Science Friday - Hawaii Eruption, Antibiotic Resistance, Florida Sea Rise. May 11, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: May 11, 2018

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano—located on the Big Island—has been continuously erupting for the past 30 years. But on May 3, magma began spewing through fissures in the Puna district, forcing nearly 2,000 residents to flee. Reporter Ku`uwehi Hiraishi of Hawaii Public Radio spoke to residents in the area of these 15 fissures and describes what type of evacuation efforts have been happening on the ground. Ten years ago, Dr. Gautam Dantas had one of those rare moments you hear about in science—a serendipitous discovery. He and his colleagues were trying to kill some bacteria they had collected from soil. So, naturally, they tried knocking them out with some antibiotics. They were unsuccessful. The soil bacteria were resistant to the drugs—but the bacteria ate the very antibiotics that were meant to kill them. The discovery came as a shock to Gautam and he says it changed the course of his career. According to middle-of-the-road predictions, seas will rise by as much as two feet by 2060 in South Florida. Residents of Miami and surrounding counties have already seen that rise in action. Citing a lack of action at the state and federal level to help the region adapt and plan, the editorial boards of three major newspapers, The Miami Herald, The Sun Sentinel, and The Palm Beach Post, are teaming up. The papers say the new The Invading Sea project will prioritize sea level rise as an issue in this year’s midterm elections. And Sophie Bushwick of Popular Science tells Ira about how the Leaning Tower of Pisa has managed to withstand weather, wars, and earthquakes, among other science headlines in this week's News Round-up. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, we'll be talking about the volcanic eruptions in Hawaii and the strange species of bacteria that can eat antibiotics. But first, the leaning tower of Pisa has been tipping for centuries. You knew that, and you know it's managed to withstand weather and wars and earthquakes. And while over the years, engineers have taken action to stabilize it, turns out there's another contributor to its longevity, and that is the soil beneath it.

Joining me to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Sophie Bushwick, Senior Editor at Popular Science. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I have to note that congratulations are in order because the Popside team was victorious at our sci-fri trivia night earlier this week. It was a tough battle.

We were really excited to win. Two years in a row. Two years in a row. Second, wow, we'll have to see what happens next year. We'll aim for a three-peat. All right, let's see. Let's talk about the news. What's this leaning tower of Pisa story?

What's the secret here? Right. So the leaning tower of Pisa, one of the reasons it's leaning is because the soil in the region is very soft. In fact, there's a couple other towers that are also leaning, although not as much. Pisa, that tower is leaning at about a four-degree angle right now. And at its greatest, it was at closer to a five-and-a-half-degree angle. So you would think that this really unstable tower would be really in bad shape when earthquakes strike. and at least four major earthquakes have hit the area since the construction of the tower,

but it's withstood them. So this latest study looked at the relationship between the soil and the tower, and they found that one of the reasons it's been able to withstand the earthquakes is because interaction between that soft soil, the same soil that makes it lean, and this tall, rigid tower has sort of balanced out, and so it doesn't vibrate when the ground vibrates the same way other buildings do. So the soil is sort of squishy and absorbs the vibes the vibration. It has to do with the interaction between that squishy soil and the tower itself.

I want to move on to this really interesting story, not that that wasn't. There's some missing plutonium somewhere? Right. So Idaho State University was just fined over $8,000 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because they had a missing amount of plutonium, weapons-grade plutonium, but the amount is about a 30th of an ounce. So think something the size of a quarter. Have any idea where?

Where do you hide or where it went? Do you lose it? Do you drop a quarter on the subway? We think the culprit is paperwork, actually. So apparently back in about 2003, there's some paperwork showing that the university was trying to get rid of just that amount of plutonium. But someone didn't fill out the rest of the paperwork showing it had been properly disposed of.

So then there's like a blank in the records and they've been fined for it. And they've had to, in fact, the university has established. new processes of taking their inventory and to try to prevent that error from happening in the future. But that's not enough to worry anybody then. You could make a bomb if it really were missing. Well, you couldn't make an explosive nuclear bomb, but you could make a dirty bomb, which is something that spreads radioactive contamination. So any amount of plutonium is enough to make the nuclear regulatory commission kind of nervous and kind of want to make sure that they can account for all of it. Yeah, let's hope that it is something in the paperwork.

Yes. That's wrong. Now, I understand there's an invasion from Russia into Alaska. Oh, no. But these are cuckoo birds? Right. So it might sound innocuous, but cuckoo birds are these, they're called broad parasites. They basically a cuckoo, cuckoo parents won't make their own nests.

They'll lay their eggs in another species nest. And when the young cuckoo hatches, it kicks out the new hatchlings or eggs that are there. and the parents devote all their resources to the cuckoo baby. And then they don't raise their own chicks. And this can actually have a big impact on native species. And so why do we think this is happening now? So because of climate change, the region in which these cuckus can live has kind of expanded. And so birdwatchers have noticed greater numbers of them in Siberia and also in Alaska.

