Latest news with #Unexplainable
Vox
3 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
This veteran health official watched Americans lose trust in science. How do we get it back?
is the host and senior producer of Unexplainable , Vox's science podcast about everything we don't know. He co-created the show and also composes the music. 'We often had to change recommendations because we learned more about the virus, and people began to wonder, do these guys know what they're talking about?' Former NIH director Francis Collins on people losing trust in science. Sarah Silbiger/POOL/AFP via Getty Images Francis Collins has overseen some of the most revolutionary science of the last few decades. He led the Human Genome Project that sequenced the entire human genome by 2003, and then in 2009, he became director of the National Institutes of Health, where he served under three presidents and led the agency's research on a Covid-19 vaccine. But nothing in his years leading biomedical research for the US government could have prepared him for the disruption at NIH over the past few months. Over 1,000 employees at the NIH were suddenly fired at the beginning of April. (Those firings are still being challenged in the courts, but as of now, the employees remain out of work.) Trump administration officials have barred researchers from studying certain topics like vaccine hesitancy or the health effects of wildfires. 'I had experienced transitions before, and those were bumpy sometimes,' Collins told me in a recent interview. 'But I didn't expect science to be under this kind of full-bore attack, which is really what happened almost immediately after inauguration day.' In the past few months, Collins saw scientists placed under communications gag orders, restrained from speaking freely even when no media were present. 'You were effectively muzzled,' he says. Collins, who had stepped down as NIH director in 2021 and had taken over a lab studying diabetes, soon felt he could no longer do his job as a scientist should. He started to worry he might be pushed out. 'So I pulled my folks together in a conference room. They didn't know what was coming. And I told them, 'By tomorrow night, I'm no longer gonna be here.' And we all cried. I never thought it would end this way. My wife came to pick me up on that last Friday, and I just walked out of the building and got in the car and said, 'I guess this is it. That's how it ends?'' Just four years ago, Collins was President Donald Trump's NIH director. Now, in Trump's second term, he's resigning under pressure. How did we get from a world where the NIH was universally recognized as a jewel of scientific research to a world where the government is essentially tearing it down from the inside? I spoke to Collins on Vox's Unexplainable podcast about how so many Americans lost trust in science and how we might be able to get it back. Our interview has been edited for clarity and length. I'm constantly hearing that Americans have lost trust in science. Is that fair to say? I think it's totally fair. You can look at all the surveys about trust. Americans have lost trust in almost every institution. But I think it was more than that. I think Covid did a lot of harm to people's trust in science because, first of all, it was a huge, disastrous experience for the world. There were days where thousands of Americans were dying. As one of those people who was communicating with the public about what we knew about the virus and what they might do to protect themselves, we were doing the best we could with the information we had, but the information was incomplete. So we often had to change recommendations over time because we learned more about the virus and about the pandemic, and people began to wonder, do these guys know what they're talking about? So suddenly this has become such a target for an attack: whether science is something that's good for our country or not. Your most recent book, The Road to Wisdom, is all about trust. If you were telling the story of the loss of trust and everything going on in the science agencies today, how far back would you start? It depends on the particular demographic you're talking about. I'm a person of faith, and certainly people of faith have tended to be among the most skeptical of science, and that goes back 150 years or more — the sense that maybe science is trying to do damage to our Christian faith. That was there certainly well before Covid. But what group was most resistant to accepting the vaccines? It was white evangelical Christians. I'm a white evangelical Christian, so those are my people, but it broke my heart to see how that happened. And I think Covid did something, took what had been a tendency for science to be political and turned it into a really big deal. If you were a Democrat, you're much more likely to get vaccinated than if you were a Republican. Does that make sense? Not in the slightest, but that's how it was. When it's becoming clear that more than 50 million Americans aren't getting the vaccine, one of the most remarkable scientific achievements in human history, did that tell you anything about the pursuit of science and how it works? It certainly woke me up to the fact that we apparently had not done a very good job in explaining to people that when science is tackling some really hard problems and occasionally gets the wrong answer, it's going to get self-corrected because science is about truth. Science is not just a bunch of people who are coming up with answers that they like. These are answers that aren't gonna be sustainable unless they're actually true. And maybe here's also where I began to realize That's another problem that society has that I was unaware of in terms of its severity: the importance of truth, the fact that there is such a thing as objective truth. Not everybody shared that: 'That might be true for you, but it's not true for me.' I would hear people say that about things that were established facts, and that's a road to destruction of a society if it becomes widespread. Unfortunately, it seems to be doing so right now. It seems like you believed that all you had to do was develop the vaccine, get to the thing that worked, and then people would take it? Then there's this whole other piece of convincing people that you and the scientific community at large didn't do. Yep. I was naive about science communication and how it works. And I was, without knowing to