Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "VICE News"
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Not sure of the exact part of the video that you are commenting on.
However vulvanoes does have other tricks up their sleeves then the slow moving lavas of Hawaii.
Some places lava flows *fast*.
But the real killer is usually pyroclastic flows that can move as fast as 700 km/h and cross 50+ km of water floating on a cushion of steam from the water being boiled underneath the flow by the insanely hot dust particles making up the flow.
And even if you survive such flows a vulvano can still fill the air with ashes filled with tiny glass particles that once you breath them in will start to cut up your lungs just as badly as asbestose, potentially killing you before you get away, and even if you manage to get away potentially damaging you for life.
Vulvanoes can melt glaciers causing flash floods that can wash away entire villages, and these flash floods can contain ashes that then solidifies into essentially sement around anyone caught in the floods so you can't escape, or be dug out.
And if there's builders included any buildings involved can be crushed till there's nothing bigger then matches left.
Almost the least of your problems near a vulvano is that they can throw lava far, far up into the sky that can solidify into huge hot builders that can come raining down crushing you, usually they're not much bigger than your head though, so a solid house roof might deflect them.
Of course any vegetation can be set alight so you'll have to deal with wildfires.
The rapidly rising gasses filled with particles can create a lot of static electricity, potentially causing lightning strikes, I don't need to tell you that those can be deadly...
Tiny glass particles inside modern jet engines can of course cause a plane to lose engine power.
And the gasses released by the vulvano has different properties then the air that the plane was designed to fly through potentially causing a plane to drop literally like a rock instead of gliding, since there's no air to glide through.
That's... "fun"...
Lava or magma expanding and contracting the ground can cause earthquakes with all that entails...
Like seriously, it would probably be faster to list all the ways of killing you that a vulvano can't cause...
If you include indirect potential methods included I really can't think of any in a hurry...
I mean, the heat could even trigger stored ammunition potentially shooting people for goodness sake, not to mention being stabbed by a branche in a flood, so even death by piercing damage is within it's repertoire...
I mean, I guess I haven't heard of a vulvano ever killing anyone with radiation poisoning yet...
Although I can imagine situations where that could be achieved...
Yes, I've spent a lot of time thinking about possible ways to be killed by a vulvano...
(Icelandic citizen living abroad, but still with family in the country)
As for the dangers of lava itself, you are aware of how 7 million km in Russia in essence is all basalt rocks left after a single gigantic vulvanic eruption that almost killed all life on this planet?
That's 4 million km^3 of basalt left by a single vulvanic event.
In such a situation I really don't think that there would be anywhere left without lava for you to flee too...
(A similar but much smaller scale event on Iceland in 1784 caused the French revolution by causing a huge famine resulting in unrest, killing a estimated 1/4th of the population of Iceland, as well as a estimated 23 000 British people killed by poisoning and another 8 000 Brits by climatic effects, about 1/6th of the population of Egypt, a unknown but large number of deaths in the Sahel region of Africa, 920 000 people in Japan, large but unknown numbers elsewhere in Europe (the poisonous cloud drifted in over Denmark-Norway, Bohemia and a number of other countries).
If you include the indirect deaths caused by the political outfalls of the vulvano then you can include all of the French wars in that equation too...
So many millions there...
I short, vulvanoes are bloodying *terrifying*.
And I'm glad that I'm living a long, long distance away from the closest one, where I'll have a pretty good chance of surviving even some of the big ones if they where to occur...
Although like I said, vulvanoes has the potential of killing almost all the life of a planet, so nowhere is truly safe...
Of course, like I said, the vulvanoes on Hawaii is relatively safe by vulvanic standards, or have been, so far...
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Hum...
Okay, so what about raising the houses above the possible maximum level of the lava over the next 30-40 years of eruption?
Start by melting holes into the lava, then drive a pile foundation into the melted rock deep enough that new lava on the surface simple can't melt it's way down there and then some.
You could use a material with a higher melting point then what the lava has ever shown before for the piles, and then a core that's highly heat transfering to transfer heat away from the piles on the surface down deep into the ground, perhaps some kind of ceramics on the outside then metal load bearing high melting point metal inside, transfering the weight down below the lava levels, also place metal tubes that can handle some heat and also safely transport water through them, both to cool the piles and to bring water to the house from outside pipes below the ground, deep below lava levels, they better be solid because they'll be covered with a layer of solidified lava above the earth and it'll be expensive to do maintenance on them, do overdimention them and make sure there's a high flow rate so there won't be any clogging.
You can also drill down to get underground heat energy for electric powering of the buildings too.
On top you could make a raised platform to support multiple buildings and a helicopter pad for evacuation etc.
The platform would need to be attached to the piles with shock absorbers able to deal with movement in all possible directions and movement of the piles relative to each other in case the ground supporting the buildings ends up being compressed, stretched or otherwise deformed.
This is to deal with earthquakes, also, who knows, you might end up with a lava tunnel forming underneath the supports of the buildings, the pressure inside the tunnel might cause deformation of the surrounding rocks...
The weight better be well spread out, and there needs to be redundancy in the load bearing.
The roofs and walls of the buildings needs to be solid enough to handle the weight of lava bombs...
The buildings will require good air filtration as well as the ability to seal off and temporarily rely on stored oxygen only.
I'm starting to think that it would be best with a single big building rather than multiple smaller ones.
Of course the buildings also needs to be earthquake resistant, just like the platform they're on...
You could use compressed gasses to aid in cooling down the buildings when surrounded by lava.
Use heat pumps around these stored gasses to help cooling down the living areas and factories.
Plausible industries, geothermal powerplants, tourism, universities...
Hydrogen plants perhaps, using sea water and geothermal energy.
It would be all about heat management.
I'm guessing that you could probably also do this a bit off shore for things like a harbor for small scale fishing and trade...
Perhaps some kind of mining of the vulvanic rock would be viable?
I don't know...
You could also dig out earth from underneath the solidified lava rocks and make raised platforms based ona similar idea adapted to farming...
Space on such platforms would probably be extremely expensive though...
But with the profit potential I think that this is doable.
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