But researchers wanted to know how the native birds would respond to the cuckus. So they made 3D printed eggs and put them in nests in Alaska, and in Siberia. And what they found was that in Siberia, the birds were on to the cuckoos, and they knew their tricks, and they kicked out the 3D-printed eggs often. But in Alaska, only one out of 96 eggs got booted out of a nest. And so the Alaskan birds are more gullible, which means they could be a lot more vulnerable to cuckus. So this is why, I guess, in other parts of the country or world, these birds know already.

Right. To expect the cuckus coming, and you better be careful. Yeah, other birds have adapted. So some of them will mob cuckoos. Some of them will knock those cuckoo eggs out of the nest, and some of them have adapted to just have very distinctive-looking eggs so they can easily tell when one of the eggs in the nest isn't their own. Wow. Up, up, up next, there's a train jumping spider.

I needed to know that today on Friday. Yes. Why would you train? Why do you get into that, please? Well, how else are you going to make an army of tiny spider robots? Absolutely. I know that. So basically, there's a jumping spiders, they can jump about horizontal.

about six times their body length, which is a huge amount. Humans can only jump from a standing start can only jump about one and a half times our body lengths. So this is an amazing feat, and researchers thought we want to mimic it to make robots, tiny robots that move more easily. So they were looking at a regal jumping spider. The regal jumping spider, they're about the weight of a raindrop. So they're very tiny, about 15 millimeters long. And they basically were trying to get these spiders to, they bought them at a pet shop,

and they wanted to get them to jump around an obstacle course that would force them to make different kinds of leaps, but only one of them would do it. And so this is a spider named Kim, and they filmed her at very high speeds, making these different leaps, and that way they could analyze her motion. How do you train a spider to leap when you want it to?

Right. It's really difficult, because this is the only one of the spiders that would do it. I'm thinking they use some reward-based motivation to get these spiders to jump around this obstacle course, But even Kim wouldn't do all the jumps. The biggest jump that Kim would do was a 60 millimeter one, and they think it was because she couldn't see much farther than that. They have keen eyesight, but it only goes so far.

I'm sure somewhere in Hollywood, you know where they train all those animals. They have a jumping spider that's trained, and they could have loaned it to them. Yeah, a movie star spider. Sophie Bushwick, senior editor at Popular Science. Congratulations again. Thank you. Always a pleasure to have you. And now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local stories with a national impact. In the next 40 years, South Florida could see two feet or more of sea level rise, and residents of Miami Fort Lauderdale, Tom Beach, and other areas will tell you they are already seeing higher seas, flooded streets on sunny day, stormwater drain issues, and don't forget all the hurricanes. And there's even a very famous picture of an octaves.

in a parking garage by the Miami Herald's sitting there floating in a puddle of water that came up through this sewer. And counties even have scientists on staff to act as climate resilience officers to help consult on planning and adapting to the creeping ocean. But local officials say they are frustrated by a lack of similar planning or investment from state officials or Congress. So, mad as hell, the three regional newspapers are now teeming up to shine. a brighter light on South Florida sea level rise, start a conversation, and make sure political candidates are ready to talk about it. Here to tell us more is Rosemary O'Hara, editor of the editorial page for the Sun Sentinel in Broward County, Florida, one of the projects founders. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, Ira. Happy to be here. Nice to have you. I hinted already,

but what kinds of consequences are South Florida residents seeing from sea level rise? We're seeing things we've never seen before. You know, on a fall day when the moon lines up in a certain way, we have now what's called King Tides. Never heard of those before about five years ago. But it means that the water is spilling over the intercoastal waterway up into people's yards. It's bubbling up through stormwater drains. I mean, stormwater drains are supposed to drain water? We have water bubbling up through stormwater drains.

And it's not just on the coast. It's happening in the western part of our county, about 10 miles from the ocean. Last year, a major mall was closed for three days because our flood control system couldn't handle the water. We've never seen that before. And like you said, we had an octopus. The sea is coming in. The saltwater is coming in, and we had an octopus bubble up. We have catfish swimming in an apartment complex parking lots.

So we are seeing it firsthand. We know that it's real. Sea level rise is real. A lot of people don't want to talk about climate change. So we're trying to have this conversation in terms of sea level rise. And what are we going to do about it? So the editorial boards of three newspapers have banded together to do what? Yes.

It's unprecedented, really. We're all owned by separate companies and have always treasured our independent voice. But, you know, we've each written about the issue, but then it's like you turn the page, it's tomorrow, and you're talking about something else. So we decided, it's like you write about what's urgent that day and what's important in the longer term you miss. So we decided we're friends, we respect one another. We, you know, share a common coastline. We share the flood control system down here. So we decided to create a collaborative, along with our NPR station in Miami, which is helping with reporting and engagement, to create a collaborative to create more awareness among the people and to elevate our region's call.