call it this, an adherent to the knowledge deficit model. What does that mean? That means that if you're trying to communicate science to get somebody to make a decision, it's because they're missing knowledge, and you're gonna provide that. You're gonna fill their deficit, and then everything will be fine. You just tell them: Here's a fact. And now they believe the fact? I'm an expert, here's the fact, and then they'll make the right decision. But no, it doesn't work that way, especially when there's already skepticism and distrust. You're seen as an elitist who maybe has an ax to grind or something you're trying to put over on them, and you may even do more harm than good by going after somebody's misunderstandings head-on. They're just gonna dig their heels in more thoroughly. I guess what I've learned is we need to do a lot more listening and really understand where people are coming from, and also be prepared to tell stories instead of going down the road with statistics. But that's challenging: For a scientist, that sounds like an anecdote and I would never get away with that in the seminar room. But this is not the seminar room, people. We need to actually find better ways to help people understand what we do. You were in charge of the NIH during Covid. You were often the one communicating to the public. Are there things that you would do differently if you could do it over again? I wish every time that myself or anybody who was putting forward a public health message would have started off saying, 'Look, this is an evolving situation. We still don't know answers to a lot of things we need to know about this pandemic. So what I'm gonna tell you today is the data we've got, but we might have to change that later when we get more information.' We almost never said that. The other thing is our one-size-fits-all approach just didn't feel like it made any sense to the public. People in rural communities, who were far away from the carnage that was happening in New York City or Washington, DC, as the virus was running wild, were left wondering: 'Why do I have to close my business? I haven't even seen any cases here yet.' I think we lost a lot of people in states that didn't necessarily have heavy academic research centers, who couldn't quite imagine how they should believe us because we didn't seem like we understood what life was like on a small farm in Nebraska. During Covid, my number one goal was to save lives. I'm a physician. I took the Hippocratic Oath. I assumed there were other people worrying about the economic effects of this and the effects on children's learning when they were kept out of school. It didn't feel like that was my thing. My thing was to try to keep people from dying. But it became clear to me that that may have been something I was a little bit wearing blinders about. Maybe those other factors about economic harms and harms to children's learning should have been a bit more front and center to the conversations that I was part of. So I understand looking back on it and saying, 'Okay, it would've been more accurate to communicate the level of uncertainty.' To say to people, 'This is evolving. We don't know.' Do you think that would've led to a different outcome? I don't know. I wish we could do the experiment, and maybe we could figure out a way to do it in some controlled space. But I would say 20 percent of the problem was the less-than-perfect communication of the science, and 80 percent of it was the deluge of misinformation and disinformation that contaminated the conversation to the point where a lot of people stopped listening to the actual facts. There didn't seem to be any penalty for stating something that's absolutely false, though, and I haven't heard anybody apologize for that. When I think about your willingness to have difficult conversations, to accept responsibility for mistakes, it seems like this is something that most people are not doing. I've heard you mention maybe we could have something like a truth and reconciliation commission. Or a pandemic amnesty on a larger level, where people could really be open about their mistakes. Do you think that could have any effect? You know, I proposed the idea of amnesty at an event and the audience blew up. They were not there. People are too angry. On both sides? On both sides. They're feeling too hurt, too much harm has been done to them. So amnesty, I don't think we're there. Truth and reconciliation, people were okay with that. Because they can imagine that other people are gonna have to ask for forgiveness for what they did. But right now, we're so dug in. I hope that this truth and reconciliation option is out there right now. It doesn't quite feel like people are ready to go there. It seems to me like what we need is more people embracing uncertainty, more people talking about their mistakes. Whether it's people with their friends who they disagree with, or whether it's the highest scientists in our scientific agencies. How do we get there? We're a long way from there. When you're in this circumstance where there seems to be a real pitch battle between the various tribes, it makes it hard for anybody to say, 'I might be wrong.' The fact that I've been willing to say that has resulted in a lot of attacks, even from people who I thought were my friends. They said, 'Oh no, you can't show weakness like that.' Well, yeah, we really do need to do that, but we need to all do it and not just expect a few people who are then gonna get whacked for it. It's hard right now, and you don't see a lot of that in our country. If I were a young scientist and I wasn't sure whether I should stay in the field, what would you say to me? I would say you're at a really paradoxical time because this is the most incredibly exciting moment for biomedical research. So many things are becoming possible that I would not have dreamed would happen in my lifetime. We're on this exponential curve of gathering insights. So if that's your dream to be part of, don't give it up. Now, the paradox is right at the moment, there's a lot of negative things happening in the United States that seem to be threats. But the case here is so compelling that I don't believe those facts can be suppressed for very long. You can already look at polls in which the American public says, 'I don't think they should be harming medical research.' That's right there. Seventy-seven percent of Americans raise that point in one poll.
