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- Author, Tom Ough
- Rolle, BBC Future
1 hour ago
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A strong eruption from Indonesia’s Mount Semeru could become a global problem
Around 90,000 ships pass through the narrow strait of Malacca every year, which connects the Indian Ocean with the Pacific.
The transported cargo grain, crude oil and every imaginable commodity accounts for about 40% of world trade. Above these ships lies one of the world’s busiest airways, and below them, above the ocean floor, is a vast network of underwater internet cables that keep the world connected.
Together, these factors make the Straits of Malacca one of the most important arterial roads for the world economy. It has been identified as a bottleneck in reports by the World Trade Organization, the US Energy Information Administration and the Londonbased think tank Chatham House.
They all claim: They have a beautiful strait there. It would be a shame if something happened to him.
Researchers warn that it’s only a matter of time before a natural disaster like an earthquake or volcanic eruption hits the region. And when that happens, the consequences will affect the whole world.
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Tracking technology shows the volume of shipping traffic in the Malacca Straits
The disruption of important trade routes is a constant problem, whether due to crime or human error. Piracy has long been a scourge in the region, but the strait is cooperatively patrolled by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand and is generally under control.
It is not uncommon for ships to collide on site. Ten US sailors died in the 2017 collision between the USS John McCain and a Liberianflagged oil tanker.
But with a minimum width of 2.7 km, the terrain is not narrow enough to be blocked by a stray container ship, as happened in 2021 with the 400meterwide ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal.
The greatest threats to the Strait of Malacca, which separates the Malay Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, are natural.
Among the many worrying maps of activity in the region, the most notable is the one that summarizes the planet’s active volcanoes and recent earthquakes. The coast of Sumatra and the southernmost part of the island of Java, following the course of the Sunda Trench, form a belt of seismic activity with several volcanoes.
Two volcanoes have recently erupted on Java Mount Semeru and Mount Merapi. In the Sunda Strait separating Java from Sumatra lies Krakatoa and to the east is Mount Tambora. Its outbreak in 1815 depressed agricultural production even in Europe and the eastern United States.
The Mount Tambora eruption had a magnitude of VEI7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), a logarithmic scale ranging up to VEI8.
An event like that of 1815 may occur once or twice a millennium. But it doesn’t take an eruption of this magnitude to cause serious problems at a global bottleneck, especially when it occurs at one of the volcanoes closest to the Straits of Malacca.
In 2018, researchers from the Center for Risk Studies at the University of Cambridge in the UK envisioned the impact of scenarios involving a VEI6 eruption of Mount Marapi in Sumatra. They suggested the eruption could create clouds of ash and fine pyroclastics airborne rock fragments that will float across the Strait of Malacca toward Singapore and Malaysia.
The resulting damage to local infrastructure and supply chains (aviation in particular would be severely affected) would be accompanied by a global temperature drop of 1°C and an estimated $2.51 trillion drop in global GDP over five years (13 trillion) create period.
This number is much higher than the estimated $5 billion (26 billion reals) in damage to the global economy due to the VEI4 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010.
Mount Marapi’s last VEI4 eruption also occurred in 2010. A VEI6 eruption at Marapi is less likely its return period, which is the estimated average time between each eruption, is 750 years.
But the risks are very high and deserve serious consideration, according to volcanologist Lara Mani of the Center for the Study of Existential Risks at the University of Cambridge. And Marapi is just one of several active volcanoes in the region.
Mani says that eruptions VEI4, VEI5 and VEI6 “can still really damage the strait. And the thing is, when a volcano erupts, it doesn’t say when it’s going to stop.”
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The consequences of a natural disaster near the Straits of Malacca could affect the whole world
Let’s imagine that one of these active volcanoes like Mount Semeru on the island of Java, Indonesia produces a VEI5 or VEI6 eruption.
Magma would erupt from the crater. Ashes would be thrown into the sky. Earthquakes shook cities in the region.
If the wind blows from the southwest, all air traffic out of the Malacca Straits would be suspended. The ash would fall on the strait itself. Pieces of pumice would accumulate on the sea surface.
