Transcript
STEVE SAUNDERS: Unfortunately we don't know the depth of the sea there. We assume the flank of the volcano carries on down at the same angle, so it would have been quite a large body of lava that built up. And just gravity got the better of it, and it looks like it just slid off down into the deeper water. I think it's around 900 metres deep there. The eruption wasn't changed by that. The lava just carried on coming out of the same crack, and it's possibly just propagated down a little bit deeper than the original one.
JOHNNY BLADES: Is this glowing lava, as it were?
SS: It'sa not glowing during the daytime, but at night it glows, yeah, so it's round about six-hundred degrees centrigrade. So it's not super hot. That would make it more fuid. It's acualy quite viscous, thick stuff. So it's coming out more as a large, blocky lava flow. It's actually being seen from Blupblup (or Ruprup) fifteen kilometres away. At the moment the weather's pretty bad down there, and they're having difficulty travelling on small banana boats which they usually use. So they can see it from fifteen kilometres away. It's a small, black steaming lump in the sea, and there's a gap between it and the island, so they estimate about fifty metres.
JB: And the eruption activity itself, that continues. But it hasn't necessarily intensified in the past couple of weeks, would you say?
SS: Yeah it's pretty stable. It's a low-level one. Some mild steaming and etc coming out of the summit. And then there's just slow, gentle emission of a flat lava. I mean flat when it's got no gas in it. So it's not explosive or anything. We're trying to keep the monitoring going. The volcano has settled into a low-level eruption. But they fluctuate. It can actually pick up or die down. That's the million dollar question. So we've got to monitor it to see if it perhaps is going to escalate. If it doesn't, we can tell people that, and people can go back to their normal lives.
JB: But if it continues like this for weeks, months, that still means that people can't go back, right?
SS: Yeah, that's true. The island itself of Kadovar will be uninhabitable for a very long time. The population of six hundred... and it was already overpopulated. So the majority of the people won't be able to go back for a long time, no.
JB: The ash and the lava has ruined crops and sort of changed the lay of the land, hasn't it?
SS: Yeah so at least half the island has been completely stripped of vegetation. If you look very closely at some of the aerial photographs you can actually see, on the flanks you can actually see terraces where people would garden. They'd actually built terraces because it's so steep. So the coconut trees and the bananas, all the crops have been destroyed on at least half of the island, probably more.
