Into the volcano: why glamourise the danger?

Into the volcano: why glamourise the danger?

Volcanologists wearing hard hats at Yassur several years ago. Take note BBC. (Photo @volcanna) 

Volcanoes are exciting things to see. Amazing cultures exist on their slopes. They threaten ways of life around them.

Hence, they make great TV – but I was disappointed with the first episode of BBC’s Into the Volcano.

Here’s why:

1) They weren’t wearing hard hats!!

Most volcanologists wear hard hats, even on volcanoes that haven’t been recently active. It’s now common practice, much like wearing a helmet whilst cycling or on a building site. I thought that these days all volcanologists wore them (especially when close to an exploding vent!). Even the smallest of ballistics from an explosion can kill someone. I have spoken at length to some of those who helped rescue survivors following the Galeras 1993 eruption – want an opinion on hard hats…ask them!

2) I question the risk/reward of collecting the lava bomb ‘fresh sample’

Did you know that there are actually quite a few volcanologists from Vanuatu, including many disaster management professionals, many of whom I often see at international conferences. I contacted them to ask why they didn’t appear in the programme. This was part of their reply:

“what was programmed to be shown by scientists for this show is not real and is against what we have been preaching to communities here, we educate the communities to take care of themselves not to throw themselves into the volcano!!!! Therefore we [Ni-Vanuatu scientists] ended up withdrawing ourselves from this filming campaign because what is being shown is not real, we do not go into the crater to collect data!!!!”

Maybe someone can give me a wholly convincing reason of why collecting a barely warm ‘fresh' sample was worth it, compared to the other bombs that they might have collected that were much nearer?

3) Volcanoes are dangerous enough – we don’t need to glamourise the risk

Volcanoes are really dangerous. They kill people. They force communities to change their ways of life to avoid potential harm. They also kill volcanologists and tourists who visit them. I’m very unimpressed with the producers for glamourising the danger, showing scientists collecting rocks without even the most modest health and safety equipment. I’m also sad that the scientists made this choice.

Most volcanologists work to reduce volcanic risk by increasing our knowledge of them through science and learning how to work with people living near them. Much of what was in this programme was laddish behaviour that I would expect to see (and admittedly sometimes enjoy) from the chaps at Top Gear.

BBC Into the volcano went to a location with the intention of doing something that is immensely dangerous, where the local volcanologists didn’t want to be involved, for limited scientific reward; this hasn’t done much to enhance the image of volcanology as a science that primarily aims to reduce risk.

"I knew it all along..." - avoiding hindsight bias after eruptions

“I knew it all along…” – as volcanologists, we need to be careful not to fall into the many traps that come from retrospectively looking at and indeed commenting on crises or catastrophes such as the recent eruption of Ontake.

There is a fantastic book you might want to read: Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman, which synthesises a huge body of research about how and why we make the decisions we make, particularly when it comes to risk and uncertainty. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with Kahneman’s papers, notably the 1976 “Heuristics and Biases” work with Amos Taversky. Others will be familiar with some of the work by his former PhD student Baruch Fischhoff on (among other things) risk communication*. I was planning on writing a short review of Thinking fast and slow from the perspective of what volcanologists can learn from cognitive psychology, but the eruption in Japan has got me thinking about one particular cognitive trap – the ‘hindsight bias’ or the ‘I knew it all along principle’, first investigated by Baruch Fischoff.

The key message is that as a group we must be very careful that when looking back at past eruptions, particularly when eyeballing monitoring data post-hoc, that we don’t make pronouncements about “missed warning signs” because we interpret things with the benefit of hindsight.

It turns out that it is very difficult for a human mind to reconstruct what we thought about something once we adopt a new belief about it. It leads us to believe that we understand the past, overstating the accuracy of the beliefs that we held (or would have held) at the time, as these are corrupted by what we now know. Kahneman suggests that if we are surprised by an unpredicted event, we adjust our view of the world to accommodate that surprise. Thus when we look back, we forget the state of mind or understanding that we had at the time, and simply think about what we know now.

What hindsight bias can do is lead us to interpret the quality of a decision (such as the recommendation for some kind of mitigative action) on whether the outcome was positive or negative, rather than whether or not the decision making process was sound. This bias leads us to a) overstate our expertise post-hoc, b) neglect the role of luck (or lack of it) in a particular outcome and c) suppress any memory of the effect that uncertainty will have had on our or other people’s interpretations/decisions.

Our natural tendency is to criticise decision making on risk issues when an outcome is negative, and neglect to recognise or praise decision-making when the outcome was good; this ‘outcome bias’ (a facet of hindsight) affects our interpretation of past events far more than we might realise. When considering what might happen at a volcano, a simplistic explanation is that we can consider the probability of an eruption happening given some monitoring signal [P(A|B)]. But, after an event has occurred…it’s quite different! It’s no longer an event that could happen (a chance or likelihood) but a certainty. So when we re-interpret past events, hindsight bias makes it very difficult for us in our present state of certainty, to acknowledge the attendant uncertainty before the eruption occurred. We find it very difficult to reconstruct or understand what our past belief would have been.

