A childish fear of volcanoes…

The Indonesian volcano of Rinjani in 1994, by Oliver Spalt on Wikimedia Commons

STOP PRESS: Moments after I published this, reports came in of a volcano erupting in Sumatra – so best wishes to everyone struggling there…
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Did you have an irrational fear of something when you were a child? In my case, for a while at least, I was terrified of volcanoes. You might say that’s not so crazy. But as I lived in Wales, where an eruption would be pretty near impossible, I think it was.

So this post is all about what I have learned about volcanoes over the decades, as I have always found them as fascinating as a basilisk’s gaze.

I’m afraid it goes on a bit, but I hope you enjoy the pictures, none of which are mine, so please click on the images to go to the source information, mostly on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

The first moment of volcano fear I recall was when I was in junior school in Rogiet, Monmouthshire. I recall looking west and the sky was red. It was probably the sunset, but Llanwern Steelworks was also in that direction and nowadays I have a fantasised image of what I must have seen, something like this…

Coalbrookdale (Shropshire) by night by Philip James de Loutherbourg, painted around 1801

The other moment frozen in my memory is just of walking along a tarmac lane and seeing a small hole in the road, maybe an inch across, slightly raised with cracks around it. Oh no, I thought, please don’t let that be the start of a volcano! This was probably around the time my mother died, when I was 10, so maybe I was just anxious, but I got over it.

Anyway, here is a gallimaufry of my life in volcanoes. Perhaps you remember discovering some of these yourself…

1. Vesuvius, Etna and Stromboli

The last Days of Pompeii by Karl Briullov, painted around 1827-1833

Although Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia in all its 10 volumes made me who I am today, its images of the dead of Pompeii, encased in stone shells, probably scarred me (and scared me) for life.

Casts of the Vesuvius victims in a Pompeii Exhibition 2007 at the European Culture Park Bliesbruck – picture by Claus Ableiter

In short, the people of the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried under about 20ft of ash and pumice from a big eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

Most fascinating is the fact that there is a contemporary account of the disaster by Pliny the Younger, who saw his uncle, Pliny the Elder, die while trying to rescue friends from Pompeii by ship.

Pompeii lay undiscovered until 1599, and subsequent excavations have revealed a snapshot of Roman life in the first century. Perhaps more poignant now than the pumice-stone-cast hollows where people died are the portraits of the people who lived there all those years ago…

The Pompeii baker Paquius Proculus and his wife, from the National Museum in Napoli

The AD79 eruption killed some 16,000 people, engulfed in a wall of burning hot gas and rock dust known as a pyroclastic flow – not in lava as I would have thought as a child. Vesuvius ejected a cloud of stones, ash and fumes to a height of 20 miles at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Vesuvius apparently didn’t start pouring out less explosive molten lava until centuries later, although since then there have been many eruptions large and small with quiet times in between. In 1906 a lava flow devastated Naples and 100 people died. The last major eruption was in 1944 and now the volcano is monitored and considered safe enough for tourists to take a path to the summit – at the moment.

All quiet on Vesuvius today, seen from ruined Pompeii

I always used to confuse Vesuvius and Mount Etna, which I also came across on a map of Italy in the Children’s Encyclopedia. It is on the island of Sicily – that triangular one being kicked by the boot that is Italy. But Mount Etna is a whole other story.

As is Stromboli, a word I know from my childhood but I’m not sure if it is from an eruption on the Italian island in the 1960s (Wikipedia is vague) or from the famous 1950 movie Stromboli starring Ingrid Bergman, which I surely would have seen on TV at some stage.

Ingrid Bergman starred in the 1950 film Stromboli…

Stromboli gave its name to Strombolian eruptions, which are low level but frequent – and dare I say it – pretty.

A pretty eruption on Stromboli

We used to have conical cardboard fireworks called Vesuvius and Etna (and maybe even Stromboli), made by Brocks and Astra for Bonfire Night.

2. Surtsey, Hekla and Eyjafjallajökull

Surtsey rising from the Atlantic Ocean in November 1963…

We always listened to the news on the wireless and watched it on TV (in black and white) when I was a child and I recall the coverage of the Surtsey volcano in the Atlantic Ocean off Iceland.

