klara have a complex relationship with volcanoes. They are both a force of destruction — lava has already consumed homes and carved up roads in Grindavik — and a source of abundant clean energy, powering people’s lives.

The country itself was born of volcanic activity.

The first eruption arrived in December. A fissure more than two miles long sliced the ground open, sending fountains of lava spewing hundreds of feet into the air. 

Five more eruptions have followed, engulfing homes on the outskirts of town, threatening a vital power station and turning Grindavik into a ghost town. 

The lava has also flowed close to the turquoise pools of the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, one of Iceland’s most famous tourist attractions, forcing several evacuations and closures over the past year.

Iceland is used to volcanoes. It experiences roughly one eruption every five years, though most are in uninhabited areas. Some are even described as “tourist volcanoes,” relatively accessible and typically non-disruptive. 

These new eruptions are not that; they are violent, dangerous and could last centuries. 

They could also hold the key to a new future.

As this new volcanic era upends lives in the southwest, hundreds of miles northeast at a volcanic caldera called Krafla, there is an audacious plan underway to drill directly into a magma chamber.

‘The potential is limitless’

In 2009, Bjarni Pálsson was an engineer with Iceland’s national power company, Landsvirkjun, running a deep drilling geothermal project at Krafla. They were trying to sink a borehole nearly 3 miles into the ground, but the drill kept getting stuck. “Again and again, at exactly the same depth,” he said.

When they were eventually able to free it, they found glass chips — cooled, crystallized, molten rock. It was proof of what they had stumbled upon: a magma chamber. 

Pálsson was shocked. These reservoirs of super-hot molten rock exist everywhere there are volcanoes, but are very hard to find and usually much deeper. The team rushed to control and cool the borehole, pumping in around 1 million tons of cold water before closing it. 

Fifteen years later, Pálsson is standing in the exact same spot, his high-viz jacket the only splash of color in Krafla’s stark, white landscape. 

Armed with new technology and know-how, he is going back in.

The ambition of the geothermal experts and volcanologists that comprise the Krafla Magma Testbed is to convert the immense heat and pressure into a new “limitless” form of supercharged geothermal energy — a tantalizing prospect as the world struggles to end its relationship with planet-heating fossil fuels. 

"This has never been done before," said Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, director of the Geothermal Research Cluster, which developed the project. 

He compares its scale and ambition to the James Webb Space Telescope, which is giving humans an unprecedented view of the universe. 

If they succeed, the implications could reverberate around the world, Ingólfsson said. There are an estimated 800 million people living within roughly 60 miles of an active volcano.

“We are looking into the sky, we are spending trillions and trillions of dollars to understand planets far away,” he said. “But we do not spend nearly as much on understanding our own.”

Krafla is a unique natural laboratory for studying volcanoes. Not only is it one of the hottest geothermal fields in the world, it is also very accessible. There is a power plant, high speed internet and a paved road — all on top of a volcano.

Drilling into magma that is around 1,800 Fahrenheit (nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius) won’t be easy. But as humans heat the planet at record speed with fossil fuel pollution, there is increasing pressure to perform moonshot feats of engineering to save us from ourselves.

If all goes to plan, the first borehole will be completed in 2027 and will mark the first time anyone has ever implanted sensors directly into a magma chamber. The goal is to unravel magma’s mysteries: how it moves through the crust, its heat, pressure, chemistry — all to help better predict when and where eruptions will happen. 

There’s never been a way to peer directly into volcanic systems, said Sara Barsotti, volcanic hazards coordinator at the Icelandic Meteorological Office. Volcanoes “remain unknown by nature,” she said.

If the first drilling experiment succeeds, the team will move onto the second borehole, due to be completed in 2029 — and this could be the global gamechanger. 

It’s here the team will attempt to harness the intense heat of magma to produce a new kind of extreme geothermal energy, many times more powerful than conventional.

Geothermal energy has already revolutionized life in Iceland. 

Only around 80 years ago, the country was powered mainly by oil and coal. Now more than 90% of homes are heated by geothermal. 

This clean, constant, stable energy took Iceland “from one of the poorest countries in Europe, to one of the richest,” said Vordís Eiríksdóttir, Landsvirkjun’s director of geothermal operations, who is helping oversee the project at Krafla. 

Tapping into magma’s extreme heat right at the source would be geothermal on steroids. 

Rather than the mix of water and steam brought to the surface with conventional geothermal, what they would get from magma is a super-hot steam with a much higher energy density. Magma energy.

The team is armed with data from when the magma chamber was first discovered 15 years ago. Measurements taken at the time showed the power produced by the 1,800-degree magma was 10 times greater than conventional geothermal, which accesses temperatures of around 200 to 300 degrees.

Not only would it be more efficient, it would require a lot less land. The wells needed for this magma energy would be roughly two or three times more expensive than conventional ones, the project scientists estimate, but far fewer wells would be needed. 

The 18 standard boreholes at Krafla, which generate enough power for about 30,000 homes, could be replaced with just two magma boreholes. 

If they succeed, the implications could go well beyond Iceland. 

Many of these sites would likely need to dig much deeper than Krafla’s wells to reach magma, cautioned Jefferson Tester, professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell, making drilling into them more expensive. 

But if the power and efficiency of magma geothermal is as vast as it appears, he added, the economics could stack up.

None of this will be quick. Drilling a borehole that can withstand such extreme conditions — the heat, the pressure, the harsh environment — is no small thing. 

The borehole also needs be stable for decades, potentially. “Power is one thing, but energy for the long run is another,” the Geothermal Research Cluster’s Ingólfsson said. 

And they don’t know yet how this magma is “kept alive” at such a shallow depth. How does it remain so hot, even though it is encased by much cooler rock? Will it maintain its scorching temperature throughout the life of the geothermal well? One hypothesis is the magma chamber is so huge, the cooling effect of the surrounding rock is insignificant. Another is it could be heated by some unknown element from below. 

What is clear, Ingólfsson said, is that if they can tame the magma, the reward would be immense. 

“Basically, the potential is limitless.” 

Ghost town  

In August, after a series of earthquakes, the Reykjanes Peninsula experienced another eruption, with fountains of lava exploding from a new fissure that spread more than two miles. The lava from that eruption did not flow toward Grindavik, where defensive walls have been constructed to protect the town. 

But no one knows when or where the next eruption will strike.

As it waits, Grindavik remains eerily empty. 

Only a handful of people have come back. Many, including Klara, say they never will. “Nobody knows how many years it will take until it will be safe to be here,” she said.

The destruction in Grindavik and the promise in Krafla show “how nature can be both giving and taking,” Ingólfsson said. It’s something Icelanders have learned over centuries.

It’s clear, too, in Ingólfsson’s own story. As a child growing up at the foot of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in south Iceland, he had nightmares about an eruption sending lava flowing toward his home. 

When Eyjafjallajökull did awaken violently in 2010, spewing ash into the atmosphere and shutting down European air space for days, “it brought me back to my nightmares,” he said. 

But he has gone from fearing magma to believing he can tame it.

“People think it’s crazy,” he said. But if they pull it off, not only will it unleash a new form of potentially endless clean energy, it could give more certainty to communities like Grindavik, whose lives are being upended by volcanoes the world remains very far from fully understanding.