“It’s a strange thing, when you see this crater of molten rock glowing at 1,000 degrees Celsius. It’s like any fire—you just want to go and stand next to it. It draws you in.” Via WiredUK
Believing he could do better, Horsley installed a basic Canon 5D camera and modem on Nyiragongo. Every half an hour, the camera uploads an image of the crater via the local cellular network to a Google Drive accessible by the GVO. By jettisoning the radio antenna required by telemetry, Horsley had reduced the impact of high winds and removed an obvious target for thieves and vandals.
Another benefit is storage space. A video livestream provides low-resolution imagery, but it could still take up thousands of gigabytes of disk space. By uploading one image every 30 minutes to a cloud-based server instead, Horsley has made his data easier for the GVO to sort through, store, and study. “It was just about simplifying the system so that it would work for a volcanology department that is struggling to find a lot of funds for equipment and backend systems,” he explains.
With Nyiragongo typically erupting every 20 years, using imagery alongside seismic data to monitor the rebuilding of its lava lake and any changes to its plumbing can be an indicator of the force, direction, and potential timing of the next eruption. “We now walk with the volcano in our pocket; the activity of the volcanic lava lake almost no longer escapes our notice,” says Celestin Kasereka Mahinda, scientific director of the GVO.
Next, Horsley has his sights on the nearby Nyamuragira volcano—Africa’s most active. At present, rebel activity in the area means the volcano is only accessible by UN helicopter. Horsley hopes that installing a second monitoring system there—potentially using Starlink to overcome a lack of cellular data coverage—will reduce the risk and cost to GVO scientists, while providing a more complete understanding of volcanic activity in the area.
“Congo has a lot of challenges; not just volcanic instability, but political instability, which has made operating there quite difficult,” Horsley says. He is unlikely to give up his obsession with peering down into the liquid Earth any time soon. “It’s a strange thing, when you see this crater of molten rock glowing at 1,000 degrees Celsius,” he says. “It’s like any fire—you just want to go and stand next to it. It draws you in.
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