Page 1231 – Physics World

Home » Page 1231

From the lab to the marketplace

Many physical scientists at some point in their careers believe they have a brilliant idea for a commercial product based on their research. But there is a world of difference between excitedly sharing that idea with a colleague over a cup of coffee and actually creating a successful product that can slot nicely into a gap in the market. In this pair of video interviews, Physics World meets business professionals involved in the process of commercializing scientific research.

In this first interview, venture capitalist Stan Reiss explains what people in his profession do. Reiss, who works for the international firm Matrix Partners, talks about how spin-off companies can seek financial investment from a range of different sources, including venture capitalists and angel investors. He also discusses the types of things he is personally looking for when deciding whether to invest in a science-based spin-off.

“Not all markets are big, not all inventions are equally useful,” he says. “If you’re going to take that kind of risk, particularly in a physics-based thing that has a lot of technical risk in it, then that risk only makes sense if the upside is commensurate.”

Later in the interview, Reiss explains what business professionals mean when they talk about the “valley of death”, a phase all spin-offs must navigate in the early stages of product development. “That is a situation where you’ve gotten off the ground, you’ve built the team, and the results are not yet there in order for you to be commercial,” he says. “In physics-based start-ups that happens very, very frequently because physics is hard and commercializing physics can take a very long time.”

In the second interview we meet Leon Sandler, who works at the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. Sandler explains how the centre was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in order to support the commercialization of technology developed at the university. He talks about the types of innovation it nurtures and the different forms of support that it can provide. “What we’re doing here at MIT is really taking science from the lab and trying to build those enabling technologies that the Amazons, the Microsofts, the Apples and the Googles will actually use later,” he says.

Sandler explains that it is essential for spin-offs to possess a range of skills and knowledge. “You generally want more than one person. Someone who understands business, who understands finance, who understands marketing. A technical person who not only understands what the technology can do, but really has the engineering skills to build something, to produce it. And the fundamental thing in a company is that you need good people and leadership,” he says.

You can find out more the process of commercializing research in the field of materials science via the TMR+ blog. It is published by IOP Publishing, which also publishes Physics World.

Qubits team up to detect errors

For the tiny units of quantum information known as qubits, teamwork pays off. So say researchers based in Austria and Spain, who have stitched together a record seven qubits in a way that enables detection of errors in any of the individual qubits.

Qubits, like the classical bits in today’s computers, have two possible states – up or down, for example. Unlike classical bits, however, qubits can also be in a superposition of both up and down simultaneously. Individual qubits can then be quantum-mechanically entangled with one another, such that they share a single superposed state. Using these capabilities, quantum computers promise to someday perform ultrafast computations to quickly solve certain problems, such as factoring large numbers and searching huge databases.

Fragile states

But quantum-computer developers must first overcome a major challenge: quantum states are fragile and easily shattered by interactions with the environment. These interactions lead to errors, such as a physical qubit flipping its state or becoming out of phase with its neighbours. Therefore, to preserve quantum states long enough to perform useful algorithms, scientists need to join physical qubits into information-processing units called “logical qubits” that can detect and correct errors in their individual components. Researchers have entangled up to five qubits in ways that allowed detection of bit-flip and phase-flip errors separately, but nobody has demonstrated a scheme that can detect both kinds of errors at once. For a fully error-correcting logical qubit, theory predicts that at least seven entangled physical qubits are needed.

Seeking to make such a logical qubit, the research team, led by Rainer Blatt of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, confined seven calcium ions in a trap with electric fields. The ions were lined up like beads on a string and were cooled to near absolute zero. At this temperature, two of the ions’ electronic energy levels can function as qubit states. The scientists then entangled the qubits and created errors by flipping the state, the phase or both the state and phase of one qubit at a time using lasers. Because of how the qubits were entangled, the researchers could tell which qubit had an error and what kind of error it was by measuring light fluorescing from the trapped ions.

It’s alive!

To actually correct errors, the team will need to incorporate into its set-up at least one additional qubit to “read out” errors occurring in the other qubits. To scale up towards a working quantum computer, scientists will also need to develop methods of trapping ions not just in lines but in 2D grids. These steps, while challenging, are “definitely on the agenda”, says Blatt. He says his team’s achievement is “the first decisive step…towards what I call keeping a qubit alive”.

