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Rural America's Red Ribbons
Features:
Tale of the Turtleman
Art Under Pressure
Anticipating Madam President
 Along a Belt of Fire
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Related links: For more information on volcanoes in El Salvador, visit the Smithsonian Institute's Global Volcanism Program on the Web at www.volcano.si.edu/gvp/.
For more information on this research, e-mail Dina Lopez at lopezd@ohio.edu. click to enlarge
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Kelli Whitlock The Early Years
Born in 1770, Izalco volcano is El Salvador's youngest. It was so active in its early years, it was nicknamed the "lighthouse of the Pacific."  return to top
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Kelli Whitlock
Lure of the Land
Geologist Dina Lopez has long been fascinated by volcanoes, having grown up in the shadow of San Salvador volcano in El Salvador.
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Kelli Whitlock
At Work, At Play
Living in the shadows of an active volcano, such as San Vicente in eastern El Salvador, is commonplace. Fertile soil makes the area ripe for crops and the hot water beneath the ground is a draw for geothermal plants.
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Kelli Whitlock
A Look Inside
In 2001, a group of teenage hikers were trapped inside the crater of San Salvador volcano when an earthquake destroyed paths that led to the bottom. The paths have not been rebuilt. return to top return to top return to top click to enlarge
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Kelli Whitlock
Making Waves
Extreme temperatures escape from deep within the Earth through vents called fumaroles. This one near the Guatemalan border is one of the region's largest. Children play on a soccer field just a few hundred feet from the pit of bubbling mud, clay, and water. return to top click to enlarge
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Kelli Whitlock
On Land, In Water
Lake Ilopango is one of eight volcanic lakes in El Salvador — and one under study by Lopez and her colleagues. San Salvador volcano looms in the distance. return to top return to top return to top | | Along a Belt of Fire
In late July, Ohio University geologist Dina Lopez traveled to El Salvador to collect data on volcanoes in her homeland. Editor Kelli Whitlock went along for the journey. Excerpts from her journal appear in italics.
by Kelli Whitlock
Personal Journal, July 18: Arrived at the airport in San Salvador at 11:30 a.m. local time. Luggage did not make the trip. While waiting in line at immigration, heard music. "New Kid in Town" by the Eagles. Seemed appropriate. Heavy presence of police - heavily armed police. Met Dina outside at 1 p.m. Her brother José drove us to the city. Traffic was very fast, very defensive. There were no lane markings and the road was still damaged in places from the 2001 earthquake. Ate lunch at a pizza shop while watching ER with Spanish subtitles. A man with a shotgun - a hired guard - stood watch outside the restaurant. Checked into my hotel. Armed guards there, too. Spent afternoon touring the city with Dina and her sister Marina. Drove up San Salvador volcano. Breathtaking.
There is a story that Dina Lopez likes to tell. The Tourist Institute of El Salvador wanted to build a hotel on the top of Cerro Verde, a dormant volcano in western El Salvador. People would come for the vista: a close look at one of the mountain's active sisters, Izalco, which lay less than half a mile away. The volcano, the nation's youngest, produced beautiful sprays of fiery liquid called lava fountains, a spectacular view no hotel in the country could match.
So, the institute built the hotel, and on the day it opened, Izalco went to sleep.
The moral to the story? If you want to quiet a volcano, build a hotel.
While the tale is a favorite, Lopez knows that man cannot still these earthen caldrons. The great mountains will erupt at their own pleasure, releasing ash, rock, gas, and lava that block the sun, cover the ground, and obliterate the arrogance of mere mortals who would build anything nearby.
History proves their might: On August 29, 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius rumbled to life in southern Italy, burying the city of Pompeii under 20 feet of ash and volcanic debris. Nearly 2,000 years later, much of the city remains encased in a rocky tomb.
More than 14,000 people died following Japan's greatest volcano disaster in 1792 at Unzen volcano. Most were killed by a tsunami caused by the eruption.
In 1980, Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted with such force, it triggered the largest recorded mudslide in Earth's history. Some 520 million tons of ash darkened the sky in Spokane 250 miles away.