Kahneman suggests that these biases make it “almost impossible to evaluate a decision in terms of the beliefs that were reasonable when the decision was made”.

In fact, research suggests that the worse or more shocking a catastrophe is, the more acute hindsight bias becomes (think back to reactions in the aftermath of 9/11). This – in the case of Ontake – is reflected by language such as “failed to forecast” used in many** news articles.

So what does this mean for volcanologists in the wake of a tragedy such as the eruption of Ontake? Well, the first thing we should be aware of is that our opinions post-hoc, about what monitoring data may or may not have shown, or what decisions should or shouldn’t have been made, are prone to huge biases. So, we should be very careful what we voice about these events…particularly to the media! If we are going to retrospectively look at something, let’s do it in a robust and sensible way, such as the work by TheaHinks, Willy Aspinall and others on the 1976 eruption of Soufriére Guadeloupe.

Another point is that from afar – not being a Japanese volcanologist working on Ontake – the availability of information for us to be able make an informed opinion is surely very limited (what Kahneman refers to as the ‘availability bias’ or the ‘what you see is all there is to know principle’). So, just as we should be very cautious about talking about ‘missed signs’, we should also be aware that when we say things like ‘it’s impossible/very difficult to predict such eruptions’ or ‘there were no precursors’, our opinions are perhaps based on very sparse evidence (of course we can draw on other examples from other cases – but hopefully you get my point). In essence, maybe we could do with waiting for a little more information before passing comment.

Hopefully you get the idea that if you haven’t yet read Thinking fast and slow, then please do. It’s very difficult to overcome the various heuristics and biases that affect our opinions and decisions (even Kahneman admits to relentlessly struggling with this) …but being aware of them is an excellent first step.

 * Want to know more about the science of risk communication - read this excellent paper by Nick Pidgeon and Baruch Fischhoff 

** Not all articles/commentaries fall foul of the hindsight bias -  if you want to read some measured and not overly opinionated articles by volcanologists about the Ontake eruption – you might want to look here (Becky Williams) and here (Eruptions blog).

Sinabung & dangerous lava domes

Sinabung in Sumatra has been erupting for the last few months, prompting regular evacuations of people living near to it.

(Incandescent lava dome, flow deposit and burning vegetation - Reuters/YT Haryono)

Currently, the style of activity is producing a lava dome: where viscous (less fluid) magma builds up on top of the vent. The lava, although seemingly solid, can have a lot of gas trapped inside at high pressures, and is also still very hot. Sometimes chunks of it fall off the dome, these blocks or slabs break apart, releasing the gas, mixing with and heating the surrounding air, forming pyroclastic flows and surges.

Depending on where the lava is being emplaced on the volcano, material may fall off in different directions, thus the areas most at risk can change quite quickly. Dome building eruptions often produce a LOT of flows - the size of which can often follow a power law relationship: many small events, with a diminishing number of larger events*. Lava domes make both managing and communicating the risk very difficult. Often people are evacuated in the anticipation of larger flows, which may not happen for a while (if at all). After a time of small flows, many people naturally want to return to their homes. Then they may be evacuated again, and subsequently return. This process can occur many times, and ultimately people can become very reluctant to leave.

Unfortunately, this kind of relationship is very different to grasp.  In Montserrat, 1997, this process (among other factors) occured - the danger perhaps obvious to the scientists, but people became used to where flows were going and how big they were. Many thought that they understood the speed of them, and unfortunately thought they could escape in time. On June 25th 1997, people on the slopes of the Soufrière Hills, in areas that they were advised not to visit, were caught off guard (despite numerous warnings from scientists) by a sudden increase in the magnitude and energy of the flows during a partial dome collapse, which lead to a tragic loss of life*. 

This has unfortunately been the case in many similar eruptions, from Soufrière Hills Volcano to Merapi. An added danger is that apart from larger flows related to small collapses...lava domes can also produce large vulcanian explosions - which create even more energetic flows, that can sweep down all sides of the volcano at once.

The key thing is to not expect a volcano to always behave in the same way, but rather to think "what could it do to surprise me?".

Despite the fact that the Indonesian scientists are very capable volcanologists and communicators, we just have to hope that the eruption calms down again.




*Loughlin, S. & Baxter, P., 2002. Eyewitness accounts of the 25 June 1997 pyroclastic flows and surges at Soufrière Hills Volcano, Montserrat, and implications for disaster mitigation. Geological Society of London. 
*Loughlin, S., Calder, E. & Clarke, A., 2002. Pyroclastic flows and surges generated by the 25 June 1997 dome collapse, Sonfière Hills Volcano, Montserrat. Geological Society of London.