Question: if you could go underground to the magma of a volcano how would you get there to see it using scientific methods?

Kate Dobson answered on 10 Nov 2014:

I would love to be able to get into a magma-mobile and go for a dive into a volcano. Unfortunately the real world isn’t quite up to what the Hollywood movies want it to be yet, and I doubt I will ever get the chance!

What we can do is look at the volcano and what it is doing at the surface (is it growing/sinking, emitting more or less magma/gas) and get some idea about where the magma is using the small earthquakes that generally accompany magma moving through the crust. We can also look at the erupted material and what it contains – this can tell us something about where the magma may have come from, if there are more than one kind of magma down there, and what happened to the magma as it came to the surface. Ancient magma chambers that have now been eroded to the surface are also really useful (look at my profile for a picture of a British one), as they show us what the system might actually look like. The final thing we do is all sorts of laboratory experiments. We use these to work out how chemistry, depth and magma temperature can control how the volcano behaves.