How to power a planet with lava

Metroid Dread, the latest installment in Nintendo's long-running Metroid franchise, has a lot to like. There's an expansive alien cave system to explore, autonomous killer robots to flee from, and an omnipresent sense of, well, dread, that conjures up science fiction-horror classics like Alien and The Thing. But as a professional energy nerd, there's something else about Dread that caught my attention early on: ZDR, the planet it takes place on, was once home to an advanced civilization that powered their entire world with magma.

Humans have long used heat from the planet's interior to produce energy, mainly by drilling into shallow underground pockets of hot water and steam. But turning molten rock into megawatts is a different beast entirely. Metroid Dread isn't the first science fiction or the first video game to suggest it can be done: volcanic heat is a crucial energy source on Sith Lord hideout Mustafar, and it can be used to light torches and cook food in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But after running through Cataris, an abandoned industrial facility filled with machines that pump power-producing magma throughout ZDR's labyrinthian underworld,  I had to know if there was a scientific basis for this wacky idea.

As it turns out, there is. For more than a decade, scientists working in volcanically spectacular Iceland have been exploring the possibility of extracting thermal energy from magma—and they've made some exciting progress.