Because down here, there's bipartisan agreement that this is real. but we don't have in state capital, Tallahassee or in Washington, the leadership that we need focused on it. Well, will you be quizzing these people about why when they come to town or you go to Tallahassee? Ask them, why are you ignoring this? Absolutely. We plan to publish an editorial every two weeks, and that means the same editorial as in the Miami Herald, the Sun Sentinel, the Palm Beach Post. And with op-eds, we're getting op-eds from people in our community. We want to raise the voices.

And then as candidates come through seeking newspaper endorsements for the August primary and then the November general, every candidate who comes through, we are going to ask, you know, what's the plan on sea level rise? What are we going to do about it? Because it's being ignored. We're 6 million people, expected to be 9 million people in not so many years. We're a huge economy, and because of the politics, you know, we're not focused. We need leadership on it, and so we plan to hold people accountable and create a drumbeat that they can't ignore.

Well, we'll keep listening in, Rosemary, to see how it's going. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. And thanks for helping us call attention to it. Happy to be here, Ira. You're welcome. Rosemary O'Hara, editorial page editor at the Sun Sentinel, part of the. team with the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post. When we come back, we're going to talk about bacteria that eat antibiotics, but we'll tell you how that it can be used to fight

antibiotic resistance bacteria. It's interesting story. Stay with us. We'll give you the details after the break. Don't go away. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. 10 years ago, Dr. Gautum Dauntus had one of those moments you hear about in science, a serendipitous discovery. He and his colleagues were trying to kill some bacteria they had collected from the soil. So, naturally, they tried knocking them out with some antibiotics. Lo and behold, it did not work. Not only were these bacteria resistant to antibiotics, but the bacteria actually ate them like there were a snack. This was puzzling, mind-blowing, even to those researchers. Why did they do this and how did they do this? Well, Dantus spent the next decade trying to answer.

these questions as well as other questions about the antibiotic resistance in soil bacteria. And in his most recent research, he and his team finally cracked it. They were able to engineer a strain of E. coli to munch on penicillin. Here to tell us that story, as well as how bacteria-eating antibiotics, could actually help with the fight against resistance. Is Dr. Gautendantas, professor of pathology and immunology, Washington University in St. Louis, Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, it's great to be on.

Nice to have you. You know, this sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. Aren't antibiotics supposed to kill the bacteria? Exactly. And as you said, 10 years ago, we were shocked by the finding. As you said, it was serendipitous. This is not what we were looking for. We're trying to look for bacteria in the soil that were degrading various other things.

And honestly, we just set this up as a control, naively at that time, thinking, you know, what are compounds that bacteria couldn't munch on? Well, clearly antibiotics. And like with a lot of things with bacteria, we were wrong about them because they're just so much more amazing than we give them credit for. Yeah, go ahead. No, I didn't mean. No, and so with the, you know, we expanded the initial finding. We wrote to a bunch of collaborators and friends and family to get soils from around the country,

then went down the Sigma catalog to get as many antibiotics as we could find, dunk them in these, those soils in the antibiotics, expecting to maybe find some trends where some could be eaten and some couldn't. And again, here, fortunately we were wrong. Virtually every antibiotic we threw at these soil bugs, they could happily munch on. Wow. And so that was the surprising finding. I know 844-7248255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI.

Now, the thing about this is that these are not some kind of crazy mutant alien bacteria, right? These are just bacteria that live in the soil. Absolutely, yeah. We think these capacities that we've discovered are old and ancient, not something that anyone is engineered, not something that's necessarily been selected recently. And also the bacteria that we find are pretty diverse. So it's not a particular specialist that's figured how to do this. There are lots of diverse type of bugs out there in the soil that, again,

have this crazy capacity to use antibiotics the way we think of most bugs using sugar to grow on. It's amazing. How did you feel? I mean, you feel like there's something wrong with our research that this can't be true when you first discovered it? Well, the first thing we did, I think as good scientists, we were skeptical. So we first thought we'd done something wrong. So that's why we repeated the experiment at scale. And then, of course, along the way, we started getting a little bit scared because, you know, again, we were taught that antibiotics are these sort of privileged molecules that allow us to kill bad bugs, which clearly they do.

And here were these bugs who clearly didn't care. They're kind of almost laughing back at us. And the other shocking part is that the concentrations that they were doing this at, right? These concentrations of antibiotics that we used in these experiments are, you know, 50 to 100 times the amount that you would use to define resistance in the clinic. So, you know, and then these guys are just saying, ah, well, don't care. We'll eat them. So, yeah, so we were shocked. Well, of course, the obvious question is what bacteria you were working with?

