I face it with enthusiasm, but with respect. This work has an important responsibility because we provide a social service regarding a danger that can cause material and personal damage. My predecessor, María José Blanco, was the one who, together with Carmen López, created the Volcanic Watch group in 2004. I was at the beginning when I arrived in 2007. It is very interesting because I have seen the group be born and grow. Now the challenge is to take it, contribute ideas and try to reach the level that María José had. She had a very clear and correct way of expressing herself. I’m a little more crude (laughs). And this new challenge has its good and bad parts, like everything. The bad thing is that I won’t be able to dedicate as much time to science. My job is no longer so much to investigate, but to get money and projects for my colleagues to do.
What then becomes of the research that he led to study the middle volcano?
We will continue to carry out that project. There are several of us and I will stay managing the administrative part. There are two very high-level people in the group who can perfectly carry out the entire seismic investigation, who are Eduardo Suárez and Carmen del Fresno. In fact, with this research we are doing new things that we believe could be exported to other volcanoes. There are certain techniques that we are applying that are not as advanced in other volcanoes.
What techniques?
Since the eruption of The Palm We have worked on the implementation of automatic systems, for example for the location, detection and characterization of earthquakes. In La Palma we realized that there was a need to automate the system because the most important thing when you do work of this type is to have the data as quickly as possible in real time and in the most objective way. If you depend on people to do that analysis, biases can occur.
Did the IGN have this resource when the La Palma volcanic crisis of 2021 began?
No. When the seismic crisis began, the data was organized manually. At that time we had automatic systems, but they were not as refined as they are now. It was then when we began to implement these new systems that gave us an interesting result and we wanted to go one step further. In this crisis we realized how quickly certain events can happen. In a week it can go from nothing to an eruption. It’s very fast in terms of volcanic monitoring. There are volcanoes in the world that are faster, but because they are open systems, here we have a system that remains without eruptions for hundreds of years and suddenly opens in a specific area. In The iron The crisis lasted three months and La Palma only one week.
So would you say that La Palma broke their schemes?
He broke the molds of all the scientists, both because of his speed and his behavior. For example, there were scientists who expected a large earthquake before the eruption, as had happened in all past eruptions on the island. A destructive earthquake that causes damage to buildings, such as small cracks. But that didn’t happen. The largest earthquake we recorded before the eruption had a magnitude of 3.8 mgLb and was strongly felt by the population, but it did not generate that destruction.
Do you think that the information that has now been obtained in La Palma can rewrite the past? After all, historical eruptions have been modeled taking into account the marks left by these volcanoes.
Of course. We have to keep in mind that to describe historical eruptions we use perception and geological marks. To understand the ancient phenomenon we only have data from chroniclers who explain what people said. This information is sometimes direct and other times indirect. That’s why extrapolating it to today is complicated. As far as the geological part is concerned, we only have data from the end of the eruption. Never from the beginning. We now have data from two fully monitored eruptions, with which we know what happened before, after and during. With this we can analyze what happened in other eruptions.
Has this biased view of the past influenced risk perception?
A phrase that has been repeated a lot on the Island is that the eruptions in the Canary Islands are calm and do not cause major problems. This belief is based on the Teneguía eruption (1971), which generated practically no problems and was one of the smallest that the Canary Islands have ever experienced. The previous one is that of San Juan (1949) also in La Palma. For her there are no longer practically direct witnesses, but it was a problematic eruption. And the eruption of Chinyero in 1909 in Tenerife Apparently it was very calm, but a subsequent analysis has revealed that it could have caused an eruptive column of 3 or 4 kilometers. We have to wake up and think that rashes may be a little more problematic than we thought they were 10 or 20 years ago.
In the last ten years, has there been a change in risk perception?
I remember that during the El Hierro eruption, people left because they thought the island was going to split. With this last volcano differences have been seen, but not enough. It is true that on La Palma people have already internalized what a volcano is and that it is possible for young people to experience an eruption again. However, in Tenerife the perception has changed a little but not enough. It is true that we do not dedicate ourselves to studying this type of social behavior either, but it would be very interesting to do so. Your thing would be to invest in disseminating, informing and educating the population and for me the best way is through the education of children.
If the population were more informed, would they know how to act better in the event of an eruption?
Without a doubt, the population must be trained so that they know how to act in times of crisis. But it is complicated. We are talking about a danger that occurs every many years and that makes training very difficult. With meteorological hazards, for example, it is easier. Every year there are torrential rains somewhere, the Aemet puts out alerts and people understand that they have to stay home. With volcanoes it is more complicated, but we have to try. In fact, one of the challenges of the IGN is to improve dissemination and communication to the population. We should not wait for them to ask us, we have to take the step ourselves. This is what we are missing and I think we have learned that with the La Palma eruption. We have realized the importance of reporting, because in the El Hierro eruption that was more limited and we did not provide as much information. Not because we didn’t want to, but because the circumstances were not right or because we didn’t understand the phenomenon so well. This caused many hoaxes to be generated. Volcanic risk is the multiplication of danger with vulnerability and can be reduced if you reduce vulnerability. That happens by training people.
Communication is one of the challenges in this new stage of IGN, but what other plans are there?
Among the challenges, there is a clear one which is the improvement of surveillance. That will never end. Our goal is also to improve automatic analysis so that it does not depend on people and can do other things. We also want to try to apply technologies for forecasting eruptions in the Canary Islands. It is somewhat complex, because they are applied in volcanoes that erupt every few years, and here we have a much larger system, with extensive volcanic areas. But, ultimately, the idea is to strengthen the institution in the Canary Islands.
Could the IGN carry out volcanic monitoring tasks alone?
We could do it independently, and in fact we must do it by law and, therefore, we have the appropriate infrastructure to do it, but it is always good for us to have external reinforcements. Volcanism is such a multidisciplinary and broad phenomenon that you can never cover everything. No institution does it, it is impossible. For example, we rely a lot on the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME), which has its specialty, its geologists, and they also do very interesting work. Also the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) which, with its underwater work, helped us understand what was happening in the underwater eruption of El Hierro. Therefore, you cannot do it because an eruption does not only require volcanic monitoring, it is much broader.
What is happening in Tenerife?
In Tenerife this year we have had some deep and peculiar swarms. We hadn’t seen them before. Since 2016 we have observed a change in activity that is a little higher than what we had before, but does not reach the levels of 2004. The problem in Tenerife is that there is a continuous background activity – every year we locate a thousand earthquakes in the island – and that complicates the analysis.