Vox
6 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
The stunning reversal of humanity's oldest bias
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. The Economist estimated that the decline in sex preference at birth in the past 25 years has saved the equivalent of 7 million the oldest, most pernicious form of human bias is that of men toward women. It often started at the moment of birth. In ancient Athens, at a public ceremony called the amphidromia, fathers would inspect a newborn and decide whether it would be part of the family, or be cast away. One often socially acceptable reason for abandoning the baby: It was a girl. Female infanticide has been distressingly common in many societies — and its practice is not just ancient history. In 1990, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen looked at birth ratios in Asia, North Africa, and China and calculated that more than 100 million women were essentially 'missing' — meaning that, based on the normal ratio of boys to girls at birth and the longevity of both genders, there was a huge missing number of girls who should have been born, but weren't. Sen's estimate came before the truly widespread adoption of ultrasound tests that could determine the sex of a fetus in utero — which actually made the problem worse, leading to a wave of sex-selective abortions. These were especially common in countries like India and China; the latter's one-child policy and old biases made families desperate for their one child to be a boy. The Economist has estimated that since 1980 alone, there have been approximately 50 million fewer girls born worldwide than would naturally be expected, which almost certainly means that roughly that nearly all of those girls were aborted for no other reason than their sex. The preference for boys was a bias that killed in mass numbers. But in one of the most important social shifts of our time, that bias is changing. In a great cover story earlier this month, The Economist reported that the number of annual excess male births has fallen from a peak of 1.7 million in 2000 to around 200,000, which puts it back within the biologically standard birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. Countries that once had highly skewed sex ratios — like South Korea, which saw almost 116 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990 — now have normal or near-normal ratios. Altogether, The Economist estimated that the decline in sex preference at birth in the past 25 years has saved the equivalent of 7 million girls. That's comparable to the number of lives saved by anti-smoking efforts in the US. So how, exactly, have we overcome a prejudice that seemed so embedded in human society? Related The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies Success in school and the workplace For one, we have relaxed discrimination against girls and women in other ways — in school and in the workplace. With fewer limits, girls are outperforming boys in the classroom. In the most recent international PISA tests, considered the gold standard for evaluating student performance around the world, 15-year-old girls beat their male counterparts in reading in 79 out of 81 participating countries or economies, while the historic male advantage in math scores has fallen to single digits. Girls are also dominating in higher education, with 113 female students at that level for every 100 male students. While women continue to earn less than men, the gender pay gap has been shrinking, and in a number of urban areas in the US, young women have actually been outearning young men. Government policies have helped accelerate that shift, in part because they have come to recognize the serious social problems that eventually result from decades of anti-girl discrimination. In countries like South Korea and China, which have long had some of the most skewed gender ratios at birth, governments have cracked down on technologies that enable sex-selective abortion. In India, where female infanticide and neglect have been particularly horrific, slogans like 'Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter' have helped change opinions. A changing preference The shift is being seen not just in birth sex ratios, but in opinion polls — and in the actions of would-be parents. Between 1983 and 2003, The Economist reported, the proportion of South Korean women who said it was 'necessary' to have a son fell from 48 percent to 6 percent, while nearly half of women now say they want daughters. In Japan, the shift has gone even further — as far back as 2002, 75 percent of couples who wanted only one child said they hoped for a daughter. In the US, which allows sex selection for couples doing in-vitro fertilization, there is growing evidence that would-be parents prefer girls, as do potential adoptive parents. While in the past, parents who had a girl first were more likely to keep trying to have children in an effort to have a boy, the opposite is now true — couples who have a girl first are less likely to keep trying. A more equal future There's still more progress to be made. In northwest of India, for instance, birth ratios that overly skew toward boys are still the norm. In regions of sub-Saharan Africa, birth sex ratios may be relatively normal, but post-birth discrimination in the form of poorer nutrition and worse medical care still lingers. And course, women around the world are still subject to unacceptable levels of violence and discrimination from men. And some of the reasons for this shift may not be as high-minded as we'd like to think. Boys around the world are struggling in the modern era. They increasingly underperform in education, are more likely to be involved in violent crime, and in general, are failing to launch into adulthood. In the US, 20 percent of American men between 25 and 34 still live with their parents, compared to 15 percent of similarly aged women. It also seems to be the case that at least some of the increasing preference for girls is rooted in sexist stereotypes. Parents around the world may now prefer girls partly because they see them as more likely to take care of them in their old age — meaning a different kind of bias against women, that they are more natural caretakers, may be paradoxically driving the decline in prejudice against girls at birth. But make no mistake — the decline of boy preference is a clear mark of social progress, one measured in millions of girls' lives saved. And maybe one Father's Day, not too long from now, we'll reach the point where daughters and sons are simply children: equally loved and equally welcomed.