Because could they make humans sick if they escape or get in, you know, they're so powerful? Right. Yeah, great question. That was one of the first things we asked, right? We try to identify what the bacteria were, try to assess what risk they might pose to the clinic. Now, the bacteria that we looked at when we kind of gaze into their genomes, if you will, when we look at who they might be, they don't appear to be pathogens, but they're very closely related to them. So their gene and their species, or sort of genus and species identities have close relatives that do cause diseases.

But in this case, the specific bacteria that we isolated, we don't necessarily expect those bugs themselves to be pathogens. So give me a, we like to dive into the weed sometimes, you know, because science program would like to hear out how it actually happens. So how are these bacteria able to eat the antibiotics? What's their munching technique? Sure, yeah. So this is the thing that took the 10 years to figure out with a pretty big team of folks. And we kind of had to throw the kitchen sink at them to really piece apart what they're doing and how they're doing it. And in the end, what we figured out was that these four bacteria that we focused on,

they could eat penicillin and a couple other penicillin-type antibiotics, could be divided into three major steps. The first step is inactivating the penicillin. And this is done using an enzyme called a beta-lactamase that is identical to the enzyme that's used by most pathogenic bacteria to be resistant to penicillin. So this is the first connection between this kind of weird property of eating the antibiotics, to their more well-known property of resisting it. So first, there's a resistance mechanism.

And this kind of makes sense because ultimately, these bugs are still munching on a toxin. So the first step is detoxification. The second step is then taking that penicillin molecule and kind of chopping it in half, sort of the head part and the tail part. And the reason I call it the head in the tail is the head part is the one that used to contain

the structure that makes penicin and antibiotic, the beta-lactam structure. It turns out that's not the part that the bugs care much about. It's the other thing that remains. The compound is called phenylacetic acid, but that's the part that then they're going to munch on. So the first, the second enzyme, called it amidase, chops the penicillin to two to give you the part that can be eaten. And then this was the kind of surprising and cool thing for us, which has allowed us to do, the engineering you alluded to, was then there's a whole suite of enzymes, in this case,

a pathway that can use phenylacetic acid and put it down into central. metabolism. And the reason I said it was the kind of interesting and cool finding was when we looked at that pathway and then looked at the genomes of all bacteria that anyone else has submitted to a public database, 13% of all bacteria that we looked at had this phenylacetic acid utilizing catabolon. And so what that suggested to us was, you know, the downstream steps, the kind of difficult steps of converting this into the energy required to grow the, to allow the bacteria to grow and to replicate exists in a lot of these organisms. And this is a shared strategy of using something that just happens to be part of the penicillin

structure. Wow. And so those are the three basic steps, right? The inactivation, the cutting in half, and then the catabolon. So now that you know how this works, how can you use this to combat the, you know, the incredible amount of antibiotics we have in our natural system. You use these bacteria to go out there and sweep them up or soak them up or eat them and have lunch with them? Yeah.

Yeah, so there are two strategies that we think that we discuss that could come directly out of a sort of application of this basic science work. The first is indeed a potential bioremediation, a cleanup strategy. So we recognize that antibiotics, once they're used in humans or in agriculture or even in the factories that make them, eventually some amount of that antibiotic will end up leaching out into the environment, and now that poses a contamination risk because it could enrich for resistant bugs out there. So it's possible that either the bugs that we have or the bug, the E. coli that we engineered to also have this property, or even just the enzymes that we discovered could be used as a way in which to decontaminate these antibiotics before they go into the environment. So that's one potential application.

obviously if you were to do this in the genetically engineered fashion in terms of the E. coli example, you'd have to have all of the regulatory things in place. But then the second aspect, which is a little bit more tantalizing because it kind of allows us to fight back at the bugs, if you will, is these enzymes that we discovered that these bugs are using to eat the antibiotics, ultimately are also giving us now building blocks of antibiotics, right? breaking penicillin up into a bunch of substructures. And so it's possible that we could use these enzymes judiciously to take those substructures and then stitch them back up as a way in which to make chimeric antibiotics, new antibiotics.

And so sort of inadvertently by studying how these weird bugs are eating antibiotics, we might actually have liberated new building blocks for the next generation of antibiotics. Wow. So where do you go from here with your work? What would be the next thing you want to know? Yeah, so a couple things. One is, you know, we showed this with penicillin and one other penicillin like antibiotic, but we know, obviously, there are, you know, many, many other classes of antibiotics.

