ADVENTURES IN VOLCAN LAND: what volcanoes tell us about the world and ourselvesby Tamsin Mather
I live on a hill of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern Connecticut, protruding from the ground here and there like a pod of whales surfacing.
Before my wife and I bought our house, we had an inspector look at it. “Well,” he said, “your foundation goes a thousand miles into the earth – so you don’t have to worry about that.”
We have been on this quiet rock for more than twenty years, and with each passing year it becomes more difficult for me to imagine living in a place like Iceland or Indonesia – where there is a lot to worry about, because the solid earth becomes liquid, ash or fluid. gas and flies out of volcanoes.
Tamsin Mather, a geologist at the University of Oxford, has no such problems. She has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and she has come to see Earth not as a peaceful world shrouded in a stable crust, but as a sphere with barely contained geological storms.
“Adventures in Volcanoland” is organized around trips Mather has made throughout her career, starting with Mount Vesuvius, which she first visited as a child on a family vacation. Next comes the Nicaraguan volcano Masaya, which she studied as a graduate student, and then the volcanoes on other continents.
Mather’s book is aimed at readers like me: novices who wouldn’t know the difference between pumice and tephra if they hit us both on the head. At times, however, it reads like a textbook, with the sentences loaded with encyclopedic digressions.
It appears that she is lecturing to trainee volcanologists in these passages: “Using these compilations of the magnitude and timing (often determined by measuring the activity or concentrations of radioactive elements in the rocks associated with the eruption ) from different types of eruptions we can draw trends,” writes Mather. “We”? Not me.
In other places, ‘Adventures in Volcanoland’ becomes lyrical. During a family outing in southwestern England, Mather shows her children a handful of sand “to evoke for them from their leaf-dappled glint in the summer sunlight the great batholithic magma body in which these crystals grew.” During her visits to Masaya, she watches green parakeets fly past the crater and listens to bee colonies buzzing in the soft volcanic soil.
For all the beauty Mather sees in volcanoes, she never forgets the danger they bring. “If they take your breath away, there’s always the risk that one day they won’t give it back,” she writes.
Yet Mather sees volcanoes as more than agents of destruction. They helped build the planet. When the young Earth was covered by a global ocean, Mather writes, volcanoes “began to form islands and then continents, pushing this new land out of the seas.”
We may owe our existence to volcanoes. It’s possible that volcanic heat in the deep sea, or lightning during eruptions, “helped rearrange some of the Earth’s atoms into the first primitive molecular building blocks, somehow allowing biology to begin,” Mather speculates.
In her own research, Mather has specialized in measuring the gases that volcanoes emit. Even when they don’t erupt, volcanoes emit enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. Without that heat-trapping gas, an icehouse effect would replace the greenhouse effect and global temperatures would drop by almost 60 degrees.
For the most part, the Earth is able to keep its climate stable. As volcanoes heat the planet, chemical reactions strip carbon dioxide from the air, eventually releasing it deep underground.
However, this planetary thermostat is not enough to prevent volcanoes from periodically unleashing hell. Massive eruptions may be responsible for the most mass extinctions in the history of life.
Climate deniers point to the massive amount of carbon dioxide released by volcanoes to downplay our own impact on the climate. But for Mather, the comparison makes clear the serious crisis we are in. “These natural emissions pale into insignificance compared to what humans produce,” she warns.
With our cars and coal-fired power stations we have created a super volcano. And if the past is any guide, we are putting millions of species at risk of extinction, including perhaps our own. “If this current mass extinction occurs, it will parallel the human experiment, and when it is over, Earth’s volcanoes will still be there and in charge of whatever planet we leave behind,” Mather writes.
Mather’s book has upset my thoughts about my home. The pink granite beneath me gives me as solid a foundation as I could hope for, and yet this too started as a huge molten blob that pushed up through the Earth’s crust hundreds of millions of years ago. It cooled into a hard, crystalline rock, and as the softer overlying layers eroded, the granite saw the sun.
It will remain solid for as long as I live, but millions of years from now, Volcanoland may well send up a new mass of magma that will cover this land with new violence.
ADVENTURES IN VOLCANO LAND: What volcanoes tell us about the world and ourselves | By Tamsin Mather | Hannover Square | 374 pages | $30