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…
—
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
.jpg)
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.
.png)
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.
_Detail_from_map_of_Iceland_1585.jpg)
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?
The Squirrelbasket 
Wow – long post indeed – it must have taken you ages to put it together – all fascinating stuff though. Irrational fear for me – maybe deep water – possibly due to a near-drowning incident when I was a nipper.
Sorry about going on, it didn’t take me longer than usual, just that I wrote one blog in the time it usually takes to do two, so I haven’t kept to my “one a week” target!
I don’t think fear of deep water is irrational at all. Very wise!
All the best 🙂
There is a rational, if sub-conscious, reason to fear volcanoes in South Wales. Our area, like most of Europe, was affected by the Black Death (bubonic plague) in the 14th century. the plague started to spread around Europe and from Asia Minor in the years after the Krakatoa eruption in the mid-thirteenth century.
There are a number of competing theories about the causes of the plague, but the wet and cooler weather caused by the major volcanic eruption may have helped in several ways, and is associated with the disease spread in Northern Europe.
One theory is that the specific infection of rat fleas is that is connected to the plague lies dormant most of the time but can spread when the temperature in Asia Minor drops.
You can read more of these theories and events at
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/stothers_05/
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_the_Black_Death#Molecular_evidence_for_Y._pestis_and_objections
and no doubt many other references on-line.
So ifestiophobia or fearing a major volcanic eruption could be logical. Or it could have a more Freudian/psychological explanation, especially in a young or teenage girl.
Finally, I just found this forum http://www.psychforums.com/specific-phobias/topic7788.html with some suggestions for overcoming this fear in case any reader is affected..
..
Well, that was all VERY interesting! I’m glad I didn’t know these things before I wrote this post, or they would have gone in, too!
Interesting there’s a name for the phobia. I guess that comes (in a roundabout way) from Hephaestus, Greek god of fire, equivalent of the Romans’ Vulcan…
I am CERTAINLY not going to pursue your Freudian suggestions!
Best wishes 🙂
Wikipedia says that Greeks considered that Hephaestus, the god of fire, sat below the volcano Etna, forging the weapons of Zeus.- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanology#Mythical_explanations.
There’s a great deal more about the mythical associations of Vulcan and Volcanoes here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(mythology) – it’s fascinating stuff.
Enough material for a whole other blog post…
Maybe one day!
Cheers 🙂
I confess I haven’t read all of this yet – but I’ll return to finish it in episodes as it’s a really ‘good read’ – and is taking me through my childhood too – not just the volcanoes themselves but fears like thinking a volcano was coming up through the tarmac. My introduction to Vesuvius was not through an Encyclopedia but through the magazine ‘Look and Learn’ – in which I was impressed and awed by a cast of a man running away from it. I now have to watch out or I’ll end up writing a comment as long as your post!
Thank you for promising to come back again and again to give my blog more “hits”!
I think I remember Look & Learn. And perhaps around the same time, “Treasure”. I think that was for younger readers and had a turquoise blue top, while Look & Learn had green or red at the top?
All the best – stay safe – I think we are in for more weather today…
another Look and Learn reader here.
Sadly Kilimanjaro is losing its snow and the glacier is retreating due to global weirding.
Irrational fear – of grasshoppers LEAPing on me, but I keep a safe distance and I’ve learnt not to shriek in horror.
That is sad about Kilimanjaro. For a moment there I had forgotten global warming.
Grasshoppers – that IS a strange one! I see they have come up with a posh name for it – acridophobia – although that is a fear of locusts as well as grasshoppers. I would think a fear of locusts is far less irrational…
I see this is what you get when you do a Google image search for Look and Learn. Very nostalgic…
click here
Loved it, and read it all in one go! It could get pleigiarised though – it would save someone a mighty amount of research! I’m assuming you’ve overcome your fear now? I’ve never really had a fear of anything; I think that bit of my brain is missing, being joined by several other bits as I get older!
Thank you for your kind comments. Most of my blogs aren’t real research (like I used to do at university) – but just pulling together threads from memory and Wikipedia!
I’m not sure you could say I have overcome my fear – it’s just that I wouldn’t live near an active volcano. I tend to avoid risk!