So, you know, there's a little bit of a sort of rinse and repeat aspect to this where we'd like to understand how bacteria they can eat other types of antibiotics. How did they do it? Maybe these are sort of generalizable strategies. And then the second goes back to what I mentioned with the enzymes and the engineered bugs. Of course, we'd like to improve them, right? In our paper, the ecoli strain that we engineered to eat penicillin doesn't do it terribly well, right? It would much rather eat glucose if you keep it to it. And so we'd like to be able to engineer those enzymes, optimize that

ecoli strain to get it to a stage where we could, you know, consider it a viable option for bioremediation. Isn't there a danger if you have these, you know, really antibiotic-resistant bacteria? What if you want, you need to kill the bacteria? I mean, what are you going to use to control the bacteria should they get out of hand? Yeah, that's a great question. And that's again why I mentioned upfront that anything you'd want to do with engineering, you need to have regulatory procedures in place. But the good news is even though these bugs can eat penicillin at this crazy high concentration, they are susceptible to a few other antibiotics. And so even though they are highly drug-resistant, so that was the other thing we showed 10 years ago,

which was scary. We tested all of these antibiotic eating bacteria against other antibiotics. I think we tested 18 antibiotics, and on average they were resistant to 17 of them. So they are pretty multi-drug resistant, but there's still a few vulnerabilities that remain. And so this is also why one thing that we might choose to do is rather than putting the natural bugs out there, you'd engineer a strain that might have the penicillin-eating capacity, but we make sure that it's susceptible to a whole host of other antibiotics. If we need to kill it, we can. Interesting. Is this resistance that you found in the soil and bacteria? Is this something that humans created in the soil bacteria, or was it always naturally there?

So we think these eating capacities are ancient. And there's really nice work done by others in the field that we've also contributed to to really clearly establish that resistance to antibiotics is a natural and ancient phenomenon. There was this really cool paper by Jerry Wright and his group that went into the Canadian. Beringen Permafrost, and they caught out samples that they could carbon date to be 30,000 years old, and then I'm going to sequence the DNA there, they showed they could find antibiotic resistance genes. So clearly establishing that resistance in the environment predates any anthropogenic human use. What we've done as humans is not necessarily invented antibiotic resistance. It's almost worse. There's already this huge existing reservoir of resistance, and we, just by using antibiotics

in the clinic and in agriculture, allow that natural reservoirs. of resistance to get amplified. And so that's the scary aspect, right? You don't have to wait for this to de novo evolve. It's already there. It can now transfer under our selective regimes. Could you put the treatment? Let's say you take the enzymes that they're making to kill the, to eat the antibiotics.

Could you put those in, let's say, wastewater treatment facilities? So as it comes out of the communities, it's already getting taken out of the system? That's exactly one of the plans that we've discussed, right? So this is something where it gets around the genetically engineered organism risk because they only work with enzymes and they're not going to transfer over. And much like any wastewater, modern wastewater treatment plant, which is a bunch of stages where you've got the settling phase and they've got the degradation phase. In the future, you might imagine that there's an additional tank

where you add on these enzymes that could break down the antibiotics, and now you've cleared out that contaminant from going out to wherever the wastewater goes. And this is really important because a lot of people have done studies. We published a paper a couple years ago looking at a wastewater treatment plant outside Lima, Peru, and we use some methods to actually measure antibiotic concentrations in the influence. And the top 15 or 20 antibiotics that were used in Lima, we could detect in the influence. So we know that those antibiotics are certainly coming in through, at least in that case, the human wastewater treatment. I'm Ira Plato.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. talking about this really interesting case of antibiotic-eating bacteria with Gautum Dantus of Washington University in St. Louis. Could these bacteria pass along the ability to eat antibiotics to bacteria pathogens that could infect people? You know, isn't it true that bacteria share their genomes or they share their genetic material with each other? Oh, yes, absolutely. And so that's been one of the major focus areas of our lab is to understand the risk of this genetic transfer. But in terms of the actual eating bacteria donating these capacities to pathogens, I would say the real risk is of the resistance gene, right?

That's that very first step I mentioned, the inactivation capacity, because that's really the only thing that the pathogens are going to care about. And a pathogen is in the body. They're not nutrient limited. They have lots of other food sources that they can munch on. So we get these can't speculate a reason why there would be any real benefit for a pathogen, a disease-causing organism, to get that eating capacity. but the risk certainly remains of the resistance enzyme of moving over.

And in fact, as I mentioned, that enzyme is exactly the same. So it's already happened effectively, right? Let me see if I can get a quick phone call in from Elkhart, Indiana. Hi, Jessica. Welcome. Hello. Hi there. Go ahead. Thank you for having me. My question is about the necessary strength of this bacteria, such as in composting.

The reason why they're so strong to eat the antibiotics is because of the rotting fruit and things in the soil. Like penicillin is made from the mold on an orange peel. So this would necessarily need to be strong enough to eat those substances. Oh, good question. Yeah, fantastic question, actually, because one of the things that we sometimes forget about with these compounds that we call antibiotics because they're so important is in fact that almost every one of them are natural products, right? There was this heyday of antibiotic discovery between the 40s and 60s, really by people going out and finding bugs in the salt that could produce them. And so us finding this antibiotic eating capacity

really kind of closes the loop in terms of a carbon cycle for bugs producing the antibiotics. And so then eventually bugs evolved the ability to eat those carbon sources. So yeah, fantastic question. Yeah, I mean, if the bugs are going to decay the food, you know, he chomp on the rotting, food that has natural penicillium mold growing in it, they have to be able to get past that, right? That's exactly right. And that's been used as the argument to reconcile this finding of lots of resistance in the soil that it made sense, right?