Perhaps it is relevant that the new island of Surtsey was first spotted in November 1963, just a week or so before the assassination of John F Kennedy. Apocalyptic times, we all thought!

A colour image of Surtsey on November 30, 1963

Surtsey was one of several volcanic islands that sprang up along the Mid Atlantic Ridge at that time, but one of few to have survived, most sinking away again. This ridge is where new molten land is forced up between the world’s tectonic plates to spread the Atlantic ever wider.

Surtsey was created between 1963 and 1967 and at its maximum size was only one square mile in area. It is now a Unesco World Heritage Site and has been protected from human interference since its birth. The island has given long-term information on the colonisation of new land by plant and animal life.

The teardrop shape of Surtsey in 1999

Somewhere from the recesses of my childhood memory I also dredge up Mount Hekla, an Icelandic volcano and possibly the most active.

Abraham Ortelius’ 1585 map of Iceland shows Hekla erupting. The Latin text says “The Hekla, perpetually condemned to storms and snow, vomits stones under terrible noise”

Also note on that old map the words Eyafialla Iokul, just south of Hekla. You may recognise this as the almost unpronounceable Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano that caused chaos in 2010 with a small eruption that caused a huge amount of dust. This led to serious disruption in air travel over Western and Northern Europe, not least delaying our neighbours’ flight home from their holiday in Iceland!

The volcanic ash cloud pouring from Eyjafjallajokull in 2010

3) Popocatepetl, Fujiyama and Kilimanjaro

Popocatepetl, seen from nearby Iztaccíhuatl

As a child hungry for interesting words, I recall picking up on “Popocatepetl”, although I have no idea why. Maybe it was from a TV travelogue. Then in my teens I was obsessed with the Aztecs and other Central American cultures, so again came across Popocatepetl, a volcano that can sometimes be seen from Mexico City, although it is 40 miles away. Its name means “smoking mountain”.

I had thought Popocatapetl extinct, but it is the most active volcano in Mexico, with 15 or so major eruptions since the arrival of the Spanish in 1519. One was in 1947 and the volcano has been quite active in the last couple of years, the outpourings of smoke sometimes disrupting local air transport in 2013.

It’s a personal thing, but I link Popocatepetl with Mount Fuji in Japan and Kilimanjaro in Africa. Maybe just because they are “romantic” and often snow-clad. Certainly the other two are iconic…

Mount Fuji viewed from kenashiyama

We always called it Mount Fujiyama, but apparently the -yama bit means mountain anyway. So it’s Mount Fuji. I thought this one was extinct, too. But Wikipedia says it’s active – although it hasn’t erupted since 1707.

Mount Fuji features in The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a print by Hokusai. It shows a tsunami and was one of 36 Views of Mount Fuji

I assume the Japanese Fujifilm photographic company is named after Mount Fuji.

Then there is Mount Kilimanjaro. this one really IS classed as dormant. It has three cones and is the tallest mountain in Tanzania. Remember that lyric “Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti”? See a great view around the two-minute mark on this lovely video of Toto’s Africa.

Kilimanjaro by Chris 73 on Wikimedia Commons

The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a 1952 film starring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward and Ava Gardner. It’s based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro…

4) Santorini and the end of Atlantis

Santorini, its settlements built on the edge of the volcanic caldera – image by Leonard G

This is the only volcano I have walked upon – an achievement, I thought, with my former phobia. I went to Santorini (also known as Thira) in 1976 when I was a student.

This island, to the North of Crete in the Mediterranean, is now widely accepted as the source of the Atlantis stories. Most people are fascinated by ancient Atlantis and there is even a rather good BBC fantasy series loosely based on it.

Jack Donnelly, centre, as Jason, with Mark Addy (Hercules) and Robert Emms (Pythagoras) in the BBC’s entertaining Atlantis fantasy series

I have a 1969 book called The End of Atlantis by JV Luce, which details the work of Professor Spyridon Marinatos (1902-1974) on his theory that a huge eruption of the island volcano that is Santorini destroyed the wonderful Bronze Age Minoan civilization on Crete around 1600BC.