The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubu in the Philippines was so massive, volcanic material was shot into the Earth's stratosphere over the North Pole. Scientists later determined the blast weakened the protective ozone layer above the Earth's northern-most point.
After two years of small eruptions, the Soufrière Hills volcano in southern Montserrat exploded in 1997, leaving much of the island uninhabitable, forcing 8,000 of the 12,000 residents to abandon their country. The West Indies mountain is still erupting today.
The destruction recorded in this geological history is familiar to Lopez, a geologist at Ohio University and a Salvadoran native. Lopez grew up at the knee of San Salvador volcano, a slump-shouldered mountain that casts a cautious shadow over the nation's capital. So, when she decided to pursue a career as a scientist, it seemed natural that she one day would set her researcher's eye on volcanoes.
San Salvador is one of many such geological wonders upon which millions earn a living, build their homes, and grow the coffee, corn, and sugar cane that are El Salvador's top agricultural exports. Most volcanoes here are lush, green mountains covered with trees and fertile soil, large, but not too steep to provide a solid foundation for crops and buildings. Only the barren peaks, covered with molten rock too acidic to support plant life, hint at the smoldering chambers below.
Lopez appreciates a volcano's beauty - above and beneath the surface. Especially beneath the surface. She has tremendous respect for the water and gases that churn deep within a volcano - called a hydrothermal system. Studies suggest that levels of sulfur dioxide, radon, and carbon dioxide are good measures of a volcano's activity. If monitors detect a sharp increase in these gases - and also record significant seismic activity - it could mean that an eruption is likely in the near future. Sulfur dioxide emissions also offer a hint of what's to come: If SO2 increases to high levels, it usually means there is new molten rock, called magma, in the volcano's chambers. These predictions don't include a specific time or date or tell geologists just how severe an eruption might be, but the warnings can give governments time to prepare and some idea of what to expect.
This sort of warning isn't possible in El Salvador. To get accurate data, scientists must first create a profile of a volcano - collect base gas levels, track normal temperatures, etc. But regular monitoring of volcanoes has been a spotty activity in this Central American country. During the 1980s, the nation's civil war made such studies too dangerous. Skirmishes between the nation's right-wing army and left-wing guerillas were played out on and around the volcanoes. Funds for equipment and trained personnel that could have advanced geological studies were instead set aside for military use. Today, resources remain scarce. Much of the equipment needed must be donated or borrowed from other countries. Travel remains dangerous in some areas of the country.
These are challenges Lopez has chosen to face. How could she not? Two of her sisters and a brother live in one of the subdivisions built on San Salvador volcano. She can't bear the thought of losing them to an unexpected eruption that didn't have to be unexpected.
So, the scientist has embarked on a project to create a geological profile of volcanoes in her homeland. She's joined forces with researchers from the Institute of Technology and Renewable Energy in Spain and with scientists at the University of El Salvador - where she earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1975. The team analyzes gas, soil, and water samples, looking for traits that distinguish one volcano from another.
"At this point, basically all the volcanoes in El Salvador and most of Central America don't have a background story. We don't have a basis to know what is normal for them," says the 51-year-old associate professor of geological sciences. "Every volcano has its own character, and what is normal for one may not be normal for another. The investigations we are doing are oriented to that."
Her work also assists those involved in energy exploration: One-fourth of the country's energy needs are met by geothermal power. As the nation's population continues to grow (there were 1.5 million residents when Lopez was a child; now there are 6 million), so does the demand for electricity. To keep up with the pace, power companies must find more thermal energy sources. Lopez's research can help them do that.
Lopez travels to El Salvador about twice a year to do research and visit family. In between trips, one of her collaborators, Tomas Soriano, a professor of physics at the University of El Salvador, analyzes data collected at geochemical stations positioned around the country. The machines monitor changes in carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and radon in the atmosphere and soil and feed the readings electronically to computers in Soriano's lab. But the machines they have aren't enough. They need more.