These bugs have been there producing the antibiotics, so their neighbors must have resistance. They themselves must have resistance. Antibiotic eating bacteria are just one more part of that cycle, right? You know, they're killing most of the competitors. Yeah. Now, this is a source that I can eat. I just have a few seconds left. I want to know how you were able to.

Did you have to grow bacteria in the lab? I know how hard it is to get it out of the soil to survive in the lab, or did you not have to do that? No, in this case, we did very much have to grow it. In fact, the way we were able to do it was by only providing the antibiotics as the sole source of carbon. And so then, you know, maybe there are a lot more of these guys out there that can do it, that are just hard to culture. So we just happen to catch the cultural ones. Well, maybe you've discovered something people have been waiting to see. Technique.

Good. Congratulations to you, Dr. Dantus. Gautum Dantus, Professor Pathology and Immunology at Washington University in St. Louis. We're going to take a break, and we're going to come back and talk about the kill-away of alcano and the science behind the eruption that is currently happening. What makes this different, is it possible now to actually predict when some of these eruptions might occur? We'll have an on-the-site report from Hawaii, so stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. I'm May 3rd, the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii's big island began spewing lava from 15 different fissures. The volcano has been continuously erupting for the past 30 years, but this latest event has forced

nearly 2,000 residents to flee. Kouvehi Hirashi is a reporter for Hawaii Public Radio in Honolulu, has been on the ground talking to residents and joins us with the latest update. Welcome to Science Friday, Kuwaiti. Aloha Aira So tell us The last count is that there are now, what, 15 fishers that have opened up

You've seen these fishes? What's it like on the ground around these fishes and the lava flows? I did get to witness one right up close It's about 150 feet long crack Foot long crack in the earth And at the time there was no lava It was safe enough for us to get close to it but it was still spewing high levels of sulfur dioxide,

so at any time we were informed that if the National Guard escort with us said to run, we would have to run out of there. So it was amazing because it's Lelani Estates where these fissures, this series, is in a lush green rainforest. And so walking, approaching the fissure, it's cool. You hear birds. you can smell the vegetation, and when you get within 50 feet of the fisher, you just feel the heat emitting from it, and you can start stepping on shards of lava like glass.

It is a sight. Does it feel like you're on the moon or some other place once you get close by? It did. It really did. It felt smoke rising from the charred vegetation around this house, which was spared. So the house, this fisher actually opened up right across Ley Loney Avenue, right across the road, and in front of this gentleman's house but spared the house. So it was an unreal thing.

Is there any pattern, discernible pattern, to these fissures? So along, these are all happening along the East Rift Zone for a Kiloil Volcano, and USGS volcanologists have seen sort of a trend. of them being in this one particular line. So if you're able to look at any aerial views of the fisher, the series of fishers, it's about 2.5 mile long, or almost three miles of fissures. They're all in this one line.

So they are continuing to look along that particular line for any future fishers, but they continue to tell us that they are USGS scientists never predict which way it will go up or down. Well, I understand. And how close is this to Volcano's National Park? Right. So Volcano's National Park is about 25 miles upland from Lelandia State in the southern.

And the state of relief efforts on the ground, has the governor declared a state of emergency? Governor David Ige has declared a state of emergency, so that helps mobilize a lot of the support. He put in a request for FEMA funds. and I know that we just received our federal funds for the disaster over on the other side of the chain of our islands on Kaua, with massive flooding, just this week. So that took three weeks. We anticipate any word from President Trump to come in in another three weeks. So this is going to take some time. You talk to residents from Pune and Lailani Estates, and we have a clip from Keone-Klave who came to volunteer.

My family went through the same dilemma in 1960 at the Kapohoho village eruption. You know, the stories that my Kupuna and my parents shared with us about, you know, they had to move out of Kapoho because of the eruption. You know, we need to accept that we're just here temporarily. Peli is here permanently. Keone, Kalev. For Hawaiians, is this sort of an – he expressed sort of an acceptance of – this is part of life here? I think so. Having folks who have been here like Keone Kalave for generations,

it's something that they've had to deal with, continuous eruptions and disruption of the living pattern. And so I think they found some way to have a resilient spirit about the whole scenario, and that's really helped a lot of the folks who have been affected so far in this one. Is there anything like volcano insurance for these people? There is not. It's actually, it depends on the homeowner's policy in speaking to some of the lawyers that are helping folks on the ground. It depends on the homeowner's policy and how much risk they were able to cover,

but because this particular area, Lelani Estates, is zoned by the USGS, has a lava one zone, it's just too high of a risk for a lot of insurers, so no one really offers anything. The closest thing to damages will be done through fire insurance or coverage with any sort of damage from fire. One interesting question, a tweet from Christine in Westchester, Pennsylvania who wants to know. What about is there any acid rain from that sulfur dioxide that's in the year? That definitely was a concern yesterday. There were heavy rains the last two days, and you could really smell sort of that rotten egg.

