In 2008, Iceland’s three largest energy companies collaborated on a research project to drill down even farther, at a site near Krafla, for steam that was even hotter, some four hundred degrees Celsius. Such “supercritical” steam is water that is so hot and pressurized that it has passed into a fourth state, beyond gas. The hotter a well the better, typically: it will produce more energy more efficiently. The Iceland Deep Drilling Project (I.D.D.P.) engineers had planned to dig down some four kilometres—but their drill got stuck at around two kilometres. Bits of black glass shot up from the well. After some disbelief, the team concluded that they had hit magma. This oops-ing into magma was at first received as “very bad news,” Bjarni Palsson, a chief project manager on the I.D.D.P. and now an executive vice-president of the energy company Landsvirkjun, told me. Many people thought that drilling into magma might trigger a volcanic eruption. “Then we started to see: What actually do we have here?” Palsson said. They put a wellhead on their work to measure the flow rates of steam. “What happened next was remarkable,” Palsson continued. The magma was about nine hundred degrees Celsius. The steam flow was such that it could produce ten times more energy than a regular well. They had created the hottest and most powerful geothermal well in the world.