Science Friday - The Leap: The Volcano Whisperer

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

As a teenager living in St. Vincent, Richie Robertson saw first-hand what a volcanic eruption did to life on the island. Forty years later, he was the scientist the community turned to when the same volcano roared back to life. Richie’s colleague, Stacey Edwards of the UWI Seismic Research Centre, explains how Richie earned the trust of the community, and why it was important to have a Vincentian leading the way in a crisis.Guests: Dr. Richard Robertson, geologist at the UWI Seismic Research Centre Stacey Edwards, education & outreach manager at the UWI Seismic Research Centre“The Leap” is a 10-episode audio series that profiles scientists willing to take big risks to push the boundaries of discovery. It premieres on Science Friday’s podcast feed every Monday until July 21. “The Leap” is a production of the Hypothesis Fund, brought to you in partnership with Science Friday.Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, it's Flora Lichtenen, and this is Science Friday. Today in the podcast, we have the next episode in The Leap. This is a series I made with the Hypothesis Fund. And we're taking you to an erupting volcano where a scientist faced some tough choices. People of St. Vincent and Grenadines and residents in our blessed land. I hereby order the evacuation of all premises in the areas designated. Let's deal with the Lille, those with children, those with children at the front, please. In April 2021, Las Sufriere Volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent started exploding.

The long dormant Lasufre volcano erupting Friday. Holy, it's really here. My God. Thousands evacuating as ash rains down on the island of St. Vincent. If you're listening this, or if they're not listening, get the message to them. The volcano had been rumbling for months, but to get people evacuated in time, one scientist was tasked with predicting exactly when the volcano was going to blow. Good morning, Professor. Professor Robertson. Professor Richie Robertson. He's a volcanologist, the former director of the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Center and a world authority on La Saffreira volcano. He's got an important job and a fancy title. But this is how the people on St. Vincent see him.

Richie's a Royal Caribbean boy. He feels like one of us. That's Stacey Edwards, Ritchie's colleague. They've known each other for a long time. There are no airs about him. He's very, we would say very root-y. He struggles to put on ties. I mean, he's just very rooted in the Caribbean

in terms of his personality, his style, and his heart. And when his island needed someone the most, he was the one who stepped up, A born-and-bred Vincentian who struggles to put on ties, but was willing to put everything on the line to keep his community safe. There is no way you could monitor a volcano without a certain element of risk. It's just part of the job.

Yes, it is. This is The Leap, a new series about gutsy scientists who are risking their reputations, their careers, and even their lives, to uncover something new. When you think about the occupational hazards of science, stuff comes to mind. Toxic boss, difficulties raising money, running a lab, getting tenure. But the list typically doesn't include getting burned up in a pyroclastic flow.

Or whether your interpretation of data could mean life or death for thousands of people in your community. But that is Richie Robertson's brand of science. So how did he find himself here in this perilous, high-stakes job? This is an amazing story, really, given what I end up actually, doing. Richie's career traces back to one formative moment in his life, another eruption of the same Las Sufriere volcano. It was 1979, Richie was 18 years old, in school, in the art track. He had no plan to go into science. He'd barely taken a science class when La Sufriere started exploding. A volcanic eruption is really a big deal on a small island. It's a big deal full stop,

because if you see a volcano erupted, and when I say an eruption, our volcanoes erupt explosively. So when they erupt, you can't help but see them. Lassufre volcano looms large on St. Vincent. I mean, it's literally the highest peak in the island. But it's also a central character in the island's story, like a sleeping giant that occasionally wakes up and kills scores of people and destroys their homes. But in 1979, most people on the island

had never witnessed an eruption firsthand, including Ritchie. So the day of the eruption was a religious holiday. It was Good Friday, and so it was a public holiday. But that Good Friday you woke up, and what got you awake was the sound of the roaring mountain. And as you went outside, what you saw was a mushrooming cloud that just kept rising. And it appeared like if it was alive. It looked like a cauliflower shape that constantly expanded. I mean, that itself was impressive.

Ritchie lived far enough away to be safe, but his grandmother lived in the north, much closer. to the explosion. So Richie and his dad hopped in the car to bring her to safety. And of course, you went towards this thing, which is frightening and also, you know, exciting. Your young person is exciting. It's amazing. As he moved towards the north, what you saw was the whole country was on the move. It's like there were people who were walking. There were people with a little bundle, people on the back of donkeys, people who were in cars, and they were heading away from you. So you were heading towards this plume. and people are moving away.