silver dioxide smell in the air, and scientists did say to stay clear of a lot of that, but tests were done, and I think we're going to see the results of that today. Thank you very much, and stay safe out there. Yes, thank you so much. Kuwaihi, Hiraschi is a reporter for Hawaii Public Radio in Honolulu. And as I mentioned, Kilauea has been erupting since the 80s, so. What's so different about this one compared to the previous bursts of lava from Kilauea? And how do you forecast? Is it possible to forecast when another eruption might happen?

That is the job of my next guest, and he's going to break down some volcano science for us. Michael Poland is a volcanologist with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. That is part of the U.S. Geological Survey Volcano Hazards Program. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks very much. Anything about this that is unusual or surprising? I think what was surprising was the fact that, the magma went underground so far down the east rift zone. Kilauea is composed of a summit

complex that has magma stored beneath it, and eruptions can occur at the summit. And in fact, there's been a lava lake present more or less continuously at Kilauea's summit since 2008. But it also travels underground through these rift zones, and since 1983 has been erupting about 20 kilometers from the summit from this Pua'u-Ovent. And we've seen previous bouts of activity where Puyuo-O has collapsed, and there have been new vent. that have formed, but it's always been within a few kilometers of Pua'u'u. So what's unusual about this is that it left that area and went another 15 kilometers or so down the east drift zone, unfortunately, into this populated area.

Let's back up a second. Give us a volcano 101 of the Hawaiian Islands, and why would have this happening? Right. The Hawaiian islands are formed by a hotspot, which is a zone of melting in the Earth's upper mantle. It's probably fed by a plume of hot material that's rising from deep within the earth. And as that the Pacific plate moves over this relatively stationary hotspot, magma punches through the plate and you get a chain of islands and sea mounts that forms. And in fact, if you look at a bathymetric map, a map of the sea floor,

you can see a chain of islands that start at the big island and then goes all the way back to midway. They become sea mounts, and then all the way back up toward Kamchatka in Russia. So this plume of magma, this hotspot, has been active for at least the last 60 million years. or so. So once the crust moves and the hot, then the volcanoes, which were once on top of the hotspot, they've moved, they become dormant or non-existent? That's exactly right. The ones that are directly over the hotspot now are the most active, and as these volcanoes are carried away by motion of the plate, they get less and less active, and ultimately they go extinct. Right now, the newest

volcano is Lojee, which is off the south coast of the big island of Hawaii, and that will one day become an island and possibly merge with the big island. It's the next volcano in the chain. Does it erupt also? It does. The last eruption of Loehi was in about 1996, recognized from seismicity that was picked up on the island by on-land seismometers. And there were also some submarine expeditions that noted that there were some collapse features and new lava flows that formed then. So you're saying that that new volcano could eventually connect the islands together as it forms? It may. It's difficult to say. Of course, it's going to happen tens to hundreds of thousands of years from now, so hard to say. But if the eruption rate from Luigi is high enough, and of course Kilauea will continue to extend outward, as Loehi becomes more and more active, it may extend back towards Kilauea as lava flows go in that direction. So it's possible that one day it will merge with the big island.

Our number 8447-2-4825. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. We have seen some magnificent. photos of nature at work of the lava lake in the summit of Kilauea and then how it dropped down 240 yards? What happened there? Right. So you can think of Kilauea as an interconnected plumbing system of magma. The summit area is connected to the east drift zone via these underground pathways. And so the lava lake at Kilauea summit was actually connected to the Pua'u-a-a-orrupted vent. and geologists working in Hawaii had been able to see complementary changes in height of the lava lake at the two places. So the lava lake at the summit may go down reflecting some subtle decrease in pressure beneath the summit, and then you could see the eruption rate go down from the east rift zone vent, from Pua'u-O'O'O.

So what's happening now is the eruptive vent is formed now on a much lower elevation, well down below Poo-O in terms of its overall height. And so the lava lake at the summit is responding to that as lava drains into the rift's sea. zone to feed this low elevation fissure. So the lava lake at the summit drained as if someone pulled the plug on a bathtub. Amazing. And now you work for the USGS Volcano Hazards Program out in Yellowstone, which is like a volcano monitoring network.