The cover of The End of Atlantis by JV Luce

The professor’s excavations found that the small island itself was a flourishing Minoan centre before the huge blast. There is so much more about this on Wikipedia. The Minoan towns of the north coast of Crete may have been washed out by a tsunami from the eruption, or by earthquakes around the same time. The weakening of the Minoans possibly led to their conquest by the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece.

A Greek map of Thira (Santorini) I bought for 10 drachmas in 1976…

You can see in the map above the volcano shape of Santorini, with the sea filling the hollow central caldera. The small islands in the centre of the lagoon are formed from material being thrown up to form a new volcano. The one I walked upon was Nea Kameni. I took no pictures but remember it as formed of soft, black material, with a smell of sulphur. I picked up some yellow sulphur crystals and kept them in a tiny Ouzo bottle for a while, but they have now crumbled away to nothing and gone.

Tourists like ants walk on Nea Kameni in 2001, by Rolfsteinar

I also visited the well-preserved but dusty excavations at Akrotiri.

Spring flowers and swallows on a Bronze Age fresco from Akrotiri, Thira

5) Mount St Helens 1980

The Mount St Helens eruption of 1980, by Carol Spears

In the news from March to May in 1980 was the eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State. This was the biggest volcanic eruption on the USA mainland since 1915.

The blast dropped ash on 11 states, killed 57 people and caused around $1bn of property damage. Because by 1980 we were in the TV age, there was much film footage of the devastated blast zone and even satellite images of the volcanic cone.

Mount St Helens in 1982, much reduced in size after the 1980 eruption and spurting a plume of steam and ash, picture by Carol Spears

6) Tambora and the Year Without a Summer

The caldera of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, by JialiangGao

In my adult life I have continued to digest stories of volcanoes. Such as the “Year Without a Summer”, 1816, which is thought to have been caused by atmospheric dust caused by the huge explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in the previous year.

Some say the spectacular skies of paintings by English artist JMW Turner, such as that in The Fighting Temeraire (painted 1838-1839), could have been caused by the dust build-up from Tambora and, between 1822 and 1838, eruptions of Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna.

The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth to be broken, painted by JMW Turner in 1839

7) Krakatoa, West of Java

Krakatoa erupting on May 27, 1883. From Symons, G, 1888, The Eruption of Krakatau and Subsequent phenomena: Reports of the Krakatau Committee of the Royal Society, Trubner, London

In my childhood Krakatoa probably became most famous for the 1969 film Krakatoa East of Java, mainly because people soon pointed out that Krakatoa is to the West of Java. It is to the East of Sumatra and sits in the Sunda Strait between these two islands of what is now the republic of Indonesia.

The 1969 film Krakatoa, East of Java…

The name Krakatoa (or more correctly Krakatau) now relates to the small island group in Indonesia left over from the much bigger island blown to bits in the famous 1883 eruption. The eruption caused huge tsunamis, killing more than 36,000 people, and the blast is thought to have been the loudest sound of modern times, apparently heard up to 3,000 miles away.

In 1927 a new island, Anak Krakatau, or “Child of Krakatoa”, raised its head from the caldera formed in 1883 and this is now where eruptions happen, a bit like the island in the middle of the caldera on Santorini.

Just as Turner’s skies may have been coloured by the eruption of Tambora, it is thought by some that the sky in The Scream by Edvard Munch may have been affected by dust from Krakatoa tinting the sky over Norway.

The Scream (one of four versions) by Edvard Munch, painted in 1893

8) Were the Dark Ages really dark?

Tavurvur, part of Rabaul, near Papua New Guinea, in 2009, by Richard Bartz

Scientists, historians and archaeologists are still debating whether the Dark Ages were, genuinely, “dark”. This time in Britain is considered by some to have been intellectually grim because it came between the departure of the Roman garrison in 411 and the Norman Conquest in 1066. Although the Celts and Saxons would have something to say about that. Now this era is more politely called the Early Middle Ages.

