Peering into the crater of Mount Nyiragongo, 25-year-old park ranger Safari Kimanuka confirms with the naked eye what scientists are already warning. ”That’s high, a lot higher than last week.”
The lava lake of the volcano, which overlooks the Congolese city of Goma, has risen sharply, prompting fears of a devastating eruption and causing unease among those who survived the last disaster, in January 2002.
Then, fountains of lava broke through the crater and surged 16km south across the plain, a burning river that consumed entire districts and forced 500 000 people to flee. Around 100 people were killed.
”I pray to my God that there will not be another eruption,” says Martha Nakabanza (48) a Pygmy widow who lost her home and crops and has struggled to raise 11 children in a straw hut at a settlement camp for the displaced.
Seismic recordings have detected tremors of increasing intensity in the past week and visual observation from the crater rim confirms a dramatic widening and rising of the lava.
Mount Nyiragongo is undergoing a ”feeding episode” which appears to have started on November 10, according to the Goma Volcano Observatory, an international monitoring group based in the city.
”The present feeding in magma raises the question of a possible injection within the fractures opened in 2002 at the base of the volcano which could represent a major risk for the populated area.”
The scientists do not think an eruption is imminent and there are no plans to evacuate Goma. It is the sixth time since 1972 that Mount Nyiragongo has been recorded feeding from its 24km-deep magma core, a phenomenon which results in important rises in the lava lake but do not systematically trigger eruptions, the observatory says.
A series of digital seismographs around the crater show a slight widening in the south flank of fractures which opened in 2002, and a 2C increase in the temperature of the fracture at the top of the volcano.
The scientists are unable to measure the rise because not even laser-enhanced binoculars can penetrate the clouds of gas and steam.
Jacques Durieux, a French volcanologist at the observatory, warns that locals should become alarmed only if the 2002 fractures are injected with lava. ”And that’s not the case yet.”
It is certain the volcano will erupt and engulf Goma, he says, but the timing could be three weeks from now to several hundred years. ”Nobody knows when it will happen.”
Because it is low in silica Mount Nyiragongo cannot explode, but its lava can flow extremely fast. It reached well over 80kph during an eruption in 1977 which killed more than 400 people.
Durieux says it is unrealistic to expect the provincial capital to move, since never in human history has a city evacuated before a natural catastrophe.
The apocalypse scenario is an eruption beneath Lake Kivu which could turn the water into toxic gas and kill up to 4,5-million people. But volcanologists judge that possibility to be extremely remote.
Host to the biggest of the world’s three lava lakes, Mount Nyiragongo sits in the Virunga mountains, which are on the border between Rwanda and the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A city of soldiers and refugees impoverished by war, Goma was ill prepared for the 2002 eruption. The worst affected were Pygmies whose crops and villages were destroyed, according to Eustache Mutombo, a former aid worker with the relief agency Concern.
Several hundred moved to Lac Vert, a bleak settlement of straw huts outside Goma drenched by daily thunderstorms.
Unable to cultivate their own land, which is covered in cooled, black lava, the Pygmies work as porters, earning a pittance for hauling neighbours’ produce to market.
”This is no life, we’re suffering. We get sick but when we go to hospital we are discriminated against,” says Rosa Bosenibamwe (50).
As she speaks, smoke plumes from the volcano silhouetted behind her. ”I try not to think of what will happen if it goes again.” – Guardian Unlimited Â