Vox
07-06-2025
- Health
- Vox
We're secretly winning the war on cancer
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Thousands of people gather on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on September 26, 1998, to demand that the cause, the care, and the cure of cancer be made top research and healthcare priorities in the US. Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images On November 4, 2003, a doctor gave Jon Gluck some of the worst news imaginable: He had cancer — one that later tests would reveal as multiple myeloma, a severe blood and bone marrow cancer. Jon was told he might have as little as 18 months to live. He was 38, a thriving magazine editor in New York with a 7-month-old daughter whose third birthday, he suddenly realized, he might never see. 'The moment after I was told I had cancer, I just said 'no, no, no,'' Jon told me in an interview just last week. 'This cannot be true.' Living in remission The fact that Jon is still here, talking to me in 2025, tells you that things didn't go the way the medical data would have predicted on that November morning. He has lived with his cancer, through waves of remission and recurrence, for more than 20 years, an experience he chronicles with grace and wit in his new book An Exercise in Uncertainty. That 7-month-old daughter is now in college. You could say Jon has beaten the odds, and he's well aware that chance played some role in his survival. ('Did you know that 'Glück' is German for 'luck'?' he writes in the book, noting his good fortune that a random spill on the ice is what sent him to the doctor in the first place, enabling them to catch his cancer early.) Cancer is still a terrible health threat, one that is responsible for 1 in 6 deaths around the world, killing nearly 10 million people a year globally and over 600,000 people a year in the US. But Jon's story and his survival demonstrate something that is too often missed: We've turned the tide in the war against cancer. The age-adjusted death rate in the US for cancer has declined by about a third since 1991, meaning people of a given age have about a third lower risk of dying from cancer than people of the same age more than three decades ago. That adds up to over 4 million fewer cancer deaths over that time period. Thanks to breakthroughs in treatments like autologous stem-cell harvesting and CAR-T therapy — breakthroughs Jon himself benefited from, often just in time — cancer isn't the death sentence it once was. Our World in Data Getting better all the time There's no doubt that just as the rise of smoking in the 20th century led to a major increase in cancer deaths, the equally sharp decline of tobacco use eventually led to a delayed decrease. Smoking is one of the most potent carcinogens in the world, and at the peak in the early 1960s, around 12 cigarettes were being sold per adult per day in the US. Take away the cigarettes and — after a delay of a couple of decades — lung cancer deaths drop in turn along with other non-cancer smoking-related deaths. But as Saloni Dattani wrote in a great piece earlier this year, even before the decline of smoking, death rates from non-lung cancers in the stomach and colon had begun to fall. Just as notably, death rates for childhood cancers — which for obvious reasons are not connected to smoking and tend to be caused by genetic mutations — have fallen significantly as well, declining sixfold since 1950. In the 1960s, for example, only around 10 percent of children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia survived more than five years. Today it's more than 90 percent. And the five-year survival rate for all cancers has risen from 49 percent in the mid-1970s to 69 percent in 2019. We've made strikes against the toughest of cancers, like Jon's multiple myeloma. Around when Jon was diagnosed, the five-year survival rate was just 34 percent. Today it's as high as 62 percent, and more and more people like Jon are living for decades. 'There has been a revolution in cancer survival,' Jon told me. 'Some illnesses now have far more successful therapies than others, but the gains are real.' Three cancer revolutions The dramatic bend in the curve of cancer deaths didn't happen by accident — it's the compound interest of three revolutions. While anti-smoking policy has been the single biggest lifesaver, other interventions have helped reduce people's cancer risk. One of the biggest successes is the HPV vaccine. A study last year found that death rates of cervical cancer — which can be caused by HPV infections — in US women ages 20–39 had dropped 62 percent from 2012 to 2021, thanks largely to the spread of the vaccine. Other cancers have been linked to infections, and there is strong research indicating that vaccination can have positive effects on reducing cancer incidence. The next revolution is better and earlier screening. It's generally true that the earlier cancer is caught, the better the chances of survival, as Jon's own story shows. According to one study, incidences of late-stage