This is very close to the final draft of this completely rewritten eBook chapter (dolled up a little with blog tools). I could not get the source list finished by Sunday morning, but will update it soon; you can check Google scholar with the info given. Sources updated September 3, 2023.
It’s not an overstatement, calling this Congolese volcano dangerous. Nyiragongo does have a potential for truly biblical amounts of destruction and mayhem.
Recognizing this, countless people/organizations, locally and internationally, have tried to reduce volcanic risk down through the years.
There have been some successes.
Nevertheless, at Nyiragongo more than at any other Decade Volcano, human tragedies can be stronger than science.
Even for residents and friends of the region, the human situation here is a tangled mess; an outsider trying to get a handle on it only finds more and more complication.
Fortunately, our focus on the one volcano requires just basic details.
What is Nyiragongo?
Nyiragongo is an 11,400-foot-tall stratovolcano that has formed over some unusually hot mantle material in the great East African Rift. (Biggs et al.; Ebinger and Furman; GVP; Wikipedia)
This is the lower part of the rift system — young, with a necklace of beautiful lakes — not the upper part, which is close to end stage now with its wildlife-filled rift valleys, intense volcanism, desolate Danakil Depression, and seafloor spreading in the Afar region as a mantle plume or plumes successfully rip the continent apart. (Biggs et al.; Ebinger and Furman; Oppenheimer; Wikipedia)
Down here, rifting has only just begun. The giant crack in Africa is still in segments, with each of its roughly 60-mile-long basins containing a Great Lake: south to north, lakes Malawi, Tanganyika, Kivu (which, as we will see, is unusual in having some “fizz” to it), Edward, and Albert. Enormous Lake Victoria is nearby, but that one does its own geological thing and drains into the Nile. (Biggs et al.; Komorowski et al.; Schmid et al.)
There isn’t much volcanism yet in this relatively new section of the Rift (Corti et al.; Ebinger and Furman), except for Nyiragongo, just north of Lake Kivu, and its associates: seven other major volcanoes that run altogether thirty miles, east to west (at right angles to the rift), over a crustal region of mantle-plume-related uplift and extension. In geography, the range of fire mountains extends from Uganda to Rwanda and into the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (as Zaire is called today). (Ebinger and Furman; Kavotha et al.; Komorowski et al.)
These are the famous Virunga Volcanoes, home to mountain gorillas and other rare wildlife, and so beautiful that the Congolese, Rwandans, and Ugandans all have set them aside as national parks (with the Congo’s Virunga Volcanoes National Park also designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site).
Visoke, located on the DR Congo/Rwanda border, briefly sputtered to life once in the late nineteenth century and once again in the mid-twentieth century, but the only permanently active Virunga Volcanoes are Nyiragongo, just west of Rwanda, and its close neighbor, shield volcano Nyamuragira (a/k/a Nyamulagira). (GVP; Komorowski et al.)
The two rocky stars of Virunga Volcanoes National Park are quite active, accounting for almost half of all eruptions in Africa. (Wikipedia)
This starts with Nyamuragira. Sometimes both are active at the same time, but they reportedly have different magma sources and chemistry, as well as very different shapes.
Today, they also have more than nine million human neighbors.
Nyamuragira is hazardous but located in a remote region. (Tedesco)
Nyiragongo is too close — it threatens the lives and welfare of those millions, both directly and indirectly, with each eruption.
Nyiragongo and the Decade Volcano program
The current Wikipedia article on Mount Nyiragongo says that experts made this a Decade Volcano because of its 1977 flank eruption.
I can’t document it in the reference given (see also Newhall, 1996 and 1999, at the end of this chapter), but that eruption certainly must have been a major reason behind the selection.
Although there was no way for volcanologists to be sure of this in the Nineties, the 1977 eruption was a sign that Nyiragongo is changing its style in response to tectonic forces in the surrounding East African Rift.
Confirmation of this worrisome fact would come in the form of similar eruptions in 2002 and 2021.
Killer lava
As 1977 began, what was probably the world’s biggest lava lake at that point had been roiling and fountaining away in Nyiragongo’s deep kettle-shaped summit crater for half a century or more. (Carn; Tedesco et al.)