So again, extremely exciting. The town where Ritchie's grandmother lived, Rosal, was pretty close to the volcano. Close enough that by the time you get to Rosal, you almost feel like you could touch the plume now, and it's still expanding. And the whole village is in upro, you know. People are trying to get out.

So we went to collect one person. It was an open vehicle. We went to collect one person. And when we went out, the entire back of the vehicle, filled with people and whatever belongings they had, the vehicle was raced. I'm packed with people.

You could barely, there are almost people jumping onto it that couldn't hole. Richie also volunteered in the evacuation shelters. He was a member of the cadets, a kind of youth national guard, and was dispatched to help.

At one point, 18-year-old Richie was running a makeshift church shelter in charge of dozens of adults, adults who were stressed, displaced, and arguing over their cramped living quarters. All of those kinds of issues,

never having dealt to them before, okay? So I didn't have another experience. Now I saw what they've volcano, the effect it was having on people. At the same time, the cadets were called in to help the scientists monitoring the volcano. The instruments needed to be watched every minute of the day, and Richie volunteered to take some shifts. I was then at the Belmont Observatory, looking at the drums. They had showed us certain things that if we saw, we had to wake them up and that kind of thing.

So I then had that to see. I guess as a young person, if you wanted to get an introduction to how things operate when a volcano goes, boom. I mean, now was it. While Richie was getting this intensive education in disaster response, he discovered that the people at the center of it were scientists. They held knowledge that all Vincentians were desperate to know. What was happening with the volcano? What might happen next?

And in fact, because they became so important, we all in Simizan got to hang on the words of the scientists. We call them all kinds of things. And we used to call them ologists. to everybody was an ologist, you know, because we've heard for the first time about these people that we call volcanologists and seismologists and geologists. These were people that we had never heard about before. And I was amazed, you know, when they speak, they just seem to have so much knowledge. They just seem to know everything with the volcano.

But there was something else, Richie noticed. What I noted was that all the scientists and all the professionals who were advising us were from outside of Sin Winston. I didn't see anybody who was of incension who was advising the government, who was advising them, telling him. And for some crazy reason, I decided that I would become that person. Why did it feel so important to have a Vincentian doing the advising? Like, why was that, why were you like, yeah, that needs to change? I guess at the time, I'm, I guess I was a young person. I was, to a large extent, given what I was doing at any time, I was very patriotic.

I was, you know, I was in cadets. and all these organizations, these youth organizations. So I always had that kind of very nationalistic mindset. And I'm still, to a large extent, very patriotic. You know, I've traveled all over the world, and I tend to relation to say that the only passport I have is a Vincentian passport. 1979 was historic for St. Vincent, politically too. A few months after the volcano erupted,

St. Vincent gained independence after nearly 200 years of British colonial rule. It was a time when a lot of Vincentians felt patriotic. And Richie did too. As a young Vincentian, I felt that, you know, if we had this system that was having such a big effect that we obviously would have to deal with, that we really needed to have the capacity to deal with it locally. Richie decided in that moment to make a complete left turn in his life. So I decided then that I would switch from being essentially an art student to becoming a scientist who would. who was a professional that understood volcanoes because I needed to help people in the intervention deal with the future runs.

But unlike 99.9% of 18-year-olds who wake up one day with a random career idea, Richie actually did it. He switched to the science track, he got a PhD in geology, and in a twist of fate beyond his control, when Las Sufriere Volcano woke up again, he was the scientist in charge. Almost exactly 42 years after that audits, audacious decision to switch paths. He was exactly where he dreamt he'd be.

I don't think I thought that I would actually end up being exactly in the position that you thought that you should be. I mean, it's surreal in a sense. I mean, you can't write that script. If you were writing the script, the next act would start in the year 2020. It was December. By then, Richie was the director of the Seismic Research Center. and was in charge of monitoring the volcano, when suddenly it puffed back to life.