colorectal cancer in Americans over 50 declined by a third between 2000 and 2010 in large part because rates of colonoscopies almost tripled in that same time period. And newer screening methods, often employing AI or using blood-based tests, could make preliminary screening simpler, less invasive and therefore more readily available. If 20th-century screening was about finding physical evidence of something wrong — the lump in the breast — 21st-century screening aims to find cancer before symptoms even arise. Most exciting of all are frontier developments in treating cancer, much of which can be tracked through Jon's own experience. From drugs like lenalidomide and bortezomib in the 2000s, which helped double median myeloma survival, to the spread of monoclonal antibodies, real breakthroughs in treatments have meaningfully extended people's lives — not just by months, but years. Perhaps the most promising development is CAR-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Rather than attempting to kill the cancer directly, immunotherapies turn a patient's own T-cells into guided missiles. In a recent study of 97 patients with multiple myeloma, many of whom were facing hospice care, a third of those who received CAR-T therapy had no detectable cancer five years later. It was the kind of result that doctors rarely see. 'CAR-T is mind-blowing — very science-fiction futuristic,' Jon told me. He underwent his own course of treatment with it in mid-2023 and writes that the experience, which put his cancer into a remission he's still in, left him feeling 'physically and metaphysically new.' A welcome uncertainty While there are still more battles to be won in the war on cancer, and there are certain areas — like the rising rates of gastrointestinal cancers among younger people — where the story isn't getting better, the future of cancer treatment is improving. For cancer patients like Jon, that can mean a new challenge — enduring the essential uncertainty that comes with living under a disease that's controllable but which could always come back. But it sure beats the alternative. 'I've come to trust so completely in my doctors and in these new developments,' he said. 'I try to remain cautiously optimistic that my future will be much like the last 20 years.' And that's more than he or anyone else could have hoped for nearly 22 years ago. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
350,000 people are losing protection from deportation
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: The Supreme Court today ruled the Trump administration could strip deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelans living in the US — a victory for President Donald Trump that comes at the expense of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people. What's the context? Since 2021, many Venezuelan immigrants have had Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows migrants to stay and work in the US when their home countries experience disasters or civil strife. Venezuela is in an ongoing humanitarian crisis thanks to an authoritarian regime's economic mismanagement and foreign sanctions. But upon taking office, the Trump administration attempted to revoke that status for approximately 350,000 Venezuelans. A federal judge froze the administration's effort in March while lawsuits proceeded. What's the latest? The Supreme Court overturned the lower court's freeze, ruling that deportations could begin — even while the cases are still in front of the courts. What's next? The administration is now free to begin deporting Venezuelans who had been covered by the status, though the court's order still allows individual immigrants to challenge their deportations or the loss of work permits. Trump also aims to revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of other immigrants later this year. What does this mean for the immigrants? Venezuela is still in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, and deportations would mean a return to a country where work is scarce but suffering is not: More than 20 million people lack adequate access to food and medical care, according to Human Rights Watch. What does this mean for the balance of power? Federal judges have repeatedly checked Trump's power by freezing his actions while they work their way through the judicial system. Trump and his officials have raged against such freezes, saying they give individual judges too much power over the president. Today, the court sided with the White House, weakening another check on this administration's power. Apropos of nothing in particular, here's a wonderful old Washington Post story about how Haitian immigrants brought a North Carolina town back from the brink of economic collapse. If you're in the mood for something totally free of politics, Vox's Unexplainable podcast has an episode whose title I can't resist: 'The man who walked butterflies on a leash.' (You can listen here on Apple, here on Spotify.) Thanks so much for reading, and I'll see you back here tomorrow.
