Krafla Magma Testbed

This week, more than a hundred of the World’s leading volcanologists, geothermal scientists and geoengineers will come to Munich to attend the Krafla Magma Testbed Symposium – the first official conference of the Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT), which aims to establish the first magma observatory at Krafla volcano, Iceland (www.kmt.is).

Partially funded by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) and endorsed by the government of Iceland, KMT is pioneering the development of a long-term infrastructure that will serve as a world-class, international, in-situ magma laboratory with access to the magma-rock-hydrothermal boundary through wells, available for advanced studies and experiments. This project (estimated at >100 M€) plans to drill, sample and manipulate magma to probe the pulse of the Earth, ground-truth geoscientific models, and so transform volcanic hazard assessment and risk mitigation strategies, whilst enabling the development of next-generation magma (geothermal) energy. Magma holds 5-10x more energy than conventional geothermal energy (even in Iceland where the subsurface hosts hot fluids), and thus learning to access this resource safely will drastically improve the energy landscape in volcanically active countries and worldwide. The prospect of accessing magma requires the development of innovative, science-based magma engineering solutions and is sparking international efforts to achieve this goal, such as the ERC funded project MODERATE (Magma Outgassing During Eruption and geothermal Exploration), led by Prof. Yan Lavallée in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the LMU-Munich.

KMT is gaining traction internationally. More than 40 research institutes and companies from 13 countries have signed up to the Krafla Magma Testbed – numbers which are set to grow rapidly following the KMT symposium in Munich next week. A programme of the event can be found at: https://kmt.is/the-krafla-magma-testbed-symposium/