There was an observation by a guy who lived in the same, the same rose hall where my grandmother lived. In fact, a guy who's actually a distant relative of mine, he woke up the morning and he started to see white steam emitted from the volcano. Usually you should not see steam from the volcano. So Richie dispatched a local team to look into it, and that team climbs up the volcano. And while they are at this summit,

They called me and they tell me what they were seeing. Immediately as soon as they told me what they were seen, I realized what was happened? The volcano was in fact erupting. Las Zafrera volcano was slowly oozing out new magma, creating a kind of pancake or dome in the crater. It was in a gentle phase of its eruption, but Ritchie knew that could change.

So, for instance, one of the volcanoes that ramps up very fast. So I told them, get off the volcano as quickly as you can. If the volcanoes erupted, you should not be where you are. And we then mobilize a team to go to the island as quickly as possible. So Richie, who was based in Trinidad at this point, is dispatched to St. Vincent with a small team. It's peak COVID. So there's all these complicated restrictions. And in fact, he quarantines at the very observatory he volunteered at 42 years earlier.

This time, his scientific objective is predicting the future. He needs to figure out exactly when the volcano is going to transition from this gentle dome-building stage where the magma is confined to the crater, to the explosive stage where it starts shooting magma out onto the flanks of the volcano. Where people are living. So it's key. Once the explosions happen, you need to physically get people away because if they stay there, they're more than likely going to die.

The trickiest part was getting the timing right. Ritchie had to give the government 24 to 48 hours of notice. That was the sweet spot. Because if you said it was going to explode and it doesn't necessarily. explode it in a certain time. And you have moved people. What will happen is that the people will go back. And it's a chance that when they go back is where it would actually explode.

Predicting something's going to happen in 24 hours seems difficult to me. Like, how do you check a bunch of boxes? Or how do you do that? There's not a fixed set of boxes that you take. But there are set of signals that you would expect to see. Certainly in terms of the seismic instruments, in terms of the gas. There's a set of things that wouldn't. to you that fresh magma is getting close to the surface.

And once you get to that stage, you get a good estimation of what it's likely to happen in the short term. Which is what scientists do all the time. Capture data, integrate that data, draw a conclusion. It's just that in Ritchie's case, that science meant life or death for 20,000 people. And you remember, there was a little bit more pressure on me, personally, because I'm not just any scientist. I'm a Vincentian scientist,

and I think the Vincentians would not have been very impressed if we had gotten it wrong. So there was a lot of pressure to basically make the right call. There was also a lot of pressure to make sure Vincentians heeded the call when it came. And while that wasn't strictly Richie's job as a scientist, he and his collaborators at the Seismic Research Center made it their mission to build trust

before the volcano blue. Trust is critical. This is Stacey Edwards again. She's the manager of education and outreach at the Seismic Research Center. If the public does not trust you as the agency or the entity giving that information,

then they're going to do their own thing. And it's even doubly, triply, I don't know, quadruply important in these social media times when everybody is an expert. Making sure Richie became the expert that people trusted was a big foot.

focus for Richie and Stacey. And the fact that Richie was a local, with only a Vincentian passport, cut both ways. On the upside... I sounded like them. So you tend to have a certain affinity to people that sound like you. It's an actual human thing.

You know, you hear an accent, this song like where you come from, you know, you hear them even more. So I think that helped. But it also wasn't that simple. They don't have to prove themselves, huh? Many in the context on these kind of global South countries

where some people may have a perception that if it's outside of the Caribbean, it has to be better. If it was made outside of the Caribbean, if the person was trained outside the Caribbean, it must be better, right? And I think that's all part of a kind of colonial legacy and mindset. In the Caribbean, our countries are relatively new. And I think coming out of that kind of legacy, it means that you have to work extra hard to ensure that you're maintaining that trust, that we are the authority, we know what we're doing, you need to listen to us, because it's easy to hit, to pay attention to voices from outside. So while Ritchie was monitoring the volcano for signs that it was going to start exploding,

he was also doing regular public dispatches. Hi, Richie. How are you doing? Hi, good morning, Sisi. I'm fine. Keeping the public informed. The latest updates with Lasufreya. Well, it's continued to do what it has been done for the last, since it started for the last week. For many months, the volcano didn't do much. And then in early April, things started to change.