Personal Journal, July 19: We arrived in the city of San Miguel about 1:30 p.m. Although the drive was hot, loud, and dirty, the view was spectacular. San Miguel volcano is perfectly shaped - steep sides and flat top. The monitoring station that tracks gas levels is on the side of the volcano, although not close to the top. Dina says the volcano usually has a constant plume of steam coming from its crater. The wind today carried it away from us and I couldn't see it. When I turned my back on San Miguel to look over the valley and city below, the sight left me breathless. Volcanoes jut upward, punctuating the horizon as a reminder that although we are on the Earth for a short time, these mountains live for centuries. And they do live. Their breath is the clouds. Their veins and arteries pulse with hot magma. They raise their chins to the sky and pour out their hearts with soul-shaking groans. When a volcano speaks, the world around it stops. It is not something to be ignored. But we forget that. Cities that attract thousands camp at the mountain's feet. To them, San Miguel is only a mountain with fertile soil, a foundation for crops and the income that comes with that farm work. The volcano is an attractive backdrop to what often is a harsh existence.
There is an undeniable romantic and mythical attachment to volcanoes. Early Christians believed lava came from the fires of hell and that volcanic groans were in fact the screams of the damned. Greek and Roman mythology claimed volcanoes were either tombs for banished gods or homes to those with the power to make the earth rumble and turn rock into fire. Many cultures around the world thought volcanic activity was a punishment from a supernatural being. They offered human sacrifices to appease these gods. To be selected as a sacrificial offering was considered a high honor.
Centuries later, the wonder of volcanoes persists, aided in part by filmmakers and authors who create such celluloid fantasies as a volcano beneath Los Angeles and lava that courses through subway tunnels. Indeed, Hollywood would have us believe that a volcano is all about the lava, the river of fiery material that pushes its way to the top of a volcano's opening and spills over its sides. But that is only part of it, and, as Lopez is quick to point out, not the most destructive part. In one type of eruption - one often shown in films - volcanoes spill lava over nearby ground. Gases in the lava bubble and are released into the atmosphere without much fuss. There is damage, of course, but it often is confined to the lands adjacent to the volcano. But with a cataclysmic eruption - such as the type that buried Pompeii and took 1,300 feet off the roof of Mount St. Helens - there usually is no lava flow, only a massive explosion. The gases expand rapidly, sending ash and pieces of magmatic rock called pyroclastics into the air.
Volcanoes also can have ongoing activity, sending plumes of steam into the sky each day. There are several of these in El Salvador, a small nation about the size of Massachusetts. The country may be just one notch on the Belt of Fire, a circle of volcanoes and fault zones that surround the Pacific Ocean, but it's a geographically interesting notch. Volcanoes in Central America sit about 16 miles from each other, making it one of the highest-density regions on Earth. El Salvador is included in that area, with an estimated 25 volcanoes and eight volcanic lakes.
Lopez's favorite is San Miguel, a volcano that looms 6,988 feet over a city of the same name near the Honduras border. More than 150,000 people live in that city; another 100,000 are within the volcano's reach. The slopes of San Miguel are lined with some of the richest, most fertile soil in the country. Coffee plants, decorated with small, green java beans, stretch in long rows around the mountainside. Farmers work these fields, which were plowed on one of the country's most active volcanoes.
One of the monitoring stations Lopez and Soriano use is locked in a cage behind a house on a coffee plantation about midway up San Miguel. Like the other remote stations, the equipment measures the amount of gases in the soil, which Lopez says can be used to monitor fluxes coming from the hydrothermal and magmatic environment. They've been tracking these data for about a year, with the hope that the numbers would point them in the right direction for future monitoring.
"In San Miguel, one thing we have found is that the diffused gases are not expelled at the top of the volcanic edifice, but mainly through the slopes. The top of the edifice is thicker, more impermeable," Lopez says. "This is important in terms of understanding how gases here are diffusing. It tells us where we can gather the best information."
On an active volcano such as San Miguel, collecting the best information is vital. In 1976, San Miguel awoke from a six-year slumber to spout lava fountains inside its crater. Since then, it has occasionally blown some ash into the air, most of which remained near the volcano's cone. But according to the Smithsonian Institute's Global Volcanism Program, volcanic tremors, earthquakes, and gaseous emissions were recorded earlier this year. Though the activity was said to be in the normal range for this volcano, the country's geological survey department announced it would install more monitoring stations.