Vox
17-05-2025
- Science
- Vox
A wild project in Iceland could transform how we forecast volcanic eruptions
is a senior producer and reporter on Unexplainable, Vox's science podcast. She covers everything scientists don't yet know but are trying to figure out, so her work explores everything from the inner workings of the human body to the distant edges of the universe When you picture a volcano, what do you see? I personally imagine a mountain sticking up into the sky. At the top of that mountain, I see a crater with a fiery hot lake boiling and roiling in it, or lava pouring down a slope like bright red candle wax, or massive clouds of grey ash exploding into the air. It's all incredible, powerful imagery, but it's also really just the tip of the volcano-berg. If I were to descend down through my imaginary volcano, moving down through layers and layers of earth, I'd find what might be an even more incredible feature: my volcano's pulsing, fiery furnace of a heart, also known as its 'magma chamber.' This is the reason that hot ash comes bursting up through the surface. It's the original source of my lava and my crater lake. It's where much of the important action in a volcano unfolds — and could hold secrets to help us better predict when a devastating eruption will occur. The problem is that we know much less about magma chambers like this than we'd like to. We're not even good at depicting them. 'We draw them as red balloons,' says Mike Poland, a geophysicist and scientist-in-charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. 'They are not. But it's a very difficult thing to represent.' Magma chambers are so hard to represent because they're so complex. They can be thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and have blends of solid material and hot liquid rock. These chambers have different temperatures in different spots, and different minerals melting at different heats or moving around in different ways. And, making things even more complex, there's a multitude of different gases that might make pressure build up before an eruption. But if we could better represent magma chambers — and just generally better understand exactly how they work — Poland says we might be able to dramatically improve our understanding of how volcanoes operate, and therefore be better able to anticipate what to expect from an impending eruption. But right now, because these chambers are so hot and so deep underground, it's hard to plumb their secrets. 'We don't have, like, the glass-bottomed volcano where you can just sort of look into and go like, Oh, that's what's going on,' Poland jokes. But what if we could have a glass-bottomed volcano that we could sort of look into and go like, Oh, that's what's going on? What if we could build, say, a little observatory deep down under the ground, right in the hot little heart of a volcano? It sounds absurd, and yet… ' There's a project in Iceland,' Poland tells me, 'They want to build a magma observatory. They want to drill into a magma chamber and put some monitoring equipment in the hole. … That would give us some idea of what's going on in there.' The project is called the Krafla Magma Testbed, or KMT, and the researchers working on it think it could revolutionize volcanology — and how we forecast eruptions. But first, what's missing from our volcano forecasts? One of the key motivations for building an observatory like this is that volcanology has a prediction problem. On the one hand, volcanoes are much more predictable than, say, earthquakes — they tend to give us some warning signs before they erupt. But on the other hand, it's hard to perfectly interpret those warning signs, which means the predictions volcanologists can make with our existing technology can be both incredibly helpful and frustratingly imprecise. For example, for the last year or so, a potential eruption has been brewing at Mount Spurr, a volcano near Anchorage, Alaska. Twice in the last 100 years, eruptions from Mount Spurr have rained ash down on the city, clogging up roadways, shutting down the local airport (one of the busiest cargo ports in the world), and settling like a fine dusting of gritty, gray, unmelting snow on cars and lawns and leaves of trees. People are understandably worried about a repeat performance, and the Alaska Volcano Observatory is monitoring the situation closely. Matt Haney, the scientist-in-charge at that observatory, told me while he can be sure that the volcano is displaying several key warning signs, he can't be sure exactly what the upcoming volcanic activity might look like — if there will be one eruption or many, exactly how intense they will be, or when they'll occur. 'That is not possible in the current levels of technology that we have,' he said. 'There's no definitive time frame, like, Oh, it's going to do exactly this, like it did in 1992. It's not the precise same playbook.' Even with 11 seismic stations gathering real-time data about the Alaskan volcano — even with devices measuring how it is changing shape in response to incoming magma, with planes circling in the sky to understand the venting of gases, and with an enormous amount of truly impressive work — these volcanologists still can't give us as clear a picture of the future as we might like them to. That's tricky enough when you're dealing with the prospect of a clogging and choking coating of volcanic ash, but it gets even more complicated when you're trying to make determinations about people's lives. 