This is the first issue of a series on this blog highlighting earth stories from The Observer newspaper. Each of these stories offers an interesting perspective on Earth Sciences and were so good I felt the need to serialise them!
We need more eruptions. If we have more eruptions, people will be more regularly reminded that volcanoes are incredibly hazardous. Five hundred million people around the world are living within reach of an eruption. In the city of Quito, Ecuador, 2 million people are living on the slopes of Pichincha volcano. If Vesuvius were to blow today, it’s estimated that 100,000 people could perish. The national symbol of Japan, Mount Fuji, is a volcano sitting next door to Tokyo. An eruption is a blink-of-an-eye sort of thing – all of a sudden the door opens and it’s death.
Volcanalogists go to volcanoes when they’re heating up because that’s when we can learn the most about forecasting eruptions, which is basically the prize. Galeras in Colombia was, and still is, fascinating, dangerous and active and accessible - making it a good laboratory. I was on Galeras with a group of scientists in 1993. I remember the climb up there, chatting with Igor Menyailov and Geoff Brown and the others, and we were all so happy to be there, working together in the crater, and the spirit was so good. Igor was taking reading from the gases bubbling out of the fumaroles, Geoff was taking the volcano’s pulse with a gravimeter - 100 million times more sensitive than a grocer’s scale. We were trying to work out if the magma was on the move. Suddenly boulders began cascading down, and then the air was rent by a thunberclap and then the sound of the Earth’s crust snapping. Nine people were killed, including five of my colleagues. It’s still hard to take in.
Galeras Crater, Colombia
I went back a year later but I didn’t go into the crater - I’d just had the wire birdcage removed from my shattered legs, so I wasn’t strong enough./ But in August 1995 I was back and working. Almost every forward step in volcanology has followed in the footsteps of disaster. Galeras has continued to be a spectacular source of knowledge and a testing ground for new instruments.
The discipline has been going since at least 79AD. Pliny the Younger wrote an incredibly detailed report of the eruption of Vesuvius - his observations are still cornerstones of the science. Field data has been collected throughout history, sometimes inadvertently. People used to think that Edvard Munch was crazy because of the mad red and yellow sky in his painting The Scream. But he painted it a few days after Krakatoa erupted in Indonesia in 1883, and some models of the atmosphere have shown that Oslo harbour would have had those sorts of horrible skies at the time. Krakatoa’s blast was heard 2,900 miles away and 36,000 people died, mostly from huge tsunamis whipped up by the blast.
However probably the biggest eruption of the last 10,000 years took place in Tambora, Indonesia in 1815. Tambora killed 12,000, mainly from pyroclastic flows - speeding clouds of gas and ash.
Tambora Crater, Indonesia
Temperatures dropped around the world as a result of aerosols and dust in the stratosphere. Turner painted the distinctive red sunsets over New England that resulted.
Tambora Ash Fallout from the 1815 Eruption
We’ve made great strides in our ability to forecast. The eruption of Pinatubo in the Philippines back in 1993 was a great success story. The volcano was gearing up and then it went quiet. The seismology team said it was becoming more and more constipated and could release a huge amount of energy. As a result of the team’s advice, thousands of soldiers were evacuated from the nearby air force vase, and thousands of villagers. By the time it spectacularly erupted, many, many lives had been saved.
But scientists are often not listened to - what we call the ‘International Chamber of Commerce’ doesn’t want us stopping the wheels of business turning. In 1985 at Ruiz, Colombia, the scientists who encouraged evacuation were called ‘volcano terrorists’. Three days later their prediction of where the people were most at risk was proved tragically accurate, as 23,000 people were killed by mudflows.
One of the things we’re up against is that people don’t like being reminded that are little gnats running around this sphere. If you look back at the big eruptions of the world, they happened with a frequency that is nor negligible. If we were to have an eruption that killed a million people, it wouldn’t be a surprise.
Stanley Williams is professor of geology at Arizona State University.
All Text © The Observer (2008)
Prof Stanley Williams: Profile
Wikipedia: Mount Tambora
Wikipedia: Galeras
Wikipedia: Mount Pinatubo
Wikipedia: Krakatoa
Wikipedia: Nevado del Ruiz
