My review of
Mountains of Fire
By
Clive Oppenheimer
Mountains of Fire is ostensibly a book about volcanoes, but really it is about the adventures of volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer on his travels to explore these phenomena. He is now Professor of Volcanology at the University of Cambridge, and has made a couple of acclaimed documentaries about his work. This, however, is not a dry academic account of his research, nor even a standard “popularisation”. Instead, it weaves together science, history and culture into a tapestry that is far greater than the sum of its parts, and is also a darn good read.
We meet Oppenheimer as a young student taking foolish risks to make measurements that ended up proving useless, visit North Korea with him, find him at risk of being kidnapped or worse on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and end up on Mount Erebus in Antarctica. This makes for a real page-turner of a book, because of the author’s gripping style and way with a descriptive narrative. If Michael Palin had been a volcanologist, this is the book he might have written.
But there are two other threads to the story. The science is not forgotten, but along with other details that might break up the flow of the story many details are confined to the 82 pages of notes which follow the main text (and can be totally ignored if all you are after is a good read). And best of all Oppenheimer includes many accounts of the adventures of his predecessors, with stories of eruptions in recorded history, as well as those that shaped the world in the far distant past. So we meet Robert Bunsen, of burner fame, on an expedition to Iceland in the mid-nineteenth century, and Charles Darwin being shaken by an earthquake in Chile a couple of decades earlier. Darwin’s first major published work, we learn, was a theory of volcanism that “came remarkably close to pre-empting a central plank of plate tectonic theory.”
My favourite section of the book, which pulls together all the threads, deals with the history of eruptions in Iceland, an island which sits astride a major crack in the Earth’s crust known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland is actually getting wider, by a couple of centimetres a year, as crust spreads out on either side of the ridge, which shows up as a steep-sided canyon crossing the island. “Tectonically speaking,” as Oppenheimer puts it, you can stand there “planting one foot in America and the other in Europe.” As well as Iceland’s own volcanic activity, the nearby Greenland ice cap carries buried in the layers of snow falling each year a dusty record of enormous eruptions from around the globe, including an eruption of the Korean volcano Paektu in the year 946 CE. Identification of this layer in the Greenland ice in turn enabled him to count backwards down the layers to pinpoint the date of a major Icelandic eruption as occurring in the spring of 939 CE. Which ties it neatly to accounts of crop failures across Europe and the Sun showing red in the daytime as far away as Rome. Tree ring data show that the following year, 940 CE, was one of the coldest Northern Hemisphere summers of the past two millennia, as particles from the volcano spread high in the stratosphere around the globe and blocked sunlight. But if you want to know how this ties in with Icelandic medieval poetry and the Norse vision of the end of the world, Ragnarok, you will have to read the book.
There are, however, two omissions that deserved a place in the book, one specific and one general. The catastrophic eruption of Thera, on the island of Santorini, which is thought to have caused the collapse of Minoan civilisation around 1600 BCE surely deserves a mention, and although Oppenheimer discusses the relationships between volcanoes, the environment and life I would have liked to learn his take (for or against) on Gaia theory, the idea that all these processes are linked to make a kind of planetary super-organism.
His early experience on Mount Stromboli is worth sharing:
“A metallic whiff like a struck match smarted my eyes. I was seized by the realisation that volatile molecules just unfettered from the inner Earth, and tasting like sour milk at the back of my throat, were now in my lungs, in my bloodstream . . . I was discovering [that] fieldwork on an active volcano is a profoundly embodying experience.” And when lumps of molten lava start falling at his feet, his notebook laconically records, “working here extremely hazardous.” It’s a wonder that he lived to tell the tale, and the rest of the tales in the book, but all lovers of adventure stories, travel stories, and the science of our living planet can rejoice in the fact that he did. Most of the books I review get passed on, one way or another, fairly quickly; but this one is definitely a keeperi
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