Blatt’s team also performed computational operations on its logical qubit by using lasers to change the states of individual qubits in a controlled way. The researchers showed that they could reliably perform most operations without destroying the qubits’ delicate entangled superpositions. By adding additional qubits to their scheme, the scientists think they can perform all of the operations needed for quantum algorithms.

The achievement “is an interesting and important step” towards a working quantum computer, says John Martinis, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the work. He points out that the new study confirms theoretical predictions of how quantum error correction should work. “People expected it to be correct, but it’s really nice to have them directly demonstrate that.” He also applauds Blatt’s team for creating the first logical qubit from seven physical qubits. In April Martinis’s team reported entangling five superconducting qubits and performing nearly error-free operations on them. His team is now working on a similar experiment with more qubits. “We obviously have to catch up now,” he says.

The research is published in Science.

Shutdown of nuclear-waste site threatens neutrino lab

An explosion and a series of radioactive leaks have forced the closure of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), which is located in a salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico, US. The incident has put a temporary halt to the Enriched Xenon Observatory-200 (EXO-200) particle-physics experiment. Installed at WIPP in 2007, the experiment seeks to answer whether neutrinos are Majorana particles – entities that are their own antiparticles. Principal investigator Giorgio Gratta, a Stanford University physicist, hopes to restart operations in early autumn. But for now, he says, “the experiment is closed off”.

WIPP, which holds low- and medium-level radioactive waste, has provided an effective working environment for EXO-200. The experiment is installed 665 m below ground, where it is shielded from cosmic rays, while the salt in the mine produces much less background radioactivity than other types of rock. But February’s explosion and leakage, which occurred nine days after a truck caught fire inside the facility, left no choice but to close the plant to prevent more radioactive material from reaching the surface.

Suspicious drums

Authorities have sealed off the areas containing suspect drums of waste, and are changing the above-ground filters that received material during the fire, explosion and release of radiation. They are also investigating the cause of the explosion, so far without a conclusive result. “We have no finalized timetable for when we’ll resume waste-disposal operations,” says WIPP spokesperson Ben Williams.

EXO-200, which had been undergoing an upgrade, is one of the most sensitive experiments to search for neutrinoless double β decay. Conventional double β decay occurs when two neutrons in an unstable nucleus become protons with the ejection of two electrons and two antineutrinos from the nucleus. EXO-200 was the first experiment to observe this behaviour in xenon. In the neutrinoless form, which has yet to be observed, the electrons alone carry away all the energy from the reaction – and theory indicates that this is possible only if the neutrinos are their own antiparticles.

Postponed upgrade

EXO-200’s first two years of operation revealed no sign of the reaction, according to results reported last week (“EXO-200 narrows its search for Majorana neutrinos”). The now-postponed upgrade, which involves improving the detector and upgrading the electronics, is intended to improve the experiment’s sensitivity by a factor of three. The team is also designing a larger and more sensitive experiment that will have to be located more deeply underground and on a more stable foundation than WIPP’s salt mine. A possible location for that experiment is the SNOLAB underground lab in Ontario, Canada.

Gratta hopes, however, that his team will be allowed back into the plant early this month. “The tentative schedule has us restarting in early fall,” he says. “If we couldn’t get underground for a year we would lose interest and concentrate on the design of the new experiment. But I see no evidence we have to worry about that.”

Science on ice: photographing physicists in Antarctica

It is my search for adrenaline and adventure that led me to Antarctica. As a photographer who specializes in taking scientific and industrial images, I have travelled to many locations around the world that are often dangerous and hard to reach. Often, I’m obliged to wear specific clothing and equipment that protect me from the environment I am in, and for me this difficulty and danger are a large part of the attraction of my job.

But my trip to Antarctica was one of my most exciting yet. After months of research, meetings and logistical planning, in October last year I set off on a photographic project to document research supported by the Italian Science Foundation in the Antarctic. My destination was the Italian Mario Zucchelli Station, at Terra Nova Bay on the Ross Sea, and later the French–Italian Concordia Research Station, situated 1200 km inland on the Antarctic Plateau at an elevation of 3233 m.

Two photos: a man in bulky cold-weather clothing including goggles and cloth over his mouth; a glacier with sky and sun behind — **On reflection** (Left) The environment in Antarctica requires specific clothing and equipment, but also provides an opportunity to see views free from atmospheric pollution. (Right) After taking a few images, Enrico Sacchetti realized that glaciers in the Antarctic are not purely white, but contain many shades of blue. This is because a glacier absorbs more of the red wavelengths entering it than it does of the blue. (Courtesy: Enrico Sacchetti/PNRA)

Getting there was a feat in itself– a 30-hour journey to Christchurch, New Zealand with about 50 kilos of baggage – followed, after a 36-hour stopover, by another 8-hour flight to Antarctica on-board a noisy C-130 military plane. I factored in the stay in New Zealand as I did not want to risk arriving on the ice so tired that I could not be immediately active.