Professor Robertson, we've had some increasing activity, particularly this afternoon. There was a series of earthquakes, a seismic swarm, and that can be a key indicator that the volcano is going to go explosive. Richie knew he was going to have to make this call soon, and he felt he needed one more instrument on the volcano to get the data he needed. What was called a multi-gas meter that detects different kinds of gases coming out from the volcano, because we were concerned about whether sulfur dioxide,

which is one of the things that we expected to come out just before an explosion happens. It was a key piece of data, but to get that meter in place, Ritchie and a team had to go onto the volcano, a volcano that was in transition, a volcano that could start exploding anytime. So yes, we were on the volcano

because we took a calculated risk that we needed to get additional information to tell us when the explosion was going to happen. Talk me through the risks of going, going on to a erupting volcano. Like, what are the risks of that? Apart from dying. Well, how could you die? Tell me all the ways.

Well, it's a really, really bad way. There are no more ways. If the volcano is exploding, what essentially it does, it's breaking up masses of hard rock and essentially pelting it, ejecting it into the atmosphere. If you're on the volcano itself at the summit, the fragments of rock that could fall on you on your head, the very least they will do is give you a serious headache. The worst thing they could do is they could basically squash you into the ground. So you have problems with falling rocks. You have problems with the fact that you also go in closer to the way the gas concentrations are such that you could actually be harmed by gas.

So those are the falling rocks, the gases. but one of the most dangerous things from exploding volcanoes is the things that they call paraclastic density currents. Another name for them is a glowing avalanche. It's like a hot, rapidly moving, and when I say rapidly moving,

moving faster than 100, 100, 200 kilometers power, shooting down the mountain side. It strips everything off the mountainside, all the trees, all the grass. So say if you're on the volcano at the time when it explode, and one of those things come down it, you would end up in the sea

as a child remain. So, so, so. Yeah, it's not, it's not for the weak hearted. Do you have, do you have family kids?

Like, do there are people who are like, please do not. Yeah. Well, hopefully, don't know listen to this podcast and I don't hear anything that I get up to. No, I don't,

I try to, minimize the extent to which they're away of somebody risk like this. Yeah. I don't think they, I don't think my daughter also like the fact that I take so much risk.

Yeah. They don't need to have the details. I take a calculator risk, and they don't need to worry about that. That day in early April, Richie and Crew got dropped on the volcano via helicopter. They've got thermal suits on and gas masks, and they're lugging a bunch of heavy gear. A couple 12-volt batteries like you have in your car, solar panels, pipes. They'd have to make a couple trips from the landing spot to the top of the volcano. When suddenly, they got a call from the observant.

We got the call that something was happening, and not the helicopter, they had told the helicopter come back for us. The observatory registered more earthquakes. It was another seismic swarm. Remember, this is a key indicator that the volcano could start exploding at any second. What were you thinking when you heard that? That we need to get off the mountain as quickly as possible. They jumped in the helicopter and got off safely, but Richie was determined to get this instrument on the volcano. When the earthquake stopped, he went back to put the meter in place. After he got off the volcano, the earthquakes picked back up, and things didn't quiet down again.

Anything that we didn't finish, that was it. We didn't come back after that. That was it. That was your last window. That was the last window, yes. You snuck it in. Yes, we did. We did. Just barely. Just barely. At this point, things were getting tense. It was crunch time for Richie.

And you can hear the urgency in his voice, in his dispatches to the public. What should people be doing now? They should really make sure that they know exactly where they are. You're the orange zone, red zone. What's your plan? What's the community plan? What's your individual?

A few days later, he'd seen enough. He told the government he thought the eruption would happen soon. I hereby order the evacuation of all premises in the areas designated as the red zone. And then, Ritchie had to wait. And that was agonaut. Because once you had made the call, the then challenge comes is that questioning whether or not it's the right call or not. It's kind of a funny thing. You don't really want it to go explosive because you know what's going to happen when it says goes explosive.

It's going to damage things. It's going to mess up the country. It's going to cause a lot of harm, you know, make life difficult for a lot of people, which is why it did. But you want it to happen also because if it happens, scientifically is interesting to look at, but also it justifies your existence in a sense. all these emotions were swirled up, the dread of the destruction coming, the thrill of seeing it erupt. I mean, scientifically, it's kind of what you live for as a volcanologist. And then the overwhelming worry was the evacuation call correct.

For me personally, I think that was somebody most difficult time in the entire eruption, actually. But it didn't last long. The volcano has spoken. The volcano is erupted. There's another explosive eruption ongoing. A big part of smoking. I don't know if I can hear the rumbling, but they actually hear the volcano rumbling. Look at that.