A large earthquake relatively close by would pose a similar threat. It could cause a tsunami over the strait, like the December 26, 2004 tsunami. It would also create turbidity currents — clouds of agitated sediment moving at high speeds — that would reach the sea floor.
“That’s usually why the cables break,” Mani explains. “At the eruption of Tonga [a erupção VEI5 do vulcão Hunga TongaHunga, em janeiro de 2022], it was the turbidity currents that broke the cables and caused a regional internet blackout. Turbidity currents also bury these cables, making them even more difficult to recover.”
On the other hand, according to Tristan Smith of University College London, these natural disasters would cause less disruption to global shipping than Ever Given at Suez.
Smith is a navigation specialist at the University’s Energy Institute. He says the ship’s machinery must be able to deal with the ash and that the tsunami is more dangerous to people on land, where the wave is breaking and larger than at sea.
It is also believed that should an outbreak occur, a restricted zone would be declared, forcing ships to follow a different route. Diversion of ships would have an impact on world trade, Smith said, but the system should eventually be able to handle the situation.
“If you have a ship that’s three days late because it has to go the long way around Indonesia, that ship just has to go a knot or two faster to make up for the delay,” he explains.
And it would still be the problem of planes on the ground. The Eyjafjallajökull eruption led to a sixday ban on the use of the airspace and left millions in trouble. And even worse would be the cutting of submarine cables, leading to economic chaos.
“Trillions of dollars move through these cables every day,” Mani said, “which essentially underpins our financial markets. Our underwater cables are vulnerable and there have been accidents over the years.”
Mani highlights the disruption of several undersea Internet cables by an earthquake near Taiwan in 2006, leaving a single cable connecting Hong Kong to the rest of the world.
“It took 45 days to fix the other cables and it was very fortunate that one of them survived,” Mani recalls. “Imagine nothing for Hong Kong and surrounding areas for 45 days.”
It would have been catastrophic, she explains, not just for Hong Kong but for the rest of the world. Like Singapore, Hong Kong is a financial hub, and a local blackout would wreak havoc on the global economy.
“We just don’t have any redundancy,” Mani says of cable: if something goes wrong, there’s no backup to meet the need. “And our satellites, in their current state, can only carry about 3% of the world’s communications.”
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Westports Malaysia, near the Straits of Malacca, is one of the busiest ports in the world
Precautions
What can we do to make the strait less vulnerable?
We cannot stop earthquakes. The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and UNESCO have developed early warning systems for events such as tsunamis, and there is a service (the World Navigation Warning System) that warns maritime traffic of geological or meteorological disasters. The Japan Coast Guard is the official coordinator for the region that includes the Straits of Malacca.
Regarding volcanoes, it may one day be possible to prevent eruptions by manipulating the magma beneath volcanoes, but we are many years away from seeing this possibility as realistic.
At the moment we not only need to improve monitoring of volcanoes an eruption warning up to a few hours in advance makes a big difference but also their identification. Mani warns that Indonesia “has more volcanoes than you can imagine, and for many of them, we do [vulcanólogos] we never looked straight.”
Diversification is also the best preparation. More satellites with internet would help. Countries in the region would also increase their resilience by introducing new undersea cables that follow a different path than the current ones.
China appears to be adopting this practice in relation to shipping. For years it has been trying to build a canal through southern Thailand that would make the Strait of Malacca obsolete.
The Thailand Canal, as it’s known, would reduce fuel costs by providing a shortcut for shipping crude oil, but would also make Chinese shipping significantly more resilient.
While the Communist Party of China Central Committee views this resilience in geopolitical terms, it could also be useful as an insurance policy for global shipping.
Finding ways to reduce reliance on bottlenecks like the Straits of Malacca is “certainly something that many governments in Asia have in mind,” according to Ben Bland, Chatham House’s Asia and Oceania program director.
Relevant government agencies in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore did not respond to BBC inquiries, but it is understood contingency planning is already underway. And all those who benefit from the Straits of Malacca and you are among that group if you are reading this story should hope that these plans never have to materialize.