Here are tourists sailing on Kivu and climbing Nyiragongo in 1976. Why do people always have to put their hand in hot springs at a volcano?
The lava lake was perched about a mile above the heads of close to 100,000 people who lived between the volcano and Lake Kivu, some ten miles away. These included 50,000 people in the city of Goma, on Kivu’s north shore, and 32,000 next door to Goma in the city of Gisenyi, Rwanda. (Durieux, 2002a; GVP; Komorowski et al.; Tedesco; Tedesco et al.; Zhujiworld)
Then Nyiragongo erupted outside its crater for the first time in recorded history. (Durieux, 2002)
The man being interviewed is a world-renowned expert on Nyiragongo. I have no idea what he is saying, but the eruption footage, which he probably took and may or may not be related somehow to the 1977 eruption, is impressive.
Shortly after 10 a.m. on January 10, 1977, huge fissures opened in Nyiragongo’s south flank (along with some small cracks to the north), and the entire lava lake drained out — most of it surging towards Lake Kivu in less than an hour. (Barriére et al.; Durieux, 2002a; GVP)
It did not reach Kivu and, somehow, spared Goma and Gisenyi — lava stopped just a mile from Goma’s airport runway — but the eruption devastated villages, killing 75 people. (Brown et al.; Durieux, 2002a; GVP; Tedesco)
Those of us who get our impressions of volcanoes from the movies don’t realize how shocking the death toll is.
Hollywood drama has its place, but in real life, lava flows aren’t usually that deadly. Although people may lose all their belongings to the molten rock, they can easily get out of its way most of the time. (Baxter et al.)
Things are different at Nyiragongo for two reasons (Baxter et al.; Komorowski et al.; Tedesco et al.):
- Geochemistry makes this volcano’s lava very runny.
- Nyiragongo’s upper slopes are steep, so the lava moves fast.
Eyewitnesses estimated the speed of those 1977 flows at up to 40 m.p.h. One village was hit just six minutes after the flanks opened up! (Durieux, 2002a)
That death toll of 75 people was the highest for any single lava flow in history up to that point. (Twenty-five years later, lava flows long enough to invade Goma would claim over a hundred lives.) (Brown et al.; Durieux, 2002a; Meredith et al.)
This is not a world record that anyone wants to see set.
However, volcanologists in the late 1980s and early 1990s had even more reasons for concern about Nyiragongo and its human neighbors.
An explosive cone field
While the 1977 disaster was this volcano’s first recorded eruption outside the summit crater, it was not the first one ever.
Nyiragongo is surrounded by miles of scoria cones and other landscape features formed by geologically recent explosive volcanism (some of it probably from magma entering waterlogged ground near Lake Kivu and causing steam-related, i.e., “phreatic” blasts). (Capaccioni et al.; Durieux, 2002a; Komorowski et al.; Tedesco; Tedesco et al.)
This explosive volcanic field around Nyiragongo extends into the city of Goma, but it has been quiet throughout historical times (which is why H. sapiens unwittingly settled down here in the first place).
With Nyiragongo’s change of behavior in 1977, geoscientists wondered if the field might wake up, too.
It was a possibility because most cones here line up with the local fissure system that parallels the East African Rift (foreshadowing!). New fractures in this system hosted the 1977 eruption. (Durieux, 2002a; Platz et al.; Santo et al.; Tedesco; Tedesco et al.)
Why shouldn’t they also reignite the field of volcanic cones?
Experts urgently needed to know how likely this was because the worst-case scenario for such an eruption is terrible — lava flows (and steam explosions) occurring without warning inside Goma, where now almost 700,000 people live.
Luckily, it has stayed dormant thus far, but uncertainty about the field’s eruption potential remains to this day.
As if that weren’t enough, a third hazard came to light during the 1980s.
Lake Kivu might explode
The rebirth of Nyiragongo’s lava lake in 1982 wasn’t an issue.
After fountaining forth, five years after the flank fissure floods, that new lava lake in the summit crater went quiet for most of the next twelve years. (GVP; Platz et al.)
