A wild project in Iceland could transform how we forecast volcano eruptions

Frida Ghitis : We know much less about magma chambers like this than we’d like to.

She says they could hold secrets to help us better predict when a devastating eruption will occur.

The project is called the Krafla Magma Testbed, or KMT , and the researchers working on it think it could revolutionize volcanology.

Volcanologists still can't give us as clear a picture of the future as we might like them to.

Mike Poland : How do you know how big an eruption’s going to be? He says the field still grapples with the same fundamental problem of precision in their predictions.

Poland says improving volcano forecasting is not just about improving monitoring equipment.

Scientists want to build models of the physics of volcanoes' magma chambers.

They've used seismic and electromagnetic imaging to take the equivalent of X-rays of the Earth .

But volcanologists have had a hard time finding out what happens inside volcanoes.

They hope to talk to volcanoes directly, to observe their magma chamber in real time.