Volcanoes are remarkable natural phenomena, but there’s a bit of a problem with them. Unlike the iridescent Northern Lights, the sweeping Amazon Rainforest or the Grand Canyon, volcanoes don’t stand apart from humanity and just let you have a peek at them. Every now and then, they erupt to sometimes deadly effect.
The grimness of mortality aside, there science behind volcanically induced fatalities are weirdly fascinating. If you fall into a lava flow, you don’t just sink in – you slowly turn into a piece of exploding leather. Pyroclastic flows don’t just scorch you; they can cause your organs to explode. If you fall into a geothermal hot spring in certain parts of the world, you dissolve like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee. Lava bombs are like cannonballs, but they’re molten.
So what of the ash? Everyone’s seen images of petrified people, but what can volcanic ash do to you? Let’s look at the bone-rattling science behind it.
Volcanic ash is frozen lava, but on a very small scale. As it’s mostly made of silicon compounds, much like sand on the beach is, when it freezes from its molten state, it does so at such a rapid pace that it becomes a glass. Each individual fragment can be no longer than two millimetres across, but they’re often far finer than that.
It can form in a variety of conditions, but you tend to get quite a lot of it when water or ice, two very effective coolants, are involved. Take the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption over in Iceland – although this wasn’t much of an explosive eruption, and lava was extruding through a fissure relatively slowly, it caused a lot of trouble because the magma met the overlying ice. The extremely rapid cooling of the then-lava quickly turned much of it to ash, which rained down over the North Atlantic and shut down flights across Europe.
A picture of silicosis of the lung
Although it does tend to be quite buoyant as individual particles – or even in its larger clumps, known as “lapilli” – it’s actually incredibly dense, roughly five to six times that of rainwater.
Most houses, buildings, bridges and other types of infrastructure can withstand plenty of water pooling on their roofs, but ash is an entirely different kettle of fish. Its density means that the pressure an inch of volcanic ash puts on a structure is often too much, and consequently, things begin to collapse.
This is one particularly insidious way in which volcanic ash can kill you, but generally speaking, inhaling it will be the primary cause of people pushing up the daisies. Remember, you’re inhaling glass, so at the very least, the ash is lacerating the insides of your bronchioli, alveoli and capillaries.
This, as you can imagine, is not a particularly pleasant sensation. In the long-term, it can cause silicosis, an ailment that results in potentially permanent scars to your lungs. If the ash falls into the water supply and people drink it, the same painful condition affects their digestive system too.
There are a fair few toxic aerosols trapped within most volcanic ash too, including hydrogen sulphide – that eggy scent you get with rotting meat or terrible indigestion – sulphur dioxide, and hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid.
At best, this can cause a shortness of breath and excessive coughing. Enough of these corrosive substances can cause your eyes to start to bleed, and your corneas can get worn down, which makes conjunctivitis more likely to follow. In terms of your respiratory system, you may get bronchitis.
Unless you’re being buried under a maelstrom of volcanic ash, or you have a pre-existing condition like asthma or emphysema, you probably can’t inhale enough volcanic ash to kill you – so it terms of the danger it poses, it’s far less frightening than those collapsing eruption columns or those rivers of lava.
Still, if you’re hiking up an active volcano, it may be a good idea to bring a filtration mask with you. The more you know, eh?
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This article first appeared on Forbes.
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