The attention is valuable, for sure. Constant vigil over the hydrothermal systems beneath San Miguel volcano, such as the work Lopez and her collaborators do, could help predict a massive volcanic event. It's frustrating work, at times. The equipment they do have breaks or stops sending data for some unknown reason. The volcano's plume offers an excellent opportunity to measure gases being emitted from the crater, but the abundance of these gases can make this too hazardous. Then, there's also the problem of equipment.
"If a volcano has a plume, we also like to measure the level of sulfur dioxide in the plume," Lopez says. "The fluxes tell you if there is new magma in the magmatic chamber. But the equipment to make that measurement is very expensive."
In fact in all of Central America, only one research group has this equipment - one in Guatemala who received the device as a gift from Canada.
Personal Journal, July 20: After a full day of data collection yesterday, we drove last night in the darkness and rain to the Berlin Geothermal Field about 40 miles away that rests on the side of another volcano named Tecapa. There are houses here that the geothermal power plant allows some visitors to use. Last night, I slept on a volcano. Today's work began at 5 a.m. First stop, a spot within the geothermal plant on Tecapa called a fumarole - a big hole in the ground that emits steam filled with gases from deep within the Earth. There, we measured temperatures and radon levels. Both were high. We traveled up Tecapa and over the rim of the volcano, down into its crater. The last eruption of this volcano occurred before records of such events were kept. This volcano is thought to be dormant, but there still are gases being emitted. A sulfur lagoon sat in the center of the crater. Dina says it's a tourist destination. There's a school inside the crater, and a soccer field. Soccer is immensely popular here and children will play wherever they can find a flat piece of land. I am struck by how people build a life in El Salvador - in, on, and around volcanoes, some of which are inactive, some active. They're no more than mountains with good soil to the people here. That isn't to say that they don't respect them. They just don't seem to fear them.
Guidebooks for El Salvador list Tecapa as a dead volcano. Lopez isn't quite so sure. Steam billows from collapsed wells on the grounds of the Berlin geothermal power plant on the volcano, which stands at 5,226 feet. The wells now serve as vents, fumaroles that the locals call "thundermakers."
It is late July when Lopez and Soriano visit Thundermaker No. 6, a large fumarole at the base of a green hillside overlooking Sihuatepec, a volcano that exhausted its magma source long ago. It is hot and hazy by 7 a.m. The area smells of rotten eggs, the trademark odor of sulfur dioxide. Lopez has an unexplainable affection for the smell. Soriano carries a Pylon AB5 radon monitor from the truck - a rectangular box with a cylindrical Lucas cell connected to a pump, a clear plastic tube, and a long metal spike, which the pair use to measure radon. Lopez inserts the spike into a patch of earth near Thundermaker No. 6. Soriano works the pump to create suction. Gases are pulled from the soil and sent into the cell. They must wait 12 minutes for the machine to calculate the concentration of radon. The levels are high today. So is the temperature. Thundermaker No. 6 is spouting off nearly 300-degree steam. Lopez is concerned, but not alarmed.
"We didn't have measurements of radon from this site before the 2001 earthquake, and this spot is close to the epicenter," Lopez says. "It could be that fracturing produced by the earthquakes has increased the radon levels. But this doesn't mean an eruption is going to happen here. We just need to keep monitoring the site."
Personal Journal, July 22: Visited San Salvador volcano to take radon measurements and collect soil samples. Radon was normal. Hot and muggy by 9 a.m. From inside the crater of the old part of the volcano, I could see a grove of orange-roofed houses built into the slope of a hill already scarred by an earlier landslide. When I asked Dina about it, she shook her head. Those houses would never stand up to a landslide, she lamented. Also went to see the crater of the younger part of San Salvador. The crater is about half a mile in diameter and 1,600 feet deep. An awesome sight. During the 2001 quake, a group of teenagers who had hiked down into the crater became trapped when the trails were shaken loose from the mountain. One had a cell phone and was able to call for help. There are no more trails into the crater. Went to the other side of the volcano in the afternoon to see the lava flow from the last eruption in 1917. It's a slope of black rock that won't support anything green for hundreds of years.