'This is the problem. How do you know how big an eruption's going to be?' — Mike Poland, geophysicist and scientist-in-charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory Look, for example, at the case of Soufrière de Guadeloupe, a volcano on the Caribbean island of Basse-Terre. In the mid-1970s, it started venting steam. That, paired with increased earthquake activity, had people worried that a dramatic eruption might be brewing. And they had very good reason to worry: In 1902, another Caribbean volcano eruption sent a deadly mix of hot gas and ash and rock careening through a nearby city at 300 miles an hour, killing 27,000 people. So, hoping to avoid a repeat of this devastating event, the governmental authorities decided to go ahead and evacuate. More than 70,000 people left Basse-Terre. But the subsequent eruption was minor. As one report put it, the 'explosive emission of steam and debris was certainly impressive to those who had the misfortune to view it at close quarters. But from a volcanological point of view, it represented a rather trivial outburst.' If anything, the biggest impact on the volcanic activity was the evacuation itself — it hurt the local economy and disrupted kids' schooling. Sometimes, though, evacuations are extremely necessary. In 1991, at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, volcanologists once again read the volcanic tea leaves — stuff like seismic activity and steam explosions — and predicted a big eruption. Once again, people were evacuated. But this time, the decision to abandon the area saved thousands of lives — the ensuing eruption was one of the biggest in the 20th century. 'This is the problem,' Poland says. 'How do you know how big an eruption's going to be?' You don't want to evacuate too little, or too late, at the cost of human lives, he says. But equally, you don't want to be the boy who cries wolf, or the volcanologist who cries, 'ERUPTION!' ' It erodes trust in the scientists,' he says. Volcanology has come a long way since the 1970s, or even the 1990s. Scientists have much more monitoring equipment set up on volcanoes, and they have made better equipment over time. Their ability to make predictions about volcanoes has improved dramatically as a result. But as the case of Mount Spurr shows, even now — in 2025 — the field still grapples with the same fundamental problem of precision in their predictions. So how do these predictions get better? How could volcanologists further improve their predictions in order to help people make decisions about how to prepare for eruptions? Poland has spent a fair amount of time thinking about the answers to this question. He wrote a whole paper about it, in fact. And he thinks that improving volcano forecasting is not just about continuing to improve our monitoring equipment. Instead, he says, what we really need is better information about volcanoes themselves, and the hot molten rocks that power them. What can molten rock teach us about eruptions? Let's talk about how we currently forecast volcano eruptions. A lot of volcano prediction involves making very informed guesses about what a volcano might do in the future based on what that volcano has done in the past — what Poland calls pattern recognition. Take, for example, gas emissions or earthquakes. Essentially, he says, researchers will take a lot of very, very precise measurements of those phenomena that will allow them to then say 'Alright. X is happening. And when X happened before, Y happened afterward, so maybe now Y will happen again soon.' 'It's not necessarily based on any special understanding of the physics of volcanic activity or that particular volcano,' Poland says, 'It's more based on…We've seen this movie before, and we know how it's likely to evolve over time.' Related Your weather forecast is about to get a lot worse This approach has been incredibly useful. It's saved a lot of lives and helped scientists make some really good predictions about how a volcano might behave, broadly. But Poland likes to draw a comparison between this approach and with how we forecast the weather. Because in the past, weather scientists also relied heavily on pattern matching. If the pressure was dropping and it was getting colder, say, they might expect a storm to come through. But then, weather forecasting went through a kind of revolution. Scientists used satellites and other instruments to collect information about clouds and winds and rain. They collected huge amounts of data about the atmosphere, and people even flew directly into the eyes of phenomena like hurricanes to measure what was happening inside of those storms. 'This really abundant information was then used by modelers…to work out the physics of what's going on,' Poland says. Weather scientists still use a lot of historical data to inform their understanding of the future (and now, with AI, are actually turning back to their massive bodies of data to try some more advanced pattern recognition), but they have also built really sophisticated models of the physics of the atmosphere that help them make their predictions. And it has paid off: Last year, according to the National Hurricane Center, hurricane forecasters set new records for accuracy in their predictions for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. 'We can now forecast, with some degree of accuracy, whether a hurricane will form, how intense it is going to be, where it's going to go,' Poland says. 