Eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in La Palma.
And send the lava in a different direction?
he told reporters in a radio interview.
As crazy as Curbelos idea sounds, hes not the first one to suggest it.
In fact, it has already been tried before.
Aerial view of a bomb detonating on Mauna Loa on the morning of December 27, 1935.
Half of these bombs were packed with 355 pounds of TNT.
The other half were merely smoke bombs so the pilots could see where the explosive bombs landed.
Six days later, the eruption ended and Thomas Jaggar declared the operation a success.
However, others were skeptic.
A similar operation was attempted in 1942 on Mauna Loa during another of its eruption.
Aerial photo of the bombing of the 1935 Mauna Loa eruption.
An unexploded bomb dropped on the Mauna Loa 1935 flow, rediscovered and photographed in 1977 by Jack Lockwood.
When Mount Etna erupted again in 1991, engineers tried a different approach.
But that proved to be a fruitless attempt.
So engineers went back to explosives.
First, a dump truck carved a relatively safe path up the lava-strewn mountain.
Nearly 8 tons of explosives were placed.
This time the explosion carved a huge hole in a major lava channel.
So can we use bombs to divert the lava flows from the ongoing Cumbre Vieja volcano?
Unlikely, according to Arianna Soldati, a volcanologist at North Carolina State University.