As soon as I stepped off the C-130, the alien nature of Antarctica was truly jolting. I feasted on infinite views of the ice, which gave me an incredible feeling of isolation; I could taste the air, which was bitingly cold at –22.5 °C. But, as a photographer, what struck me most was the quality of the light. Almost completely absent of atmospheric pollution, the air was crystal clear. Following the researchers on planes, helicopters and snowmobiles to remote sites gave me a unique perspective of Antarctica and its scientific adventurers; I felt privileged to visit these places that almost no-one has seen before.

Wide snowy landscape with two snowmobiles ridden by figures dressed in red — **Adventures in Antarctica** Enrico Sacchetti followed researchers to remote sites via snowmobiles. (Courtesy: Enrico Sacchetti/PNRA)

At Terra Nova Bay I photographed glaciers as well as scientists collecting silverfish egg samples, before travelling inland to Dome C – one of several summits of the flat Antarctic Plateau, and the site of Concordia Station. The transparency of the atmosphere here makes the station well suited to astronomy – stars can be observed even while the Sun is at an elevation of 38°. Experiments located here include the International Robotic Antarctic Infrared Telescope (IRAIT), which is used to study cool stellar objects in our galaxy in the infrared range, and the Antarctic Search for Transiting Exoplanets (ASTEP) 400 optical telescope, designed to identify exoplanets that are transiting their stars. Off-site there is also part of the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) – an international radar network for studying the upper atmosphere and ionosphere.

Two photos: a group of people in red snow suits hold a drone overhead as another figure digs the snow; a lone figure in red holds a weather balloon aloft — **Up and down** (Left) Scientists from the Italian Science Council institutes ISMAR and ISSIA drill a hole in the 2 m thick ice in Terra Nova Bay for capturing silverfish egg samples. (Right) Evening launch of a meteorological balloon into the upper atmosphere above Concordia Research Station. (Courtesy: Enrico Sacchetti/PNRA)

To my surprise, the photographic equipment held up perfectly in temperatures of –48.9 °C. I’m certain that the low humidity was a major factor. After all, Antarctica is one of the driest places on Earth – the Antarctic Plateau being the world’s largest desert.

Although I faced cold weather and high winds, these hardships did not take anything away from the experience of being surrounded by vast natural beauty and enveloped by such pure light. In fact, the inherent difficulties of the White Continent made me appreciate each and every image I shot.

Row of large aerials in snowy landscape — **Wintry web** Part of the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network, installed in 2013 near Concordia Research Station. (Courtesy: Enrico Sacchetti/PNRA)

Extra dimensions, other-worldly football, the ISS at night and more

By Tushna Commissariat

This week, we came across the above video on “extra dimensions”, in which physicist Don Lincoln talks about the possible physical reality of such dimensions and why we need them. The video begins with Lincoln pointing out just how weak a force gravity is, especially when compared with, say, magnetism. He then goes on to talk about how gravity may exist in more than the three dimensions we experience, making sure to point out that these “extra dimensions” are not of the Hollywood variety in which a different reality may exist. This video is part of Fermilab’s “Big Mysteries” video series – be sure to take a look at the rest.

(more…)

The cure is success

Jim Gates. (Courtesy: John T Consoli, Cheltenham Science Festival)

By Margaret Harris

Last Sunday I went up to Cheltenham for the final day of the town’s annual Science Festival. My plan was to meet the University of Maryland theorist Jim Gates before lunch and then stay to hear his lecture on science and policy.

I was already somewhat familiar with Gates’ research thanks to a feature he wrote for Physics World in June 2010. I could also have made an educated guess about his activities as a member of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST). However, I knew very little about his personal history before his evening lecture, when he was interviewed by the physicist and science presenter Jim Al-Khalili.

Gates was born in 1950 and grew up during a period when African-Americans faced severe institutionalized discrimination across the US. However, being from a military family helped insulate him from some of the worst effects, and he told the audience that he didn’t feel the full impact until his family moved to Florida after he turned 11. For the first time, he attended a racially segregated school, and there, he said, he had “the very curious experience of having to learn how to be black”.

