Forty experts from 27 research institutions, academies and industrial companies from nine countries around the world (Italy, represented by INGV, Iceland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and France) gathered at the Physique du Globe in Paris to discuss the new frontier of research in the fields of volcanology and geothermal energy. The occasion, the presentation of the Krafla Magma Testbed – KMT project.
Scientific and industrial worlds in the Earth Sciences sectors for the first time together to create an international infrastructure unique in the world, centered on a series of permanently open wells inside and around the magma body about two kilometers deep, with the purpose of carrying out direct observations and experiments on the deep roots of a volcano and its geothermal system. The potential of the infrastructure, called KMT - Krafla Magma Testbed, is to revolutionize scientific knowledge on the origin of the earth's crust and the dynamics of volcanic systems, pave the way towards new generation systems for volcanic monitoring and hazard assessment volcanic, and, finally, to allow new experiments for the use of geothermal energy directly from conditions close to magmatic ones (with efficiencies estimated from ten to one hundred times higher than those of conventional geothermal wells). The project was then presented at the residence in Paris of the Ambassador of Iceland in France and Italy, in the presence of representatives of ministries and agencies of the countries involved.
During drilling activities at the Icelandic volcano Krafla, within the framework of a project financed by the ICDP - International Continental Drilling Project, the drills of the Icelandic state energy company accidentally encountered magma at a depth of 2,1 km. This event opened new scenarios for scientific and industrial research at an international level. It is in fact the only case in the world for which the exact position of a magma body in depth is known, at a temperature of about 900 °C, with the (at least theoretical) possibility of drilling, sampling, study, monitoring, and experimentation direct. This scenario lays the foundations for the creation of a large international infrastructure in the field of geosciences, capable of opening new horizons for basic science, for applications in the field of volcanic hazards, and for the use of new efficient and renewables, at the same time favoring the development of new technologies operating in the most extreme environment existing near the earth's surface.
Participants in the KMT meeting at the Paris IPG. Seated in the center is Prof. John Eichelberger, of the University of Alaska, creator of the project
Schematic of the KMT infrastructure, consisting of a series of wells equipped and extended in and around the magma body 2,1 kilometers deep below the Krafla caldera, Iceland, by a series of aboveground installations consisting of laboratories and data processing centres, lodgings and guesthouses, visitor centers and advanced training centres, and a network of multi-parameter monitoring instruments distributed on the surface and inside the wells