the Tajogaite volcano has become an immense steam iron

Last Wednesday, while the storm therese discharged more than 117 liters per square meter in the Roque de los Muchachos, something striking was happening a few kilometers further down in the Tajogaite flows. Here the rainwater touched the ground and disappeared without accumulating, without forming puddles or running off. And it has an explanation: It evaporated the moment it hit the ground.turning the lava field into a kind of giant steam iron.

A hot zone. But it is not that the La Palma volcano has been reactivated, but quite the opposite: it has been officially off since December 13, 2021. More than four years have passed, and yet the ground continues to burn from the inside.

Because? To understand why, you have to think about how rock works as a material. The basaltic lava from Tajogaite, which is precisely what the volcano expelled during the 85 days it was erupting, came out to the outside at a temperature that could reach 1,200 degrees. This is double that of other volcanic compositions, such as andesitic, which is around 800 degrees. That 300 degree difference matters a lot when we talk about how long it takes to cool down.

But the key factor in this case is not the temperature, but rather that the rock is a poor heat conducting material. In this way, the outer surface of the flow may be cold to the touch, even covered with vegetation in some places, while at a depth of 15 or 20 meters the temperatures have been exceeding 150 degrees Celsius until recently. In this way, when water falls, it is logical that it ends up evaporating.

What’s underneath. What we see when it rains is actually the tip of the iceberg because beneath this there is a complex geological process. a study published in 2025 it generated for the first time a three dimensional map of the internal structure of the Tajogaite. In this way, they were able to see that under the crater there are areas with anomalies compatible with the presence of pockets and conduits where there is still trapped magma and gases.

But logically this does not mean that the volcano will erupt again, but rather that the residual activity still lasts years later.

When will it cool down? The most honest answer is that no one knows preciselysince it depends on too many simultaneous factors: the variable thickness of the casting at each point, the porosity of the rock or the ambient temperature are some of them. That is why each area is a different world when it comes to interpreting it.

What is true is that the subsoil is going to cool little by little and the scenes that we have seen with this storm will theoretically diminish. The final result will be a completely new piece of land in Spain with a considerable extension that must continue to ‘mature’.

Images | Annamarie Ursula rtvc

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