So Nyiragongo appeared to be returning to business as usual.
The mid-1980s wake-up call instead came from volcano-related disasters elsewhere in Africa.
Two ordinary lakes “erupted”; that is, their dissolved load of carbon dioxide, which had percolated into the water from nearby volcanic systems, suddenly came out of solution when the lake’s internal layered structure shifted for limnological reasons.
When this happened, the lakes exploded — just like champagne explodes out of a shaken bottle during celebrations — but in a very unpleasant way.
Since carbon dioxide is heavier than air, the eruptive cloud ran along ground near each lake, suffocating 34 people at Lake Manoun in 1984 and more than 1,700 people at nearby Lake Nyos in 1986.
From 2016.
Manoun and Nyos are tiny compared to Lake Kivu, which contains 250 cubic kilometers of carbon dioxide and 55 cubic kilometers of methane. (Baxter et al.; Schmid et al.)
Thanks to local volcanoes, Lake Kivu is essentially a natural gas field.
Rwanda, whose western border runs along the lake just east of Goma and Nyiragongo, actually mines the methane for its national energy grid!
At 55 miles long, 30 miles wide, and up to almost 1,600 feet deep, “fizzy” Lake Kivu has plenty of storage capacity left. (Schmid et al.)
Still, there is so much dissolved gas down there right now that, if the entire lake “erupts” (i.e., overturns) — as it has done at least once before, according to the geological record (Balagizi et al.; Komorowski et al.) — Kivu could produce a carbon dioxide cloud more than 300 feet thick, plus whatever flammability methane might add in around the edges. (Baxter et al.; Schmid et al.; Wikipedia)
Even without fire, the gas cloud would asphyxiate millions of people living near this African Great Lake, along with their livestock and local wildlife.
In minutes.
Yes — “biblical.” But let’s keep Nyiragongo’s other, more probable hazards in mind, too: runny lava; that explosive cone field; and the volcano’s frequent activity.
In 1990, Tuttle et al. covered all the reasons for making Nyiragongo a Decade Volcano when they wrote (emphasis added):
The variety of volcano-related hazards which threaten the inhabitants in the Lake Kivu area (lava flows, explosive phreatic eruptions, and volcanic heating and overturn of deep lake waters) make a basic monitoring system essential . . . To save lives in the event of a dangerous eruption, all residents must know what is expected of them if a warning is sounded: which way to run, how far, and how long to stay away. This will require a massive public education effort.
Authorities and specialists in various fields did what they could:
- Zaire established the Goma Volcano Observatory in 1986. (Nyirabihogo; Ruch and Tedesco)
- Nyiragongo was listed as a Decade Volcano in 1991. (Wikipedia)
So far, so good.
But then in 1994 — at a very bad time, when there were a million refugees from the Rwandan genocide camped in the area and Goma’s population was soaring as villagers moved into town to escape rural unrest — Mount Nyiragongo’s lava lake woke up and started an impressive rise toward the crater rim. (Komorowski et al.)
Speaking of ‘biblical’…
Was Nyiragongo going to pour lava on these unfortunate people?
An emergency evaluation showed — correctly, as it turned out — that this was not likely to become a threat. The main volcanic hazard for refugees and local residents still was a repeat of the 1977 eruption. (Tedesco)
While life was tough for everyone in North Kivu back then, at least Nyiragongo did not have a flank eruption during the Rwandan crisis of 1993-1994 or for most of the subsequent regional fighting.
It waited until peace was in the air and other improvements were giving people a little hope for the first time in almost a decade.
Human tragedies
With Japanese financial help in 1995, the Goma Volcano Observatory moved into an old building that sat atop one of the scoria cones in town. Here, international researchers — including but not limited to a Belgian scientific consortium whose interest in the area goes back to colonial times — and Zairean technical staff monitored Nyiragongo with a seismic telemetry network. (Britannica; GVP; Pease; Smets et al.)
Unfortunately, Zaire was rapidly falling apart around them. In the mid to late 1990s, a massive civil war grew out of the Rwandan genocide, with Goma as a major hotspot. This soon developed into what Wikipedia calls ‘Africa’s first ‘world war.’ There was a second war, too.
