The world, says James White ’81, is not a stable place. Any geologist will tell you this, but volcanologists say it with the glint of past eruptions in their eyes.

“Volcanoes and earthquakes give us real-time reminders that the earth is not at rest,” says White, associate professor of volcanology at Otago University on New Zealand’s South Island.

Rock hounds like White love the earth’s inner craziness. They live for her hissy fits and meltdowns, her upwellings and explosions, the rocky remnants of her churning, turning power. White even lives on an ancient volcano, but don’t worry, Dunedin Volcano hasn’t erupted for about 10 million years — although lately there’s evidence that a new one is forming. A high concentration of helium gas in Dunedin Springs and partly molten rock lurking 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) underground spell new magma below the city, “but there’s nothing happening at the surface. Yet.”

It’s a good idea to keep watch. Especially in places like New Zealand, located in the Pacific Ring of Fire. On the North Island, Auckland’s 1.3 million residents live, work and play in the middle of an active volcanic field with 50 volcanic vents. White, a specialist in the type of eruptions that have occurred there in the past, says there will be an eruption in the city at some point.

“It could be next week, next year, or in 10 centuries, but it will happen. The trick will be pinpointing exactly where,” he says.

White and other volcano researchers have long-standing relationships with GNS Science, the government entity responsible for protecting islanders from the hazards of their geology. When Mt. Tongariro, located in a national park four hours’ drive from Auckland, grumbled and spit ash in August 2012, White was busy conferring with GNS and answering questions from news agencies about how dangerous the eruption might become.

The question is always, “Do we evacuate?” Thankfully, this time Mt. Tongariro didn’t show seismic signs of worsening, so evacuations weren’t necessary. But because of falling ash, local air travel was halted.

White is a world authority on eruptions known as phreatomagmatic (phreato means steam). They occur when magma of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit meets water, causing instantaneous explosions of steam, rocks and ash, which can form into dangerous [volcanic] clouds.

In 2010, the phreatomagmatic eruption of  Eyjafjallajökull in southern Iceland brought air travel in Europe to a week-long standstill. Ice melt from the glacier had mixed with magma, blasting 250 million cubic meters of ash into the jet stream and stranding more than 100,000 passengers. Since ash can cause jet engines to fail, it was a necessity that cost the airlines $1.7 billion.

The more that volcanologists know about volcanoes’ inner workings, the better able they are to predict them. The justification for all of White’s research comes down to public safety; discovering more about how magma and water interact in order to prepare for possible disasters.

“Will the next eruption be a low-risk magma flow you can toast marshmallows over, or an explosion that will knock down the whole neighborhood?” he says.

Nature’s messy, and always teaches us, “that we know less than we think,” White says. This is one reason he keeps returning to the desert of the southwestern U.S. — to get nose-to-nose with clues that lie frozen in stone.

About 300 ancient volcanoes stretch across 965 square miles of Navajo country under the wide Arizona sky. They’re not your typical cone-shaped mountains. The Hopi Buttes volcanic field is pock-marked and flat, punctuated here and there by broken ships of dark rock, remnants of maar-diatreme volcanoes, a type which explodes when magma interacts with groundwater. Between 8.5 and 6 million years ago, the volcanoes were active, blasting craters in the aquifer called maars, shooting out volcanic tuff and sediment through conduits called diatremes.

White’s dissertation was on these rocks, and they may be his favorite volcanic landforms. “I love how Standing Rocks rise above the colored austerity of the Painted Desert badlands.”

But looking at these eroded volcanoes is also forensic work, and White is a rock detective, eyeing up the scene of the crime. He recently coauthored a paper with University of Buffalo volcanologist Greg Valentine that presents a new model of how these volcanoes erupt.

“We found that phreatomagmatic explosions are much more dangerous than previously thought. Understanding when they are most dangerous depends on how we think they work,” says White. “Contrary to previous models, we found that the sites of explosion bounce around laterally as the volcano evolves, rather than moving deeper and deeper beneath the surface. That means that dangerous shallow-depth explosions that affect larger areas beyond the crater can happen late in the eruption, as well as at the start.”

All of this has meaning for Auckland, as does White’s new project in Iceland. He’s been on two different undersea studies through the years, “looking at modern sea floor volcanoes under one or two kilometers of water.”

Now he’s had an invitation to go to Surtsey, Iceland, to examine the volcanic island that burst from the Atlantic sea floor in a blaze of smoke and fire in 1963. Locked off to all but a handful of scientists since that time, Surtsey’s eruption is the one that White would “most like to know everything about.” In July, he’ll travel to the island.

“The more you know the harder it is to make a general statement about water-magma interactions. You need to look at everything,” he says.

At TCU, White studied philosophy and history along with geology. Analysis of arguments and curiosity about why things are the way they are have stood him in good stead. But he keeps looking and questioning ancient rocks along with his assumptions. Because even with seismic equipment sensitive enough to pick up small earthquakes 50 kilometers beneath the surface, an eruption in Auckland’s volcanic field would happen so fast that there would only be a few hours’ warning before people had to get out.

“Knowing exactly where a volcano will erupt in Auckland is like hearing a distant drummer coming toward your town with your eyes closed. There are 10 roads into the town, and until he’s really close, you can’t tell which road he’s on.”

And there aren’t 10 roads into and out of Auckland. There’s only one.