Scientists at the University at Buffalo in New York are making lava to understand and learn more about volcanoes.

In particular, the team wanted to examine the interaction between lava and surface water, which sometimes make volcanic eruptions a lot more dangerous such as during the eruption of Hawaii's Kilauea, Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull, and Indonesia's Krakatoa.

The first set of data has now been published in The Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

A Dangerous Combination

The team of researchers is using up to 10-gallon batches of molten rock for the experiment. By injecting water into the man-made lava, the researchers are able to observe the basic physics of lava-water interaction, which is a fairly common occurrence but, until today, is little understood.

"f you think about a volcanic eruption, there are powerful forces at work, and it's not a gentle thing," stated Ingo Sonder, lead investigator and research scientist at the Center for Geohazard Studies at University at Buffalo. "Our experiments are looking at the basic physics of what happens when water gets trapped inside molten rock."

A separate team from Germany previously attempted the same feat, but with significantly less lava, a cup's worth that is. They found that an independent stimulus, pricking the water inside the lava, is necessary to trigger the blast.

The researchers at Buffalo discovered in their own experiment that when water rushed in more quickly and when the lava is stored in a tall container, the interaction tended to create larger and more brilliant reactions.

The researchers arrived at the conclusion after several tries. The team ran a total of 12 experiments, injecting the water at varying speeds. The container — an insulated steel box — also changed, with height ranging from 8 to 18 inches.

Next Step Of The Experiment

The researchers warned that the number of tests they have conducted so far has been small. They need to conduct more experiments to draw a firm conclusion.

However, so far, the takeaway is that lava does not need much water to trigger a dangerous explosion. The next step of the research is to recreate the same experiment but using a higher water content to observe how the lava would react.