(more…)

Germany set to pull out of €2bn radio telescope

The head of the €2bn Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is confident that the project will go ahead, despite Germany saying that it will pull out of the project in 12 months’ time. In a press conference held in Sicily today, where more than 250 radio astronomers gathered to discuss the project, SKA director-general Philip Diamond reiterated that the withdrawal would not have a “long-term effect” on what will be the world’s largest radio telescope when built in 2023 in Australia and southern Africa.

Progress was also made at the meeting on drawing together the 130 chapters that will make up the updated SKA “science book”, which will be released by the end of this year. Appearing 10 years after the previous version was published, the new SKA science book will set the direction of what will be the world’s most sensitive radio telescope. Germany was the third largest contributor to the publication, behind Italy and the UK.

Germany’s decision to withdraw was announced last week following a letter sent last month by Georg Schütte, the state secretary of the Germany’s federal science ministry (BMBF), to SKA director-general Philip Diamond. The letter informed SKA officials that Germany’s membership would end on 30 June 2015 – only two years after it first joined the organization. The BMBF took the decision because it is apparently under financial pressure as it has to find money for two large German-based projects – the X-ray Free Electron Laser in Hamburg and the Facility for Anti-Proton Research in Darmstadt.

This has come completely out of the blue. It will have a catastrophic impact on German astronomy
Michael Kramer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn

“We’re obviously disappointed by Germany’s decision,” Diamond told Physics World. Although he says that the withdrawal will not have a major impact on the project “in the near future”, Germany’s decision has caused some concern among researchers. Germany had been expected to contribute towards the SKA’s construction and had already spent around €1m on a membership fee and contributed around €2.8m towards the €140m cost of the SKA’s design. Moreover, the move to pull out was apparently taken without consultation with the astronomy community. “This has come completely out of the blue,” says Michael Kramer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. “It will have a catastrophic impact on German astronomy.”

Germany has already played a major role in determining what science the SKA will do, with the German radio-astronomy community having been involved in a number of science working groups to define this. “German industry is involved in some of the design work too,” adds Diamond.

Extreme sensitivity

Germany is currently the 10th full member of the SKA Organisation, which includes researchers from Australia, Canada, China, Italy and South Africa working together to build a giant facility in the form of more than 3000 antennae with a total collecting area of one million square metres spread across Australia and southern Africa. The main site in South Africa is in the Karoo semi-desert region more than 500 km north-east of Cape Town, while most of the Australia antennae will be in the Murchison region, more than 300 km from the nearest town, Geraldton, on the country’s west coast.

Construction of the first phase of the project is scheduled to begin in 2018. It will see an array of 254 dishes built in South Africa covering the bulk of the high- and mid-frequencies of the radio spectrum, while Australia will host the low-frequency section of the array with 96 dishes accompanied by approximately 250,000 individual dipole antennas. Astronomers will use the telescope to probe the early universe by looking as far back into time as the first 100 million years after the Big Bang. It will also search for life and planets, as well as study the nature of dark energy.

Design work for the first phase of the SKA got under way in 2013 and one of the key aims for 2014–2016 is to secure funding for the construction of the array. If all goes to plan, the first science results will appear from 2020 onwards, with the first phase of the array scheduled to be fully complete in 2023. Construction is scheduled to begin on phase two of the telescope in 2023 and is due to be finished by 2030.

Knock-on effect

The SKA Organisation will now have to manage Germany’s withdrawal, including finding other partners to pay for what the country might have contributed towards construction. Construction costs have yet to be divided between member states, but estimates – as a starting point to negotiations – show Germany would have been set to pay about 10–12% of the total. “That makes this decision to pull out even more baffling, as we don’t yet know how much Germany would have needed to pay,” says Kramer, who adds that his institute will continue to contribute to the SKA.

However, Diamond is hopeful that if Germany does not backtrack, then other countries could step into its shoes. “There are a number of other countries actively interested in joining the SKA, and we expect to see more in the next few years as we ramp up our funding search, which we’ve only just started,” says Diamond. But he thinks the real losers in the withdrawal will be German industry, which will not now be able to compete for engineering contracts to build the SKA, as well as the German science community, which will now find it harder to get time on the telescope. “That’s unfortunate given Germany’s long tradition of radio astronomy,” adds Diamond. “But interest in SKA science is strong in Germany, and we believe the German scientific community will continue to work with us, and we will support them in that.”