While many countries were involved, much of the fighting was done in Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo (the country’s name from 1998 on).
All that Newhall could report for this Decade Volcano in his 1999 program summary was:
Seismic, tilt, EDM [electronic distance measuring], and thermal monitoring were increased in 1994, when the lava lake began to rise and threaten refugees from nearby Rwanda. Beginning in October 1996, escalating civil strife destroyed all stations and halted monitoring.
As bad as things got, the Congolese world did not end and good will was never completely extinguished in this troubled land.
Nyiragongo erupts, 2002 and 2021
By 2001, ceasefires and peace initiatives were underway. (Wikipedia)
As the region’s security and sociopolitical situation improved a bit, monitoring resumed at Nyiragongo (Carn), but Goma Volcano Observatory (GVO) staff did not have an easy time of it.
There wasn’t much of a remote monitoring network left, thanks to looters. (GVP; Kavotha et al.; Smets et al.)
Volcanologists do need data, but field trips were (and still are) rare because of funding problems and the presence of many armed partisan groups on and around Nyiragongo.
GVO workers, and occasionally, international volcanology teams, go up there when they can and take measurements in person.
Sometimes local staff workers get shot (Neiman, 2021), although their casualty rate isn’t nearly as high as that of the Virunga park rangers to whom Balagizi et al. dedicated their paper out of gratitude for the rangers’ protection and assistance in the field.
It’s dangerous, but special perks come with the Virunga ranger job, too:
In the early 2000s, some applause for GVO’s staff would have helped tremendously — or even a paycheck! (Clarke) — but local officials or residents rarely knew about or acknowledged the Goma Volcano Observatory’s existence. (Ruch and Tedesco)
Most of the 400,000 people living in Goma at the turn of this century were not prepared for volcanic trouble. They knew only too well war, corruption, violence and other crimes on a daily basis but had no personal experience or recollection of Nyiragongo’s 1977 eruption. (Clarke; Pouclet and Bram; Ruch and Tedesco; Tedesco et al.)
Few took the volcano’s hazards seriously, or GVO’s warnings of a seismic activity uptick in December 2001. (Ruch and Tedesco)
Authorities should have known better, but it isn’t clear that there was effective Congolese authority in and around Goma at this time. Neither were there any official contingency plans locally or through the United Nations peacekeeping mission. (Clarke; Ruch and Tedesco)
Then, on the morning of January 17, 2002 — twenty-five years, one week, and almost to the hour after its last eruption, and with just two working instruments on the mountain (Clarke) — Nyiragongo opened up again.
2002: Eruption and rifting
This was basically a repeat of 1977, with widening and extension of the old fissures (up to 11 miles long, compared to a maximum length of 6 miles in 1977), as well as some new fissures and lava outbreaks near Goma that not only divided the city into thirds like a big pie but also entered Lake Kivu and built a small lava delta on its north shore. (Allard et al.; Carn; GVP; Komorowski et al.)
The resulting human catastrophe, summarized here (Sections 3 and 4), is beyond the scope of this eBook.
Suffice to say that about a third of Goma International’s runway was destroyed (hindering quick access to the disaster zone by outside relief agencies and security forces), along with more than ten percent of the city, including its main business/commercial center. An estimated 120,000 people lost their homes. (Allard et al.; GVP; Komorowski et al.; Tedesco et al.)
Brown et al. put the death toll from lava at 127; this figure probably includes those caught in an explosion, per Allard et al., at a Goma gas depot that was surrounded by fast-moving lava. Meredith et al. count 47 deaths by lava and 60 to 100 in the gas depot explosion.
Almost 500 people were injured during the eruption. (Tedesco et al.)
While fourteen villages were also affected (GVP), 2002 was the first time — in history (Allard et al.) or since Mount Etna’s trashing of medieval Catania in 1669 (Komorowski et al.), depending on which source you consult — that a lava eruption had inflicted major damage on a big city, forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate. (Carn; GVP; Komorowski et al.; Ruch and Tedesco; Tedesco et al.)
Despite the concern that Tuttle et al. expressed in 1990, refugees in 2002 did not know “which way to run, how far, or how long to stay.”
