January 16, according to foreign media reports, mentioning Ethiopia this country, people first thought of probably the dusty desert, crowded streets or steep cliffs. However, few people know that Ethiopia is also on Earth One of the most volcanic areas, which is related to its location - the Great Rift Valley runs right across from Ethiopia.
The Great Eastern Rift Valley is the result of movement in the crustal plateau where the land on either side of the Great Rift separates from each other at roughly the speed of fingernails growth.An earth fissure allows underground magmatic breakthrough pressures to emerge from the surface and more than 60 volcanoes have been discovered in Ethiopia, many of them In the past there have been large eruptions, leaving a huge caldera, part of the volcano is still active today, you can see bubbling mud, geothermal hot springs and many steam vents.
(Steam from the crevices of the Arutuo volcano. Photo: William Hutchison)
The locals use volcanic steam to wash their clothes and take a shower, but these resources are of greater value. Surface activity surges up to a temperature of 300 to 400 degrees Celsius, and it is possible to use these high temperatures Steam to power large turbines and generate huge amounts of electricity, a program that, if feasible, will bring enormous benefits to the locals, and 77% of Ethiopia's population will not be able to access electricity, making it one of Africa's most power-hungry countries.
Geophysicist surveys show that a volcano can produce enough gigawatts of power to make geothermal energy development a priority, with gigawatts equivalent to the capacity of millions of solar panels or 500 wind turbines. The total energy available for a volcano is estimated to be around 10GW.
As early as 20 years ago, Ethiopians started geothermal power generation pilots in the Arutut Volcano area and now upgrade their power plant infrastructure, generating ten times more power, up from 7 to 70 MW. , Geothermal development seems to be a great low-carbon renewable energy solution in Ethiopia that will allow geothermal power to power the entire power industry and help people out of poverty.
A major dilemma is that, unlike the more developed geothermal countries such as Iceland, little is known about Ethiopian volcanoes, and even when most of the last volcanic eruptions were unknown, no volcanic eruptions occurred Geothermal power is the primary premise.
In recent years, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has funded RiftVolc, a joint investigative group between Britain and Ethiopia, to study these issues, and researchers focused on hazard prevention and methods for developing and testing volcanoes So that volcanic energy can be safely and sustainably exploited.
Over the past three years, research groups have been deploying detection equipment and observing them on the ground, but the most important breakthrough comes from a completely different approach - researchers analyzing satellite imagery in the office.
With the help of satellite radar technology, researchers have made exciting discoveries on the Arhuoto volcano, observing that the surface of the volcano is expanding and deflating, and a good analogy is the volcano's breathing: when people discover that the volcano is first continuous A few months of swelling, which is in the 'inspiratory' and then 'expiratory' process leads to a slow sag in the volcano for many years, and one can not be entirely sure what caused the ups and downs, but enough evidence suggests that it should be magma, Underground hot water or gas flowing five kilometers below the surface of the ground due.
In a recent paper, researchers used more detailed observations of the Arutou Vapor Emissions from satellite remote sensing images and found that steam spills often coincided with known fault lines and volcanic fractures.
The researchers monitored the volcano vents for several years and was surprised to find that most of the vents were stable in temperature and that only a small number of vents in the east had measurable changes in temperature and were not associated with volcanic The same frequency of 'breathing' led scientists to be surprised by the fact that they expected the temperature change in the vents to coincide with the rise and fall of hot liquid inside the volcano.
(The photo shows a geothermal well in the Arututus. Photo: William Hutchison)
It was not until later the rain was taken into account that the vestiges of the vents, whose temperature had changed, were only a delayed response to the surrounding rains and concluded that the vents near the center of the volcano were not affected Rainfall, it is possible to maintain a constant temperature and to better reflect the temperature of the underground thermal reservoir, which is of great significance to the construction of volcanic drilling and power plants, of course, its impact goes far beyond this.
This is the first time that human beings have been monitoring geothermal resources from a space perspective, and since satellite data is freely available to the public, this may provide a cheap and low-risk research tool for geothermal resource exploration.
Except for Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, which also have abundant volcanic resources, this new technology can be explored and monitored by geothermal resources to be developed throughout the Great Rift Valley in the whole of Africa and around the world. As you zoom out of the map and look beyond the globe, the future landscape It is looking forward to.