A mixed bag of science books

By Margaret Harris

The longlist for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books has been announced today, and, with a few exceptions, I’m not impressed.

I’ll begin with the exceptions. Of the six books on the 12-strong longlist that have come across my desk as Physics World’s reviews editor, two of them – Philip Ball’s Serving the Reich and Pedro Ferreira’s The Perfect Theory – fully deserve to be in contention for the £25,000 prize. I reviewed Ball’s book myself and found it fascinating, and although Physics World’s review of Ferreira’s book won’t be published until July, I can reveal that the reviewer found it “timely, expert and highly readable”. I also gave a pass mark to Brian Clegg’s Dice World, which is a good, serviceable treatment of a topic – quantum randomness – that deserves more love than it gets. Congratulations to all three authors.

(more…)

Using magnetic cooling for ‘green’ refrigeration

A large, rotational magnetocaloric effect – which could be used as the basis for a low-temperature magnetic refrigeration device – has been observed in crystals of the compound HoMn₂O₅, according to research carried out by scientists in Canada and Bulgaria. This finding expands our knowledge of magnetocaloric materials, adding to our progress towards a practical and environmentally friendly magnetic cooler that might be usable in a domestic setting.

Hot and cold

In recent times, the potential of magnetic refrigeration techniques as an alternative to traditional, vapour-compression solutions has been attracting considerable attention. This is mainly thanks to the lower energy demands of the technique, and the fact that it is not reliant on hazardous fluids. Such devices take advantage of the magnetocaloric effect – a phenomenon in which certain materials change temperature in response to an externally applied magnetic field. Such fields cause the magnetic dipoles of the atoms within magnetocaloric compounds to align. To balance out this decrease in entropy – and thereby satisfy the second law of thermodynamics – the motion of the atoms also becomes more disordered, and the material heats up. In contrast, when the applied field is removed, the process reverses and the material cools. In magnetic refrigerators, these temperature changes can be harnessed, using a fluid or gas, to drive a heat pump.

The cooling potential of a magnetic refrigerator is proportional to both the size of the applied field and the magnetic moment of the active material being used. While alloys of gadolinium are conventionally associated with the magnetocaloric effect, materials with greater cooling potential are being actively sought. To this end, researchers from the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada and the Bulgarian Academy of Science set out to examine the magnetocaloric effect in the manganese compound HoMn₂O₅. This material is attractive both for its resistance to corrosion and for its insulating properties, which prevent energy losses from eddy currents induced by varying the applied magnetic field.

Rotated fields

While expecting to observe only the standard magnetocaloric effect in the compound, the researchers were surprised to discover that, at a temperature of 10 K, HoMn₂O₅ also exhibits a large magnetocaloric effect when simply rotated by 90° within a constant magnetic field. Such an effect is caused by the material experiencing a different magnetic response depending on its orientation. This makes the compound a candidate for use in a rotary magnetic cooler: an established variation of the standard magnetic refrigeration solution, in which repeated rotations of the active material are used to effect cooling. The researchers propose, for example, that their material might be employed to liquify hydrogen or helium for use as a heat-transfer fluid.

The advantage of the rotary approach comes from the simplification of the refrigeration device. “The magnetization–demagnetization process when using [the] standard magnetocaloric effect generally requires a large mechanical energy for moving the active material in and out of the magnetic field source,” explains lead author Mohamed Balli, a physicist at the Université de Sherbrooke. In contrast, keeping the active material within the field leads to not only an improvement in efficiency, but also a more compact device. Additionally, Balli notes, “the implementation of such [an] effect allows the conception of rotary magnetic refrigerators working at high frequency, leading to a large cooling power”.

Having demonstrated the potential of HoMn₂O₅ for application in rotary magnetic refrigerators, the researchers are now exploring the possibility of enhancing the cooling effect in the compound – along with seeking other materials with similar properties, especially those that might function at room temperature.

The research is described in Applied Physics Letters.

From the past, a fiery warning

I wanted to dislike this book. After all, there are so many books out there about volcanoes already. Did we really need another? But Island on Fire is interesting. It focuses on one particular eruption, rather than volcanoes in general, and it also investigates what the consequences would be if such an eruption were to happen again. Using accounts written during the eruption itself, Island on Fire documents the evolution of an important event in volcanic history through the eyes of those who experienced it.