Chaos and terror ruled. (Ruch and Tedesco)
Instinctively, despite the region’s ongoing ethnic tensions, political instability, and fighting, most people fled to Gisenyi and the Rwandan hills nearby.
Just twelve hours later — before the lava in Goma had cooled! — they began returning to their city after feeling unwelcome in Rwanda, although no organized humanitarian aid was up and running in Goma yet to provide them with the basic necessities of life. (Allard et al.; GVP; Ruch and Tedesco)
The worst news in geological terms was lava flowing into Kivu.
Would it destabilize the huge lake? (Allard et al.)
Emergency studies were done and, fortunately, the results were reassuring.
Lava had sunk into the lake to a depth of only about 260 feet — nowhere near the gas field, which starts at around 660 feet below the surface. (GVP)
This relatively small intrusion hadn’t even been able to seriously affect the Great Lake’s upper water stability (with only a 0.1° C warmup just nine miles from the lava delta). (Schmid et al.)
No one knows what might happen if lava ever does erupt through the lake bed (Smittarello et al.), but those 2002 findings suggested that the likeliest triggers for a Lake Kivu overturn/explosion might be a bigger, more concentrated heat source than the lava delta could provide, or a volcanic process of some sort that suddenly injects lots of magmatic gases into the deep-water gas field. (Schmid et al.)
That’s when things could get biblical in a hurry.
While these studies brought very good news, they didn’t explain what Lake Kivu actually did in 2002.
Immediately after the eruption and for about a month afterward, the water level rose on all shores — as much as 2-1/2 feet at Goma Harbor! (Allard et al.; GVP; Tedesco et al.)
This was weird, since no heavy rain had fallen and there was no flooding anywhere else.
Experts also noted two land-based peculiarities:
- The 2002 ground fissures were way too large and too numerous for the volume of lava erupted. (Tedesco et al.) Something else besides volcanism was going on here.
- Earthquakes got worse after the 2002 eruption instead of before it (typically, as we saw in the 2010 section of the Mount Merapi chapter, volcanic seismicity happens beforehand, while magma is breaking its way up to the surface). This intense post-eruption shaking at Nyiragongo brought down some buildings in Goma and Gisenyi. (GVP; Tedesco et al.)
Geoscientists soon realized why all this was happening (although it might not occur to us laypeople): Lava, while a contributor, wasn’t the main culprit behind those gaping fissures in Nyiragongo; the East African Rift broke them open in 1977 and then broadened them in 2002. (Komorowski et al.; Platz et al.; Pouclet and Bram; Smittarello et al.; Tedesco et al.)
And Lake Kivu’s water level hadn’t actually risen even an inch — the ground under Goma Harbor sank 2-1/2 feet!
Yes. Here’s how that works.
As any continental rift widens, its two sides move apart and the ground in between subsides (drops down), producing a rift valley.
Farther north, in the oldest part of the rift, things are closer to the “sink-or-swim” stage.
That’s an oversimplification, of course — such effects are intricate in the real world, especially in tectonically complex Africa — but you get the general idea.
Because it’s a geological process, rifting can be slow, in human terms.
Hundreds of millennia must pass before we’ll see wildebeest herds (or their equivalent) migrating over the Kivu savanna, pursued by charismatic cats or cat-like predators.
Geology does have some changes in its bag, though.
Sometimes rifting happens quickly. Friction along a fault might weaken, allowing movement; the regional stress field might change; Cthuthulu might come up for a visit — that and all sorts of highly technical geophysics are at work as a continent breaks up.
It’s possible that one of those “speedy” moments happened when extension of the East African Rift cracked Nyiragongo’s walls in the late 1970s and then widened those cracks and opened a few more in 2002.
The presence of a big, gassy lake of molten rock, pushing against summit crater walls in 1977 and again in 2002, was a factor, but rift movements probably triggered both eruptions. (Allard et al.; Komorowski et al.; Pouclet and Bram; Tedesco et al.)
Wait — there’s more.