We DO know there was extremely bad weather at times between the 5th century and the 10th century in Europe, notably in 535-536. Like the “Year Without a Summer” mentioned above, it was a time of crop failure and famine.

In the 1980s RB Strothers suggested that an eruption of the volcanic island of Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, may have been to blame, but since then there have been several theories, including another eruption of Krakatoa or strike by comets. The current theory seems to be that a huge eruption of what is now the Ilopango Lake caldera in El Salvador, which also destroyed Mayan cities, caused the 535-536 crop failures in Europe.

Ilopango Lake caldera in El Salvador, by Michael Metzger

9) The Hawaiian hotspot

A lava flow on Mauna Loa, Hawaii, during an eruption in 1984, by RW Decker

As I have been writing this post about the past, I have been finding out new things, too.

In my mind there are two types of volcano – the huge, stony ones that do nothing for ages and then go bang and throw out lots of grey smoke and dust, and the flatter, slower ones that ooze molten black and red lava. And that’s not too far from the truth.

Most of the volcanoes above – Vesuvius, Etna and Stromboli, Hekla and Eyjafjallajökull, Popocatepetl, Fujiyama and Kilimanjaro, Mount St Helens, Tambora and Krakatoa, Rabaul and Ilopango – are the big stony ones, known technically as stratovolcanoes.

The other, softer, flatter volcanoes are called shield volcanoes. Many of the active ones are in Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and one of these, Mauna Loa, is considered to be the biggest volcano in the world. Although Hawaii is a great tourist destination, the volcanoes don’t often make international news as they don’t go bang with huge destructive force.

The beautiful Hawaiian Islands grew out of the sea through volcanic activity and life came by wind, waves and wings – picture by Christopher Michel

You may have heard of the Pacific “Ring of Fire” – this is a description of the actively volcanic land areas near the coasts that circle the Pacific Ocean. Of the volcanoes mentioned earlier, Mount St Helens, Popocatepetl, Krakatoa, Tambora, Rabaul and Fuji are all in this zone.

Imagine the edge of one tectonic plate slipping under another and forcing up molten magma about 100 miles beyond the boundary. This causes earthquakes and volcanoes in that geologically troubled zone.

But Hawaii is notable because it is far away from the edges, sitting on what has been called a volcanic “hotspot”, where molten magma from the earth’s mantle rises naturally in a plume to the surface. Although some of these occur at boundaries between plates, many hotspots are in the middle of plates, such as in Hawaii.

In Hawaii, the movement of its tectonic plate over the hotspot has led to a chain of island volcanoes being formed, gradually becoming dormant and then extinct and finally being washed away by the ocean.

As the tectonic plate has moved over the hotspot, a chain of volcanic islands has been formed in Hawaii

10) Not to mention Yellowstone Park…

All quiet now – Yellowstone Park by Seattle Skier

The term “supervolcano” was made fashionable by a BBC Horizon TV science programme here in the UK in the year 2000. But it’s not a word volcanologists and geologists use as it is too vague.

That didn’t stop it being the name of a disaster TV movie in 2005, which centred on the idea that the Yellowstone Park caldera volcano was overdue for a massive blast. It last erupted 640,000 years ago, give or take a few lifetimes.

The 2005 TV movie Supervolcano

The above-mentioned eruptions of Santorini and Tambora would also be considered supervolcanoes. Such activity can bring on a volcanic winter as dust blocks out the sun. I can’t help thinking it’s nature’s way of easing global warming…

But the human effects of eruptions depend on how close to “civilization” they are, as the Minoans of Crete & Santorini and the Romans of Pompeii & Herculaneum learned. If Yellowstone went up, it would almost certainly mean the end of modern civilization as we know it. So perhaps my childhood fear was logical after all?

I am relieved to find (from Wikipedia, of course) that now scientists are more sceptical about any imminent threat from Yellowstone. Phew! Just hope that’s not “famous last words”.

If you are still with me at the end of this ridiculously long blog post, thank you for bearing with me. Have you visited any of these volcanoes?

Or did you have any irrational fears as a child?