The eruption in question is not a well-publicized one such as that of Vesuvius in 79 AD, Mount St Helens in 1980, Montserrat in 1995 or even Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. Nor is it some mysterious event that happened millions of years ago. Rather, it is a “forgotten” eruption that took place in 1783 – which, while obviously not within living memory, certainly feels a lot closer to home. The eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki in that year was not the first to have an impact far beyond the island itself, and it would certainly not be the last. But unusually for an historic eruption, we have a very detailed eyewitness account of its effects.

Much of what we know about the 1783 Laki eruption comes from the writings of Reverend Jón Steingrím-sson – an early volcanologist, natural scientist and priest whose parish lay directly in the path of the eruption. His story forms a central part of Island on Fire. Beginning on 8 June 1783, Steingrímsson observed the changing mood of the volcano as earthquakes heralded a rise in river levels; a cloud of “vog”, or volcanic smog, settled over the island; ash fell from the sky; and finally lava began flowing down the valleys on Laki’s flanks. Over a period of a month, numerous villages and farms in the surrounding area were destroyed by lava flows or covered in ash, and by 20 July 1783 it looked as though the lava would next consume Steingrímsson’s own village of Klaustur and the chapel where he preached. On that day – a Sunday – he preached for rather longer than usual, leading the congregation in prayers that the village and people would be spared. When the service was over and they went outside, they saw that the lava had stopped advancing. As a result of this apparent miracle, Steingrím-sson became a celebrity and was dubbed the “Fire Priest”.

We now know that this episode marked a change in the activity at Laki, and that while Klaustur was indeed spared from the lava flows, the devastation was far from over. In the months that followed, Steingrímsson continued to document the effects of the eruption on local people and their livelihoods, including the horrific poisoning of both animals and humans by volcanic fluorine, which could be inhaled or ingested with the ash. By the end of the eight-month eruption, half of Iceland’s livestock and 20% of its human population were dead.

Today, Steingrímsson is well known not only in Iceland, but also in volcanological circles worldwide thanks to his careful documentation of the progress of the eruption and its effects. And like Steingrímsson’s reputation, the consequences of Laki’s eruption were not confined to remote farms and villages in Iceland. The outside world first heard of the eruption after travellers to the island returned to Europe or the Americas, but by then, people in those places were already experiencing their own unusual and ghastly phenomena.

Between 17 and 23 June 1783, a mysterious warm haze began drifting across northern parts of the UK, Scandinavia and eventually much of central Europe, engulfing the area in an acidic mist that scorched crops. The haze extended from sea level up to at least 3000 m, where it was reported by shepherds in the Dauphiné Alps. It smelt sulphurous and left a bitter aftertaste. Occasionally, ash fell through the haze and was spotted as far away as Venice. By July the haze had reached the Altai Mountains in Asia, and there are reports of a severe dry fog in central China. Records from South America and Alaska likewise suggest strange happenings that summer.

These unusual weather conditions led to sudden and violent thunderstorms and floods, followed by an unusually severe winter in both Europe and the US. The American scientist Benjamin Franklin, who spent some time in France during the worst of the haze and then returned to the US in time to endure the cold winter, was apparently the first to suggest that these unusual phenomena might be connected to the eruption in Iceland. Even more astutely, Franklin also suggested that if it could be shown that hard winters in the past were preceded by hot summers, there might be scope to make preparations if this were to happen again. This is probably the first recognition of a link between volcanoes and climate change.

The effects of the Laki eruption were widespread and devastating. Estimates of the death toll range from a conservative 9350 to a cool 6 million, and there is even speculation that the combination of harsh winters, cool summers and the inevitable crop failures that followed were catalysts for the French Revolution in 1789. By comparison, the air-travel chaos caused by the rather small and short-lived eruption of another Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, in 2010, seems insignificant.

Events like the 1783 eruption of Laki have happened before and they will happen again. The big difference now is that we are very much more vulnerable than we were in the 18th century. While the complete systems breakdown that followed the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption was annoying, the brevity of that eruption made a speedy recovery possible. But the 1783 Laki eruption lasted for months, and a similar eruption could last even longer. Extrapolating the impact that such an eruption would have today makes for gloomy reading.

There is no way of preventing such natural hazards. We can only try to mitigate the worst of their effects through better preparedness and by improving our understanding of the precursory signals. Island on Fire is an enjoyable and informative read, and it provides a timely reminder of how essential it is to improve our understanding of volcanic processes.

2014 Profile Books £10.99hb 224pp

Browse articles by content type

From the lab to the marketplace