Before, during, and for a month after the 2002 eruption, rift extension was intensively working in the basement, too, breaking through bedrock. Magma filled some of the resulting cracks, forming dikes that were at least 2 miles underground. (Biggs et al.; Smittarello et al.)
If the magma doesn’t have much gas in it — say, it’s from Nyiragongo and has been degassing through a lava lake for decades, it won’t fountain much if it reaches the surface and erupts. (And yes, that’s “billion” with a “b.” Some of those Canadian formations are among the oldest in the world.)
But were all of them that far down?
Starting in 2002, volcanologists looked at Nyiragongo’s extensive post-eruption network of fissures on its lower south flank; they analyzed lava samples and plotted earthquake epicenters (as well as possible, given the limited seismometer data).
The information hinted at a disturbing possibility: Nyiragongo’s eruption might well have come from two lava sources — the draining lava lake, of course, but perhaps also a deeper magma reservoir, connected to the surface by active dikes that fed those destructive and deadly lower flank fissure vents. (Tedesco et al.)
And there might be more of these fissures now hidden underneath Goma, dangerously close to Lake Kivu. (Tedesco et al.)
This needed to be looked into — fast.
In March 2002, a British-French scientific team made a number of high-priority recommendations on how to deal with this challenging volcano and reduce its risks (see Allard et al. for details).
Over the next twenty years, steps were taken on these and other suggestions, but progress was difficult in the face of the region’s chronic political and security instability, armed insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and epidemics of cholera, measles, and Ebola virus. (Boudoire et al.)
Meanwhile, up at the volcano’s summit crater, instead of waiting five years to return, as it did after the 1977 eruption, a new lava lake was in place, roiling and fountaining away, in two to six months. (GVP; Smittarello et al.)
Here it is in 2005.
Over the next 19 years, this lava lake would rise almost a thousand feet inside those kettle-shaped summit walls, made of rock that had been severely weakened in the 2002 eruption. (Barrière et al.; Burgi et al.; GVP; Wright and Flynn)
Tourists drawn to the lava lake from around 2017 on were a valuable source of information for GVO staff and other volcanologists. (GVP)
Then, on the evening of May 22, 2021, the walls broke. (Smittarello et al.)
2021: Eruption and other concerns
It caught everybody by surprise, including the Goma Volcano Observatory staff.
The sociopolitical situation was (and is) very complicated — to start on details, check Holland, both Neiman articles, Nyirabihogo, Pease, and Wikipedia in the reference list — and at the time, many blamed GVO for missing the eruption’s precursors.
But now we know that there was no warning. (Boudoire et al.; Smittarello et al.)
One moment, the world’s biggest lava lake was churning away in that summit crater; the next moment, it was pouring through old fissures in the volcano’s south flank, as well as from at least two fissures lower down. (GVP; Smittarello et al.)
GVO personnel could only confirm the eruption the same way a million other people in harm’s way did — from the sudden red glow on the mountain, less than 40 minutes after GVO seismometers first showed an unusual signal from Nyiragongo, as one flow headed towards Gisenyi and the other one moved on Goma. (Smittarello et al.)
It didn’t reach Gisenyi, but lava was in North Goma in a few hours, eventually stopping just a few hundred yards from Goma Airport. (Boudoire et al.)
Even now, 2-1/2 years later, it is difficult to confirm the death toll. Meredith et al. note a minimum of 31 fatalities (mostly in traffic accidents, per Wikipedia), while Smittarello et al. report about 220 dead or missing, more than 750 injured, and some 6,000 households made homeless.
In terms of property, the brief 2021 eruption, according to Smittarello et al., destroyed:
- 8 schools
- 3 health centers
- A dozen churches
- Several key infrastructure elements, electrical and telecom facilities
- The largest water tank supplying North Goma, affecting almost 550,000 people.
The rock formations do not hold ground water. As I recall, the Virunga rangers repaired the tank. Until then, Lake Kivu and rain were their only alternatives. Of note, just one gallon of water weighs over 8 pounds. Also, it’s never good to drink untreated lake water in an area prone to epidemics.
