Easter Island and its underlying volcanism

BY JASON KAMMERDIENER

Evacuate Easter Island?

It should be no revelation to those that are familiar with the English or Spanish languages that Easter Island (Isla de Pascua) is in fact... an ISLAND!  And it is a remote one at that.  Evacuation would therefore have to be accomplished by plane and by sea.  Though Easter Island's population is small (~3,800),^{6, pg. 169} there will clearly not be enough transportation to get everyone off the island with only the day-to-day vehicles available.  To invest in the necessary resources would be economically unviable, especially taking into account the unlikelihood of an eruption.

Perhaps more importantly, there is no reason to believe that possible activity from Terevaka would be threatening enough to provoke an evacuation.  Lava flows pose more of a threat to property than anything else; people should be able to move to unthreatened parts of the island before they are overrun with any possible lava flow.  There have been other islands in the past where evacuations due to volcanic unrest have been necessary, namely Montserrat, but the hazards there were from pyroclastic flows which pose a far greater and more unpredictable threat than lava flows.²⁰

 

Pyroclastic Flows: Ignore the audio and just watch the destructive power of a pyroclastic flow.  If Easter could produce these an evacuation plan would have been necessary, but PFs could not occur on such effusive and rounded volcanoes.

Lava Flows: Don't try this on your own, but this man's daring antics demonstrate how the danger posed by lava flows to humans is relatively low (Note that this flow is NOT from Easter Island).