Glad to hear you are fearless 🙂
Fascinating stuff! It’s still an unfulfilled ambition of mine to see an erupting volcano… not too closely though.
Thank you, Finn.
I think I would rather see it on TV!
Best wishes 🙂
Fabulous post Pat. OH and myself discussed Yellowstone for what seems like months – I had forgotten all about it! Funny how easily it slips from the mind .. Thank you for such an informative and entertaining post.
Shaz
Thank you Shaz.
I think we would get quite depressed if we thought too much every day about the ways civilization could end…
Best wishes 🙂
I had to come here and post this as our stories are eerily similar.
I too developed a phobia of volcanoes as a child but also became fascinated by them.
I think it started when I began having reaccuring dreams about volcanoes although mostly in the dreams they’d never erupt. I would create school projects about them hawaii and such.
When I was about 8/9 we went on holiday to Malta and at this time Etna was erupting and was being reported on the news. We often went on excursions and my parents insisted on a volcano tour to Sicily. We didnt go because I was so afraid but it still sticks in my mind.
I dreamt that a volcano ‘spring up’ in my street, in England. These dreams would happen almost daily, I still have these dreams albeit not as often.
I stumbled upon this as I was researching phobias and I fully believe that I have an irrational phobia of volcanoes. On a trip across the USA I visited Yellowstone, I couldnt use the bathroom all day because it was simply a cabin with a hole deep un the ground below, which, in my mind, is volcanic and scary. On the road one day near Utah I saw a large plume of ‘smoke’ behind the mountains and began obsessing over the fact it may be an eruption, Google told me otherwise but it was still terrifying.
Weirdly enough I enjoy documentaries about volcanoes and feel I mustve lived near one in a past life, on a remote island such as Tristan Da Cunha.
I loved your post and felt I could not leave without commenting as our stories are very alike.
Thankyou for the post, Kristie.
Thank you for sharing your story! I apologise I have taken so long to reply.
Although it may be a phobia I believe it is also quite logical to be scared of volcanoes as they are so deadly.
It’s probably only a “phobia” if it is illogical. Like my cringing at spiders (although I also find them fascinating). Luckily here we have very few venomous spiders.
There are no live volcanoes in Britain so I guess now I am reassured enough by the science not to be worried in my daily life. When I was a child I didn’t know how volcanoes worked or why they are situated in certain regions of the world.
Maybe you should write a novel!
All the best 🙂
I came across this as I used to be terrified of volcanoes as I was a child and I find it really rare (most people making fun of it). I love this post as it captures everything I feel as I developed a big interest in volcanoes I even went to study them and I overcame the fear when I climbed Puy de Dome in France and then went to Iceland.
My fear was so irrational I always freaked at certain sunsets, a fireworks show on top of a mountain. The most absurd moment for me was when i woke up in the middle of the night and I saw a red light on the floor coming from the power divider button. The whole room was red and I needed a long time to get myself together after that.
I think it all came from the time i watched the movie “Volcano” in LA when a man drowned in lava and I was too young at that point.
Also, dreams were the worst. Always the same one. I live on a hill and i always looked down on my city being consumed in red and the lava slowly following me on the road everywhere I went. Screaming at my parents drinking coffee “let’s go les’t go we have to go” but they only laughed and I ran and didnt dare to sleep as the moment i looked behing my shoulder, there was lava approaching me.
I feel good for sharing 🙂
I do hope you are fully over it now and the nightmares have stopped!
These days my nightmares are mainly of burglars or floods…
While we all live with the real nightmare of the pandemic.
All the best 🙂
Thank you for stopping by to leave a comment.
I’m pleased I am not alone and that the story resonated with you!
Exposure to scary things too early can clearly be a bad thing…
Best wishes 🙂
I live in the US had the same irrational fear as far back as I can remember of volcanoes and most people say that’s strange because we don’t live in a volcanic area I wouldn’t say I learned anything new but it was fascinating to read through someone else’s take especially being from a different generation thank you for your time
Thanks for commenting.
I guess if we did live in a volcanic zone it would not be “irrational”. I think it’s the suddenness of an eruption that frightens me and the inability to escape.
Best wishes 🙂