US media: Why can’t volcanoes “help dispose of garbage”?
2024-08-26
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[Global Times Special Correspondent Wu Yan] The rapid increase of urban garbage is becoming a new threat to modern society. Although various countries have proposed methods such as landfill, incineration and recycling, they all have their own shortcomings. The American "Dialogue" website recently raised an interesting question: Since garbage disposal is so troublesome, why not throw it directly into the crater of an active volcano?
According to the report, many people's first reaction to this issue is that these garbage will produce toxic gases when ignited by high-temperature lava, which is not good for the environment. This statement does make sense, but in fact, the craters of active volcanoes themselves release a large amount of toxic and harmful gases, including sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide and nitrogen oxides, and the amount and scale are much higher than ordinary garbage incineration stations. Therefore, the real obstacle to "turning volcanoes into garbage disposal stations" is actually related to the characteristics of volcanoes themselves.
First, the temperature of lava varies greatly from volcano to volcano. The magma temperature of some volcanoes is hot enough to burn common garbage. For example, when the Kilauea volcano erupted in Hawaii in 2018, the temperature of the lava flow exceeded 1100 degrees Celsius, which is hotter than the surface of Venus and enough to melt many rocks. In contrast, when a garbage incinerator is working, the internal temperature is usually 1000-1200 degrees Celsius. Therefore, lava can theoretically handle common food scraps, paper, plastic, glass and some metals in garbage, but it is still not enough to melt many other common materials, including alloy materials such as steel, nickel and iron. At the same time, volcanoes in different places will show different temperatures due to different magma compositions. For example, the lava erupted from Mount St. Helens in the United States is a relatively thick andesite, and the temperature of the lava erupted from the volcano from 2004 to 2008 was only about 700 degrees Celsius.
In addition to temperature, there are other good reasons not to burn garbage in volcanoes. For example, not all volcanoes on Earth have lava lakes that we can easily dump garbage into. Among the thousands of volcanoes on Earth, only eight are known to have active lava lakes. Most other active volcanoes have craters filled with rocks and cooled lava, such as Mount St. Helens; some active volcanoes will form crater lakes due to years of accumulation of water in their craters when they are not erupting. Therefore, there are very few active volcanoes that are truly suitable for "burning garbage", and most of them are inconvenient to transport. It is really not cost-effective to transport urban garbage from thousands of miles away.
The third problem is that dumping garbage into an active volcanic lava lake is a very dangerous job. The lava lake is covered by a crust of cooled lava, but underneath the crust flows extremely hot lava. If rocks or other materials fall on the surface of the lava lake, they may break the crust and disturb the lava below, which can then cause an explosion. This happened at Kilauea in 2015, when rocks from the edge of the crater fell into the lava lake, causing a huge explosion that spewed a large amount of lava out of the crater. Therefore, if you want to throw garbage into a lava lake, the person performing this task must not only run fast enough, but also avoid the burning garbage and lava spewing out of the crater at any time.
In addition, the toxic gases from the burning of garbage mentioned above cannot be ignored. Sulfur-containing gases emitted by active volcanoes produce acidic mist, also known as "volcanic fog". It can kill plants and harm the respiratory systems of people nearby. When these already very dangerous volcanic gases are mixed with other gases produced by burning garbage, the resulting smog is even more harmful to people and other animals and plants near the volcano.
Finally, many local residents in volcanic areas regard nearby volcanoes as sacred places. For example, the crater of Kilauea volcano is regarded as the home of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess. The area around the crater is a sacred and inviolable area for local Hawaiians, so dumping garbage into the volcano is a great insult to the local people. In short, if we want to reduce the trouble of "garbage siege", we cannot put the blame on nature, but need to start with ourselves and try to reduce the generation of garbage.
