Wired Science

Rosaly Lopes is a planetary geologist with a thing for volcanoes. A native of Brazil, Rosaly studied planetary science at the University of London. After mapping the hazardous region surrounding Italy's Mount Vesuvius, she moved to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where she joined the Galileo Unmanned Mission to the moons of Jupiter. Working with the Galileo data, Rosaly Lopes discovered 71 individual volcanoes on the surface of Jupiter's moon Io.

In 2005, she was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal by the Division For Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. Ziya Tong meets with Rosaly Lopes.

ZIYA TONG: Welcome to the show Rosaly, it's great to have you here.

ROSALY LOPES: Thank you so much.

ZIYA: Now you're a Volcanologist. That's got nothing to do with Star Trek, I imagine?

ROSALY: No, those are Vulcanologists.

ZIYA: You're from Brazil. Are there actually even any volcanoes there when you were growing up?

ROSALY: No, actually not recent ones, there are some very old volcanoes but nothing that is active today. So, I had to go somewhere else to study volcanoes.

ZIYA: So what's your current research focused on?

ROSALY: Well, I do 2 things. I study volcanoes on earth and also volcanoes on other planets and particularly other moons. I have studied volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and also Saturn's moon Titan. And I also worked on Mount Etna, that was my first volcano and that's Europe's largest volcano and a very interesting one. And it erupted right during my first trips, so it was great.

ZIYA: So, I guess there must have been a lot of excitement when you first got the images back of Io?

ROSALY: Well, there is always excitement with new observations but in the case of Io it was really quite funny because when I got the first close-up infrared images of Io, which is what I was working on, I wasn't at the Laboratory. I was actually on a trip to Italy at a conference and we weren't expecting to get the images back that soon. So, several of us actually had to go late at night to a hotel room and use the slow phone line to actually, download the data from JPL and analyze the data all huddled around this hotel bedroom. So, it was very funny.

ZIYA: What was the thing that surprised you the most when you saw the pictures?

ROSALY: Oh, just actually the fact that it worked because we were getting very close to Io and that's a very harsh radiation environment. There is a lot of radiation and in fact our instrument didn't work as well as it should, but just the fact that the spacecraft survived and that we were able to do not only that close fly-by but, several others were amazing.

ZIYA: How would you define a volcano?

ROSALY: Well, the classic definition of a volcano is any opening on the earth's crust where magma, that is molten rock, comes out but of course, when we went to other planets and we're discovering volcanoes on other planets, we had to change that definition. We find that they have icy lavas we call them...

ZIYA: Ice lavas?

ROSALY: Yes, we call them cryo-lavas they are very strange because they are not molten rock like the lavas on earth and the lavas on the Moon or Mars or Io. These moons are very cold like minus 300 Fahrenheit at the surface but...

ZIYA: So, snow comes out of the top of the volcano or…

ROSALY: Well, it's a, it's like slushy ice. They have a layer of liquid water, mostly water we think perhaps with ammonia under their ice crust and sometimes cracks open up and these icy mixtures come out, so volcanoes on other planets are really expanding our definition of what's a volcano.

ZIYA: And how about the absence of gravity? How does that affect volcanoes?

ROSALY: Well, that can make for example, the explosive plumes go up a lot farther. A friend of mine calculated that if you had the Old Faithful geyser on Io, for example, it would be about 20 miles high.

ZIYA: 20 miles up?

ROSALY: Yes. So, there are other effects as well in the atmosphere or lack of an atmosphere has an effect and you have an effect on how fast lavas cool and so on. But we can use other planets like laboratories and see what volcanoes would be like, how different they would be on other planets than on earth.

ZIYA: What do the space volcanoes teach you about the volcanoes here on earth?

ROSALY: Well, they can teach you a lot because when you're looking at volcanoes on earth, you are looking at like a very limited range of volcanoes and when you go to volcanoes on other planets you, you find some really weird ones.

ZIYA: Like what?

ROSALY: Well, for example, on Jupiter's moon Io, we found that the lavas are very, very hot. They are like the lavas that erupted on earth billions of years ago. So, you can say that Io is teaching you something about how the earth erupted a long, long time ago.

ZIYA: And you've discovered a lot of volcanoes, I think 71 on Io, did you actually get to name these volcanoes?

ROSALY: Actually, anyone can propose a name to the International Astronomical Union and I proposed names to 2 of them, Tupan and Monin. Those are native Brazilian Gods and Brazil is where I come from. All the volcanoes on Io are named after Gods of fire or thunder or lightning or volcanoes. So we have a volcano called Pele after the Hawaiian Goddess of volcanoes. So these days, I'm actually in charge of the committee for the other planet names, you know so I can...

ZIYA: That's very cool.

ROSALY: I can make more suggestions.

ZIYA: You can hook me up.

ROSALY: Right.

ZIYA: Well, thank you so much for joining us here today.

ROSALY: Oh, you're very welcome.

ZIYA: And if I do come up with a name, I'll definitely let you know.

ROSALY: All right. Thank you.