The pressure cooker

The "burning fields" of Italy are a spectacularly unsafe place to live

It will come as no surprise to people who know me well that I have a peculiar fascination for things that are huge and powerful and can kill you.

I’m not entirely sure where this obsession comes from, but it’s what’s driven me to research such upbeat topics as giant predatory dinosaurs, tornadoes, hurricanes, massive earthquakes, supernovas, gamma-ray bursters, and the cheerful concept of “false vacuum decay” (which wouldn’t just destroy the Earth, but the entire universe). I’m guessing part of it is my generally anxiety-ridden attitude toward everything; after all, just because we don’t think there’s a Wolf-Rayet star nearby that’s ready to explode and fry the Solar System doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I know that worrying about all of that stuff isn’t going to (1) make it any less likely that it’ll happen, or (2) make a damn bit of difference to my survival if it does, but even so I don’t seem to be able to just relax and focus on more positive things, such as the fact that with the sea-level rise predicted from climate change, it looks like here in upstate New York I may finally own ocean-front property.

It’s also why I keep regular tabs on the known volcanoes on the Earth—on some level, I’m always waiting for the next major eruption. One of the potentially most dangerous volcanoes on Earth is in Italy, and I’m not talking about Vesuvius; I’m referring to the Campi Flegrei (“burning fields,” from the Greek φλέγω, “to burn”), which isn’t far away from the more famous mountain and seems to be powered by the same magma chamber complex that obliterated Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae in 79 C.E. Both Vesuvius and the Campi Flegrei are highly active, and near the top of the list of “world’s most dangerous volcanoes.”

The problem is, the three million residents of Naples live right smack in between the two, only twenty-odd kilometers away from Vesuvius (to the east) and Campi Flegrei (to the west). (For reference, Pompeii was nine kilometers from the summit of Vesuvius.)

The Campi Flegrei, looking west from Naples [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Baku, VedutaEremo2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The problem is that volcanoes like these two don’t erupt like the familiar fountains of lava you see from Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii, and the recent eruptions on La Palma in the Canary Islands and the ones near Grindavík in Iceland. The most typical eruptions from volcanoes like Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei are pyroclastic flows—surely one of the most terrifying phenomena on Earth—a superheated mass of steam and ash that rushes downhill at speeds of up to a hundred kilometers an hour, flash-frying everything in its wake. That the Campi Flegrei volcanoes are capable of such massive events is witnessed by the surrounding rock formation called the “Neapolitan Yellow Tuff.” A welded tuff is a layer of volcanic ash that was so hot when it stopped moving that it was still partially molten, and fused together into a solid porous rock.

(If you can deal with alarming stuff like this, check out this actual video of a pyroclastic flow from Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991—it’s fascinating and terrifying.)

The Neapolitan Yellow Tuff isn’t very recent; it came from an eruption about 39,000 years ago. But there are signs the Campi Flegrei are heating up again, which is seriously bad news not only for Naples but for the town of Pozzuoli, which was built right inside the main caldera. The residents of Pozzuoli have had to get used to regular rises and falls of the ground, some by as much as an alarming two meters. In fact, between 1982 and 1984, there was so much uplift—followed by magnitude-4 earthquakes and thousands of microquakes—that the harbor became too shallow for most ships to dock, and the entire population of forty thousand was evacuated until things seemed to simmer down.

In fact, the reason the topic comes up is a study out of Stanford University and the University of Naples that I ran across in the journal Science Advances, that found this terrifying swell-and-subside isn’t due primarily to magmatic movement, as was feared—it’s the bubbling of superheated groundwater. The study looked at the composition of the “caprock,” the rock layer on top of the formation, and found that when mixed with hot water it forms something like a natural fibrous cement. This then plugs up cracks and prevents groundwater from escaping.

The whole thing is like living on the lid of a giant pressure cooker.

Of course, unlike (I hope) your pressure cooker, the rock doesn’t have the tensile strength to manage the pressure fluctuations, so ultimately it breaks somewhere, triggering an earthquake and steam eruptions, after which the caprock settles back down for a while until the cracks all reseal and the pressure starts to rebuild.

This is all pretty scary, but it does point scientists in a direction of how to mitigate its potential for harm. “I call it a perfect storm of geology—you have all the ingredients to have the storm: the burner of the system—the molten magma, the fuel in the geothermal reservoir, and the lid,” said Tiziana Vanorio, who co-authored the study. “We can’t act on the burner but we do have the power to manage the fuel. By restoring water channels, monitoring groundwater, and managing reservoir pressure, we can shift Earth sciences toward a more proactive approach—like preventive health care—to detect risks early and prevent unrest before it unfolds. That’s how science serves society.”

Which is all very well, but I still wouldn’t want to live there. I visited Italy two years ago and loved it; in fact, it spurred me to start learning Italian, so that on what I hope are many subsequent visits I’ll be able to converse with the locals. The area around Naples is gorgeous, but as for living there—that’d be a big nope for me. When we were in Sicily, itself no stranger to seismic unrest, one of our tour guides said, “We might be taking a risk living here, I suppose. But those people up in Naples—they’re crazy.”

That anyone would build a town on top of an active volcano is explained mostly by the fact that humans have short memories. And also, the richness of volcanic soils is generally good for agriculture. Once Pompeii was re-discovered in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with extremely eerie casts of the bodies of people and animals who got hit by the pyroclastic flow, you’d think folks would join our Sicilian tour guide in saying, “no fucking way am I living anywhere near that mountain.” But... no. If you’ll look at a world map, you might come to the conclusion that siting big cities near places prone to various natural disasters was some kind of species-wide game of chicken or something.

Not a game I want to play. Such phenomena make me feel very, very tiny. I’m very thankful that I live in a relatively peaceful, catastrophe-free part of the world. Our biggest concern around here is snow, and even that’s rarely a big deal; we don’t get anything like the killer blizzards that bury the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states every year. Given my generally neurotic outlook on life, I can’t imagine what I’d be like if I did live somewhere that had serious natural disasters.

Never leave my underground bunker, is probably pretty close to the mark.