Volcano Adventures: What volcanoes tell us about the world and ourselvesby Tamsin Mather
I live on a lump of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern Connecticut, jutting out of 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 down a thousand miles to Earth—so there’s nothing to worry about there.”
We’ve been on top of this quiet rock for over two decades and every year it gets harder for me to imagine living in a place like Iceland or Indonesia – where there’s so much to worry about because the solid Earth returns in liquid, ash or gas and flies from volcanoes.
Tamsin Mather, a geologist at Oxford University, does not have this difficulty. She has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and has come to see Earth not as a peaceful world encased in a stable crust, but a globe of barely contained geologic storms.
Adventures in Volcanoland is organized around the trips Mather has taken throughout her career, starting with Mount Vesuvius, which she first visited as a child on a family vacation. Next comes Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano, which she studied as a graduate student, and then volcanoes on other continents.
Mather’s book is intended for readers like me: novices who wouldn’t know the difference between tuff and tephra if both hit us over the head. However, at times it reads like a textbook, its sentences loaded with encyclopedic digressions.
She seems to be lecturing volcanologists in training in these passages: “Using these summaries of the size and timing (often determined by measuring the activity or concentrations of radioactive elements in the rocks associated with the eruption) of various types of eruption, we we can infer from trends,” Mather writes. “We”? not me.
Elsewhere, Adventures in the Volcano waxes lyrical. On a family walk in southwest England, Mather shows her children a handful of sand “to remind them by their leafy glow in the summer sunlight of the great batholitic magma body within which these crystals grew ». On her visits to Masaya, she watches green parakeets fly by the crater and hears colonies of bees buzzing in its soft volcanic soil.
For all the beauty Mather perceives in volcanoes, however, she never forgets the danger they pose. “When, with fear, they take a breath, there is always a risk that one day they won’t get it back,” she writes.
However, Mather sees volcanoes as more than agents of destruction. They helped build the planet. When the new Earth was covered by a global ocean, Mather writes, volcanoes began “to fashion islands and then continents, pushing this new land from the seas.”
We may owe our existence to volcanoes. It’s possible that deep-sea volcanic heat, or lightning during eruptions, “helped rearrange some of Earth’s atoms into the first primitive molecular building blocks, somehow allowing biology to begin,” Mather speculates.
In her research, Mather specializes in measuring the gases emitted by volcanoes. Even when they are not erupting, volcanoes emit large amounts of carbon dioxide. Without that heat-trapping gas, an ice effect would replace the greenhouse effect and the planet’s temperature would drop by nearly 60 degrees.
For the most part, Earth is able to maintain its stable climate. As volcanoes warm the planet, chemical reactions pull carbon dioxide from the air, eventually delivering it deep underground.
However, this planetary thermostat is not enough to keep volcanoes from periodically unleashing hell. Big explosions may be responsible for most of the mass extinctions in the history of life.
Climate deniers point to the enormous amount of carbon dioxide released by volcanoes to minimize our impact on the climate. But for Mather, the comparison shows what a dire crisis we’ve put ourselves in. “These natural emissions pale into insignificance compared to what humans produce,” she warns.
With our cars and our coal plants, we have created a super-volcano. And if the past is any guide, we are risking millions of species with extinction, possibly including our own. “If this actual mass extinction happens, it will be along with the human experiment, and when it’s over, Earth’s volcanoes will still be here, presiding over whatever planet we leave behind,” Mather writes.
Mather’s book has disrupted 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 began as a great molten blob that rose into the Earth’s crust hundreds of millions of years ago. It cooled into a hard, crystalline rock, and when the softer upper layers eroded away, the granite saw the sun.
It will remain strong for my lifetime, but millions of years from now, Vulkanoland may send forth another mass of magma that will cover this land with new violence.
Volcano Adventures: What volcanoes tell us about the world and ourselves | By Tamsin Mather | Hanover Square | 374 pp. | 30 dollars