Surprise magma pocket found in Iceland hints at more 'ticking time bombs'

1 Jun 2021, 16:03 BST
When engineers began drilling into an Icelandic volcano named Krafla, things took a turn for the weird. The team’s objective was to approach the boundary of a magma reservoir 2.5 miles below the surface, tapping into superheated fluids that could produce geothermal energy. But when the drill was just over a mile down, molten rock began creeping up the drill.
On that brisk spring day in 2009, the engineers had accidentally hit a pocket of magma sitting right below the surface that no one knew was there.
Krafla is “one of the best studied volcanoes on the planet,” says Hugh Tuffen, a volcanologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom who wasn’t involved with the research. It has been repeatedly surveyed using a range of techniques, so scientists thought they had a decent grasp of its underground workings. “It’s remarkable that this magma was able to hide.”

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