Volcanic eruptions are often accompanied - or preceded - by an earthquake that shakes hillsides so violently, they lose their grip and come crashing down to the valley below in a deadly rush of dirt, rocks, trees, and buildings. In January 2001, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake rattled much of El Salvador to its core. Landslides killed hundreds throughout the country, including entire families living along and below a hillside near the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador.
The memory of this tragedy marks Lopez's face as she offers a tour of the city. Scientists have warned of the dangers of building on areas susceptible to landslides. Some politicians make attempts to prevent such housing and business developments, but often are outnumbered by those who stand to profit from the structures.
Such was the case when a developer submitted a proposal to build a subdivision in the eastern side of the city. When the developer approached the city for permission to build these homes, the mayor rejected the proposal, aware of the fault that lay beneath the very ground the developer claimed was prime real estate. The country's central government overruled the mayor's decision. The homes now house hundreds of families. Politics has long had a heavy hand in such matters, though most agree the influence is not as imposing today as it was during the country's civil war, which began in 1980 following a decade of government rule that put the military in control of the people and created death squads to silence those who would object.
Indeed, it was a fearful time, says Lopez, whose studies were interrupted for two years when the university was closed in 1972. Five years later, she traveled to America, where she completed a master's degree in physics (her thesis was on seismology) at Virginia Tech. More than anything, she wanted to go home to put these newly acquired scientific skills to use. So, when she was offered a teaching job in 1979 at the then-reopened university, she took it. One year later, the battles of the 1970s turned to an all-out civil war, and the army closed the university again.
During the 1980s, resources dried up. Lopez couldn't do research because she had no equipment and no confidence that she would be safe in the field. It wasn't until 1992 that peace returned to El Salvador, with the signing of the 1992 Accords of Chapultepec, a peace agreement that resulted in a reduction in the military and the disbanding of the National Guard and Treasury Police, which many believed were behind the death squads. Like so many other Latin American countries, poverty rages today in El Salvador. In July, the lowest-grade gasoline was $1.85 a gallon. Prices at supermarkets are as high as those in America. Federal law requires employers to pay their workers a minimum wage of about $5 a day, but most don't earn even that. The birth rate rises almost every year; infant mortality rises with it. Access to health care and education are sorely limited.
And the rich volcanic soil upon which many Salvadorans earn their living could slip away without warning, destroying the crops they work, their homes, and, quite possibly, their lives. There is little Lopez can do about the other challenges her countrymen and women face. But this one is something she can address.
After the civil war ended, Lopez began thinking of plans for a research project in El Salvador. She began the work soon after joining the faculty at Ohio University in 1996. At first, her studies focused on Ilopango Lake, a large volcanic lake near the capital city. Later, she and her collaborators in El Salvador and Spain began studies of San Salvador volcano, which towers 6,211 feet to the west of the capital city. Some scientists believe volcanoes erupt with some regularity - every 1,000 years, every 100 years, etc. Using Carbon-14 dating techniques, geologists date the organic matter in between the layers of volcanic rock. Each layer is older than the last and yields dates for eruptions throughout history, allowing scientists to figure out how often a volcano might erupt. Other studies of San Salvador volcano suggest it erupts about every 82 years. By that calculation, the volcano was due for a major eruption in 1999.
Though there have been no signs of such volatile activity, Lopez and her collaborators are keeping a close watch on the levels of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. In 1999, Lopez and her collaborators completed a survey of CO2 on San Salvador volcano and Ilopango. In findings presented at a 1999 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Lopez reported that CO2 levels at the volcano were higher than those at Ilopango. But data collected during the trip in July suggest the lake's levels may be rising. She hopes to return to El Salvador before the end of the year for more studies.
Personal Journal, July 23: Left at 7 a.m. for Ahuachapan Geothermal Field in western El Salvador near the Guatemalan border. On our way to see a large fumarole on Laguna Verde volcano, came across a truckload of police. Robbers had been spotted on the road. We turned back, drove to the plant, and arranged to have two armed guards accompany us into the field. The fumarole we visited resembled a geyser. The heat from deep within the Earth boiled the water, which rose to the surface in giant waves, splashing a reddish-brown mixture of clay and dirt all around. There was a soccer field just a few feet from the fumarole. Went next to what Dina called the "steaming ground" - an area about three-quarters of a mile long with dozens of fumaroles, some very large, some tiny. The heat and smell were overwhelming. We had to watch our step. Some parts of the ground were little more than soft coverings of fumaroles. Our weight could cause the soft earth to give. The burns from the steam underneath would be quite severe.