It was very bad, and yet an unnamed senior UN official probably wasn’t completely callous in telling a New Humanitarian reporter in 2021 that the Nyiragongo crisis was the least of their problems, given the scope of other troubles in the country that have already displaced a million people. (Neiman, 2021a)
That assessment of Nyiragongo’s impact could change, but not necessarily for the better.
The May 2021 eruption only lasted six hours, but — just as in 2002 — intense earthquakes after the eruption lasted for about ten days. (Boudoire et al.; Smittarello et al.)
If anyone has reported apparent changes in Lake Kivu’s water level during/after those earthquakes, I haven’t found it yet.
But everyone noted what Smittarello et al. describe to other scientists as “the gradual southward propagation of a shallow dike from the Nyiragongo edifice underlying below Goma airport on May 23-24, then Goma and Gisenyi city centers on May 25-26 and finally below the northern part of Lake Kivu on May 27.”
It was impossible to miss, either on satellite radar imagery —
This is how looks like a dike intrusion #NyiragongoEruption #Sentinel1 #DRCongo pic.twitter.com/78NtBOm5Zr
— Adriano Nobile (@j_p_joule) May 26, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
— or at ground level, where a line of fissures opened on either side of the dike — in the Goma and Gisenyi areas, respectively, and the 1,500-foot-wide ground in between these new fissures subsided a bit. (Boudoire et al.; Smitarello et al., 2022)
Then seismicity quieted down.
The top of this dike is less than 1,500 feet below the surface. No lava has erupted yet, but the Goma-side fissure system is hotter, while on the Gisenyi side, fissuring is more severe. (Boudoire et al.; Smitarello et al., 2022)
And now, just a little way under the Kivu lake bed is an excellent point source of heat, larger than the 2002 lava delta, though it might not contain much gas (thanks to volcanic degassing before the dike opened up).
Nyiragongo potentially could zoom from “least” to “Number One” on the UN’s sadly extensive list of crises. And, remotely possible, it might conceivably keep going all the way on to “biblical.”
Lava returned to the summit crater in late September 2021, and another lava lake has formed. (GVP).
And that’s where we are today, as far as I know.
This combination of hazard and an incredibly complex set of human crises is why I call Nyiragongo the most dangerous volcano in the world.
Stats
Location:
1.52° S, 29.25° E, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The GVP Volcano Number is 223030.
Nearby Population:
Per the Global Volcanism Program (GVP) website:
- Within 5 km (3 miles): 2,416.
- Within 10 km (6 miles): 31,145.
- Within 30 km (19 miles): 1,006,436.
- Within 100 km (62 miles): 9,087,529.
Current Status:
Yellow.
Biggest recorded event:
The city of Goma is built on the huge Buyinga lava flow. This happened 700-800 years ago and covers an area of almost 300 square miles.
Monitoring:
The Goma Volcano Observatory. (French and some English)
Nyiragongo is in Toulouse VAAC’s area of responsibility.
Featured image: Nyiragongo from Goma Airport, by Alexei Shevelev via Wikimedia, GFDL.
Sources:
Allard, P.; Baxter, P.; Halbwachs, M.; and Komorowski, J. C. 2002. The January 2002 eruption of Nyiragongo volcano (Dem. Repub. Congo) and related hazards: observations and recommendations. Final Report of the French–British Team, Paris.
Balagizi, C. M.; Kies, A.; Kasereka, M. M.; Tedesco, D.; and others. 2018. Natural hazards in Goma and the surrounding villages, East African Rift System. Natural Hazards, 93(1): 31-66. In the image for our chapter, Virunga Park rangers contemplate Nyiragongo’s lava lake, while stars shine overhead. Balagizi et al. dedicated their paper to the many rangers who have given their lives defending the park.
Barrière, J.; d’Oreye, N.; Smets, B.; Oth, A.; Delhaye, L.; and others. 2022. Intra‐Crater Eruption Dynamics at Nyiragongo (DR Congo), 2002–2021. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 127(4): e2021JB023858.
Baxter, P.; Allard, P.; Halbwachs, M.; Komorowski, J.; and others. 2003. Human health and vulnerability in the Nyiragongo volcano eruption and humanitarian crisis at Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. Acta Vulcanologica, 14(1/2): 109.
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Flight To Wonder 