You all detected weeks ago that Kilauea was going to erupt. So what signs did it give you that you knew it was going to have it? Well, we have a lot of different tools that we use for looking at how volcanoes may change activity in the future, seismicity, how the ground deformed, gas chemistry, geologic changes, even satellite data. In the case of Kilauea over the last few months, maybe starting around March, we noticed that the Poo O'OO erupt event was starting to inflate like a balloon. Magma was starting to accumulate beneath Poo O'OO, probably because there was less of it that was coming out of the ground. It was sort of backing up. We eventually started to see the same inflation at the summit,

And in fact, you might have seen these amazing videos and photos of lava coming out of the summit eruptive and resurfacing the floor of Halimaumaumao crater, which is the summit crater that this lava lake was sitting within. So these were signs of pressure building beneath both Pu'u'a and the summit. The whole magma plumbing system was starting to pressurize because there was more coming into the volcano than was getting out. And we've seen this thing happen in the past numerous times, 2007, 2011. there have been new erupt events that have formed as a result of this. But it's always been relatively close to Pu'u'u'a. In 2011, there was a rather spectacular four-and-a-half-day period of lava-fountaining,

not far from the Pu-u-Oo event. So this one, we expected something was going to happen. We knew from the inflation, from the pressurization of this magma system, that we were going to probably see a new eruptive vent, but it's difficult to forecast exactly when or exactly where that activity will take place. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. How finely tuned is your hazard system? I mean, how good are you at predicting and how far out can you predict? I think a lot of our prediction or forecasting is based on pattern recognition to a certain extent.

You could see that in the way that this particular event was dealt with in recognizing the signs that in the past have led to the formation of new vents. So a lot of it has to do with our experience in certain places. The more active a volcano is and the better monitored it is, the more experience we tend to have. And Kilauea, we have a very good record of continuous monitoring. It goes back over 100 years. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory was founded in 1912, so we have nearly continuous observation since then. It's also one of the best monitored volcanoes in terms of instrumentation. There are seismometers all over the place.

There are GPS sensors that detect ground deformation and tilt meters, continuous gas sensors. There's a tremendous amount of satellite data. So we can detect these sorts of changes that we've seen in the past that lead to changes in volcanic activity. But it's still a tough call to figure out exactly the how and the what is going to happen and precisely when. So those are the elements of prediction that we're still trying to get a handle on. Let's go to Dawn in Huntsville, Alabama. Hi, Dawn. Hi.

Go ahead. I'd like to find out if you believe that the recent earthquakes related to Kilauea's eruption are going to unsettle the rest of the big island such that the other volcanoes may be at risk of erupting. Good question. Yeah, it's an interesting question. There's a lot of research into triggering of eruptive activity between different volcanoes or between the occurrence of strong earthquakes and possibly volcanic eruptions. There's not a strong relation.

It appears in some cases, yeah, there can be triggered activity. Oftentimes we'll see strong earthquakes in one part of the world trigger micro seismicity in other parts. There have been big earthquakes in the past at Kilauea. In 1975, there was a magnitude 7.7 earthquake. It was not necessarily associated with any major activity in other places on the island except at Kilauea. There was an eruption earlier that year at

Monaloa, but that doesn't seem related. But at the same time, there was in 1868, a very large, perhaps magnitude 8 earthquake on the south coast of the island, and shortly thereafter, there was an eruption of Monoloa. So this particular earthquake, this 6.9, that occurred on

the south flank, it's probably a bit on the small side to be triggering a lot of activity, but this is why we have such an intense monitoring network on these volcanoes. This lava flow happened in a populated area. We talk about this with wildfires and floods. Should we rethink about where we're building things, or are people going to have a false sense of security? Hey, it's, it spute itself out, it's safe to go back and rebuild. That's probably a danger with just about any natural hazard

flooding wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes. And I think really we need to just sort of take a logical approach to land use planning. I don't think there's any place that's not going to be subject to some sort of natural hazards. So the key is recognizing what we can do to prevent those hazards from becoming natural disasters. All right. That's about all the time we have for today. Thank you, Michael Pollan, volcanologist at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

My pleasure. One last thing before we go. Hey, Chicago, join us Saturday, June 16th for a special night of science and music at the Harris Theater. We're going to talk with mathematician Eugenia Cheng, and hear her on the P. also. And we'll search for urban coyotes with WBEZ's Curious City, and we're bringing you a tale of space rocks falling from the sky, performed by Second City sketch comics. You don't want to miss it. That's on Saturday, June 16th. Tickets and info at ScienceFriday.com slash Chicago. ScienceFriday.com slash Chicago. That's going to be on Saturday, June 16th. We're going to have a lot, a lot of fun up there in Chicago. Charles Berkwist is our director. Senior producer Christopher Taliaata. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Heiler, and we have technical and engineering help.

As always, from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Jack Horowitz. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. If you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want. So every day now is Science Friday. Happy Mother's Day. I'm I Refledo in New York.