ADVENTURES IN VOLCANOLAND: What volcanoes tell us about the world and ourselvesby Tamsin Mather
I live on a knoll of pink granite that is part of a geological formation that stretches across southern Connecticut, popping out of the ground every now and then like a whale pod.
Before my wife and I bought our house, we had an inspector look at it. “Well,” he said, “your foundations go down a thousand miles into Earth—so there’s nothing to worry about there.
We’ve been on top of this peaceful bedrock for over two decades now, and every year it’s harder for me to imagine living in a place like Iceland or Indonesia – where there’s a lot of worry as the solid Earth turns to liquid, ash or gas and flies out of volcanoes.
Tamsin Mather, a geologist at the University of Oxford, has no such difficulty. She has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and has come to see the Earth not as a peaceful world enclosed in a stable crust, but as a ball of barely contained geological storms.
“Adventures in Volcanoland” is organized around trips Mather has taken 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 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 we were both smacked over the head. However, at times it reads like a textbook, its sentences are loaded with encyclopedic digressions.
In these passages, he seems to be lecturing volcanologists in training: “Using these compilations of the size and timing (often determined by measuring the activity or concentrations of radioactive elements in the rocks associated with the eruption) of different types of eruptions, we can draw trends,” Mather writes. “We”? I do not.
Elsewhere, “Adventures in Volcanoland” turns lyrical. On a family outing in southwest England, Mather shows her children a handful of sand “to conjure up from their leaf-strewn sheen in the summer sunlight the great batholithic igneous body in which these crystals grew.” On his visits to Masaya, he watches green parakeets fly around the crater and listens to bee colonies buzzing in its soft volcanic soil.
For all the beauty Mather sees in volcanoes, he never forgets the danger they pose. “When you take your breath away in awe, there’s always the risk that one day it won’t come back,” he writes.
Yet Mather sees volcanoes as more than agents of destruction. They helped build the planet. As 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 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, allowing biology to somehow begin,” Mather speculates.
In his own research, Mather specializes in measuring gases emitted by volcanoes. Even when volcanoes don’t erupt, they release huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Without this heat-trapping gas, the ice effect would replace the greenhouse effect and the planet’s temperature would cool by nearly 60 degrees.
For the most part, Earth is able to keep its climate stable. As volcanoes warm the planet, chemical reactions pump carbon dioxide out of the air and eventually transport it deep underground.
However, this planetary thermostat is not enough to prevent volcanoes from periodically unleashing inferno. Huge eruptions may be responsible for most of the mass extinctions in the history of life.
Climate deniers point to the vast amounts of carbon dioxide released by volcanoes to downplay our own climate impact. But for Mather, this comparison shows how dire a crisis we’ve gotten ourselves into. “These natural emissions are insignificant compared to what humans produce,” he warns.
We have created a supervolcano with our cars and coal-fired power plants. And if the past is any guide, we are threatening millions of species with extinction, possibly including our own. “If this current mass extinction occurs, it will be in parallel with the human experiment, and when it’s over, Earth’s volcanoes will still be there to dominate whatever planet we leave behind,” Mather writes.
Mather’s book disturbed my thoughts about my home. The pink granite below me gives me as solid a footing as I could hope for, and yet it also started as a huge molten blob that pushed its way through the earth’s crust hundreds of millions of years ago. It cooled to a hard crystalline rock, and as the softer overlying layers eroded, the granite saw the sun.
It will remain solid for my lifetime, but in millions of years Volcanoland may send forth another mass of magma to cover this land with new violence.
ADVENTURES IN VOLCANOLAND: What volcanoes tell us about the world and ourselves | By Tamsin Mather | Hannover Square | 374 pages. | 30 dollars