And what we're seeing there is a huge plume of ash. Wow. Las Zafrere volcano exploded the day after Richie called it. He got it right. Many people had already been evacuated by the time it started spewing lava. The rest were on their way. No one died. But there wasn't time for a victory lab,

Because even though 20,000 people were evacuated from immediate harm, there was other fallout from the eruption. You just had tons of ash being ejected. After a while, we couldn't see anything. There's a lot of ash everywhere. It's like snow. The car got stuck here, trying to get the car out. My feet were literally sinking inches.

The entire landscape was bathed in white, gray ash. You're basically living through this doomsy kind of landscape. You know, fire and bring. stone kind of thing. At one point during the eruption, rock started dropping from the sky. Stones jabbing now. Stones japping now. Bigger stones dropping now.

The ash was so bad that the power system shut down. So on midnight, on Saturday, the entire island went black. No power. And of course, the entire country is in panic mode. You can hear it in people's voices from interviews during this time. including Richies. You see films with people in war zones. This is being a war zone right now with the volcano,

so we shouldn't be here. Yo, this is like a twilight zone. It's very, very scary, Joe. I can't believe this is my beautiful hometown. It's a very emotional time. This is uncertainty. You're not sure when the eruption is going to end. You know, many people had to leave their homes,

and all of this is happening within the back. ground of the pandemic. The volcano spewed ash for days. People were sequestered in their homes. And just like in 1979, people in St. Vincent were hanging in the ologist's words. We started to go on every morning. Every morning, at a particular time,

people would tune in live, and they will get an update about what's happening. This is NBC from studios at Richmond Hill in Capitol, Kingston. But this time, the experts weren't from somewhere else. of the Coast Guard boat. Richie and many members of his scientific team were local to the Caribbean. And Vincentians all over the country shouted them out for what was a relatively smooth response to a huge disaster.

I've seen some comments on social media. People are commending the team in terms of the evacuation order. They say the team did a good work. So it seems that people are giving you all, you know, good props. I mean, we thank people for that. You know, it's the hardest thing to make into opposition to what is happening. In terms of responding to the crisis, managing the people, managing the situation, which was really, really hard.

It didn't overwhelm the system. It was done like if, okay, oh, we have volcanic corruptions every day. And by making something so dangerous feel manageable and under control, Ritchie didn't just earn the public's trust here in their pride. He really became a rock star for a little while. I got kind of famous. In fact, you got to the state where people would, you know, like a celebrity, they would ask you for a picture with them, a selfie and an autograph.

And yeah, I used to run from people after a way. It's pretty rare for a scientist to become a national treasure. But in Ritchie's case, it makes sense. Because it wasn't just about him. He became a symbol for something bigger. I think it is super important for people. for us, I should say, because I'm from here, for us to see models where we are solving our own problems

and we don't need to depend on somebody who's from a bigger country or somebody who is white or somebody who has more money or whatever to solve our problems. Ritchie proved what he felt was true all along that Vincentians could handle it. They could take care of themselves. The risks he took a lot of. the way weren't just in service of people, but this idea.

Because on a small Caribbean island, this version of self-determination handling hazards is especially meaningful. As we speak now, a hurricane has just passed through my homeland, and that's a routine thing. We are small islands over a large area of space, and we're impacting by lots of hazards. We have a lot of issues to deal with. And really, we have to find a way. which we could live sustainably here. And the only way we could do it

is trying to find ways of solving our own problems in our own ways. What did it feel like for you to sort of be fulfilling your destiny? I still pension myself. I keep saying I could have, you know, I could have died next day and I could have feel that, you know,

I fulfilled my destiny life, kind of. The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. The show is hosted by me, Flora Lichten, and produced by Annette Heist. Editing by Saeed Tijan Thomas Jr., Zhao Van Gay, and David Sanford, fact-checking by Nicole Pasulka, mixing and scoring by Emma Munger, music by Joshua Budo Karp. Thanks to Rod Stewart, and thank you to you for listening. Ira's back tomorrow on the podcast with a story about using CRISPR gene editing

to speed up the process of breeding some of our favorite foods, like think moving genes from the eggplant to the tomato. The modern tomatoes is to hundreds of years to develop. from the wild species. And now we can do it basically in one generation. That's tomorrow on the podcast.