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Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland
The following is a script from "
Volcanoes" which aired on Jan. 5, 2014. Scott Pelley is the correspondent. Nicole Young, producer.
If you think we're living in an unstable world, just listen to this: only one percent of our Earth is solid rock. Most of the other 99 percent is an oozing, mass, churning beneath our feet like road tar at temperatures between 2,000 and 10,000 degrees. The Earth's crust is only 20 miles thick. When that cracks, one of the greatest forces in nature erupts. There are 1,500 active volcanoes. And, tonight, we want to tell you about three; one that caused the most recent mass disruption, another that's the biggest threat to a major city and a third, in the United States that could wreak havoc all around the world.
The first, the disruptive volcano, has a name as long and as hard as the trouble it caused, Eyjafjallajokull, means "island mountan glacier" in the inscrutable language of Iceland. When it blew in 2010 we started shooting this story and we came to the right place. Over the last 500 years, Iceland's 30 volcanoes have released one third of all the lava on Earth.
We put together an expedition to be the first to reach the summit after the eruption. The volcanic landscape covered in ice isn't hospitable to life or convoys for that matter. The man in front of the truck is pointing out cracks in the glacier that would swallow us whole. We covered miles of forbidding terrain at walking speed.
When the trucks could go no further, we hiked with our guide, one of the world's leading authorities on volcanoes, Haraldur Sigurdsson.
