Beware of fearmongering journalists. The first line of a disappointing Daily Mail story posted this week warns that "a sleeping super-volcano in Germany is showing worrying signs of waking up."
But that sensational assertion is based on nothing more than a sparse smattering of old facts that sound tantalizingly apocalyptic when you string them together. Read the full story, and you'll find no mention of new science, no expert named.
One of the supposedly "worrying signs" is the well-known fact that carbon dioxide bubbles up along the southeastern shore of Laacher See, the lake that now fills the collapsed caldera of the volcano (above), which last erupted 12,900 years ago. Ongoing bubbling is indeed a sign that the magma chamber beneath the lake is degassing, but this phenomenon is not new. And so in no way could it signal an eruption.
As Wired's Erik Klemetti pointed out in a stinging analysis, the Daily Mail story clearly panders to the 2012 Apocalypse crowd. "This is the volcanic equivalent of the Daily Mail going out and saying “Massive hurricane to hit London?” because they looked out the window and saw a cloud," he writes. "Irresponsible, lazy journalism at its finest."
To be fair, we should not blame journalists for taking advantage of pop culture to write a catchy phrases for a story that is worth reporting on its own merit. A great example is "Fishpocalypse Now: Mass Herring Deaths Remain a Mystery," which FoxNews published on Tuesday.
When tens of thousands of dead fish carpet a coastline and then disappear, that's newsworthy. And if such an event happens to coincide with doomsday chatter, a witty journalist gets lucky.
The Daily Mail story, in stark contrast, is a catchy idea whipped out of thin air. Had the story instead been anchored to new scientific evidence that the German volcano is becoming restless, then its headline might have been justified: "Is a super-volcano just 390 miles from London about to erupt?"
Discovery News recently used a not-quite-so-provocative question to draw readers into a blog about an inflating supervolcano in Bolivia. The difference is that there was actually evidence for increasing activity in Bolivia, and experts were willing to say so:
BLOG: Zombie Volcano or New Supervolcano?
Trumpeting the potential for a looming eruption is also clearly legitimate when volcano experts actually raise the official alert level, as they did for Mt. Tambora back in September 2011:
BIG PIC: Mt. Tambora Rumblings Put Indonesia on Alert
No doubt we will be seeing more doomsday stories this year. And like Klemetti, I predict, sadly, that too many of them will be based on "no scientific evidence whatsoever." Let us be the folks that sort the garbage rather than contribute to the pile.
IMAGE:
Germany's Laacher See fills the caldera of a large volcano that last erupted 12,900 years ago. (Photo courtesy Marta Salazar, Wikimedia Commons)
Tags:
comments ( )