Personal Journal, July 25: I couldn't help but think that researchers who've only studied in the United States have no idea how hard it truly can be to do the work. Most will have the good fortune to never know what it's like to do research in a place where there is no money to purchase equipment that doesn't break, where scientists must borrow tools from other countries, and rely on the good intentions of friends and relatives for transportation, room, and board. Professors in El Salvador make only about $600 a month.
The name "El Salvador" means "magic corner." For scientists studying the nation's volcanoes, that magic sometimes comes in the form of a screwdriver held by a skilled handyman. Whether it stems from his natural curiosity of how things work or from the necessity of working with old equipment, Soriano has learned to fix just about anything that can be fixed.
Toward the end of their field work in late July, the researchers boarded a borrowed pontoon boat and sailed out onto Ilopango. Damage from volcanic chemicals and manmade pollution has put the lake's health at risk, adding another degree of importance to Lopez's work.
Some areas of the lake already have been closed to fishermen, but Lopez suspects there are other regions that also should be avoided. So, on a bright Thursday morning, she and Soriano drove the short distance to the lake to collect data on water temperature and gas levels. After collecting a few readings, it became clear that luck was not with them that day. A bad boat battery proved impervious to Soriano's fix-it skills and the group was forced to leave without the data they needed.
Lopez and Soriano returned to the lake about a week later. They were unable to get the water readings, but they did investigate an area of land around the lake where some fisherman had reported seeing dead trees. In this part of Ilopango, the levels of CO2 in the soil were 25 times higher than in her 1999 survey. There also are reports of hot water in some areas of the lake, a claim the government wants her to investigate on her next trip.
"This isn't necessarily a sign of volcanic activity. But we need to monitor and check it often," she says, adding that ideally, the scientists would take readings once a month. However, the $15,000 equipment they used in July belongs to one of the geothermal plants and isn't always available.
The pair have other plans to further their work in El Salvador. Lopez isn't sure how long it will take to create an accurate profile of these volcanoes, maybe a decade, perhaps longer.
"This is a continuous learning process," she says. "We never know what is going to happen next. We have some basic knowledge already, but that could change as we investigate more."
While that investigation continues, Lopez also is involved in a number of projects in Athens, Ohio, which, surprisingly, share some common traits with her work in El Salvador, at least from a geological perspective.
The scientist has seen some of the same substances she's monitored in volcanoes in abandoned mining areas in southeastern Ohio. Working alongside several graduate and undergraduate students, Lopez has studied the acid mine drainage produced by abandoned mines in southeastern Ohio and collected soil samples from 100 sites in and around old mines.
"We want to see if the concentration of radon in the soils is different in the mined areas compared to the unmined areas," she says, adding that she also plans to study radon levels in basements of houses close to and far away from abandoned mines.
The work is tedious at times. But the result, she hopes, will be a safer environment for her family and friends in Athens. That motivation is not unlike that which draws her to the volcanoes of El Salvador.
"One reason I do the work in El Salvador is out of scientific curiosity. The challenge of knowing something we don't know yet," she says. "The other reason I do it, the main reason, is it's a place I love and I have many loved ones there. I want to make life better for them and one way to do that is to understand and produce research that could help predict a volcanic event in the future and maybe save lives."
Personal Journal, July 26: Awoke early to pack. Took a taxi to the airport and arrived about 10:30 a.m. Wound my way through security, the ticket counter, security again, then to the gate. Flight left on time. My time in El Salvador will remain with me forever. The power of life beneath the earth; the reach of death above ground. Life here is so fragile, but it's a fragility different from what most Americans will ever know. There is no certainty here. No certainty that the child crossing the street will make it safely to the other side. No guarantee that the violent shaking of the ground will end before lives are lost. No certainty that people like Dina will be able to warn the government of a volcanic eruption in time to evacuate. It is a country of beauty and horror, joy and fear. Laughter and tears sound the same in any language. And there are plenty of both here. |
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