'Obviously not every forecast is perfect. And that's because our knowledge is still imperfect. But they know enough.' Poland wants volcanologists to build similar models of the underlying physics of volcanoes, which would mean building models of magma chambers. Scientists have been working on making models like this — and have even been working on applying them to forecasting. But if the weather scientists built their models by flying directly into things like hurricanes and taking measurements, volcano researchers have had a bit of a harder time doing the equivalent for magma chambers. They can't take direct measurements, so they've used seismic and electromagnetic imaging to take the equivalent of X-rays of the Earth, and they've studied places where ancient volcanoes have eroded away, bringing their cooled, frozen magma chambers up to the surface. They've even read the layers of volcanic crystals as though they were tree rings. This has been helpful, but it's kind of like studying your neighbors by eavesdropping on their conversations through the wall and going through their trash instead of just talking to them directly. So that's why some researchers are hoping to talk to volcanoes directly — to observe their magma chambers in real time. Krafla volcanic area in Iceland. Getty Images/iStockphoto Introducing KMT: The Krafla Magma Testbed In some ways, the dream of a magma observatory started with an accident. Or to be a little more specific, it started with three different accidents in three different countries, each more than a decade ago. In each case, people set out to drill a deep hole into the rock near a volcano, and in each case, they accidentally drilled right down into the magma chamber. These accidents were a big surprise to the people doing the drilling, but to John Eichelberger, they were a big opportunity. Eichelberger has been studying volcanoes for around five decades. For much of that time, he's been curious about magma chambers. He thinks that knowing more about them could not only help us forecast volcanoes better, but also maybe tap into them for geothermal power. Unfortunately, he says, for a long time, it was difficult to find a way to drill into magma chambers and find out more about them, because people were not sure what would happen if you did. What if you triggered an eruption? 'Really the only way [drilling down to a magma chamber] could happen was by serendipity,' Eichelberger says. Serendipity like these three drilling accidents. They provided some real-world examples of what would happen if you drilled down to a magma chamber. And the answer was, it turns out, not all that much. In each of these three cases, the drilling companies hit the magma chamber and instead of like hot rock shooting out of their hole in a hot plume of fire, the magma basically climbed a little ways up the hole, and then cooled off into a plug of dark obsidian glass. This was very good news for Eichelberger. As he remembers it, he wound up meeting someone from a power company that was involved in one of these accidents. That representative let him know that they would be open to letting Eichelberger and other researchers do some more research near their power plant in the Krafla volcanic region of Iceland. And so, in 2014, Eichelberger gathered researchers together for a consortium – including a researcher named Yan Lavallée, now at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. 'Fifty or 60 of us spent the best part of a week together browsing ideas as to…what could we learn if we were to do this?' Lavallée syas, 'What could we learn if we were to drill back in the magma?' This was the start of the dream of KMT: The Krafla Magma Testbed, named for the volcanic system in Iceland. It's a dream that Eichelberger, Lavallée, and their collaborators are still trying to get funded, but they have a clear idea of how they'd make it a reality. 'First, we're going to install a drill rig at the Earth's surface, and we're going to start drilling,' Lavallée tells me. As they drill down, things will get hotter and hotter. They will pump fluid through, which will cool things down. Eventually, as they start to approach the magma of the magma chamber, the fluid will even start to cool down a little bit of that magma, too. 'It will vitrify to a glass,' Lavallée says. This glass will likely not be transparent like a window. Instead, it will be obsidian — dark black and full of minerals. The researchers will then continue to keep things cool while they carve into that black glass, creating something like a pocket within it. Once that pocket is made, they hope to drop measuring devices into it. Lavallée works with tools in his lab that are made of the same kinds of heavy-duty materials that we put into things like jet engines and other materials that can withstand extremely high temperatures. Once everything's in place, they will stop cooling things down. Then the heat of the surrounding molten rock should start warming the obsidian of the glass pocket back up again slowly, until it melts back into magma and flows back around the instruments, submerging them fully in the magma of the chamber. Then, hopefully, the researchers will finally have their observatory: a set of measuring devices feeding them real-time data about an active magma chamber. If this first project succeeds, then Eichelberger and Lavallée are brimming with ideas for further drilling projects that could help them tease out more information about volcanoes. They both hope this research could help the world tap into volcanoes as a source of power, but also that it could help with forecasting — to help us build the models of volcanoes' hearts that will give us the tools to predict their behavior as effectively as we predict hurricanes. And overall, Lavallée thinks that if this dream of theirs succeeds, it might revolutionize volcanology. 'I don't think we can really fully conceive how it's going to change things,' he says. Obviously, Lavallée has a clear reason to think this way, but when I asked Poland, who has no involvement with this project, what he thought, he was also pretty enthusiastic. 'I am excited to hear what they can come up with,' Poland said, 'I mean, you go into a magma chamber, you're going to learn some things.'
