Island on Fire Read online

  Island on Fire

  The extraordinary story of Laki, the forgotten volcano that turned eighteenth-century Europe dark

  First published in 2014 by

  Profile Books, 3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street, Exmouth Market

  London, EC1R OJH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Island on Fire © 2014 by Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe

  Typeset in Minion to a design by Henry Iles.

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 184765 8418

  Island on Fire

  Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe

  ALEXANDRA WITZE is a correspondent for Nature.

  JEFF KANIPE is the author of Chasing Hubble’s Shadows and The Cosmic Connection: How Astronomical Events Impact Life on Earth.

  Contents

  Preface: Heimaey, 1973

  1. Laki Erupts: June 1783

  2. Land of Ice and Fire: The volcanoes of Iceland

  3. Supervolcanoes: The world’s hotspots

  4. Fire, Famine and Death: The poisoning of Iceland

  5. Horrible Phenomena: Europe’s ‘year of wonders’

  6. The Big Chill: Laki’s global fallout

  7. Laki Today: Life in the mountain’s shadow

  8. Death by Volcano: The many ways eruptions can kill

  9. The Next Big Bang: How worried should we be?

  Epilogue: Return to Heimaey

  Endnotes

  Photo credits

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  PREFACE

  Heimaey, 1973

  AT LEAST EVERYONE WAS AT HOME, snug in their beds, when the world began to end.

  It was late January, 1973, and the harsh Icelandic winter had been even rougher than usual on Heimaey, an island off the country’s southern coast. On a normal night, Heimaey’s fishermen would be out plying the rich waters of the North Atlantic for cod, haddock and herring. But on this night, high winds and stormy seas had kept the crews off their boats. Instead, they hunkered down in the trim little clapboard houses that sprawled above the island’s spectacular black-cliffed harbour. So when the earth ripped open on 23 January, nearly all of Heimaey’s 5,300 residents were there to see it.

  It began just before 2 a.m., in a field on the island’s eastern side. Only 200 metres from a serene little hamlet called Kirkjubær, or Church Farm, a line of flame spouted from the ground. It looked like a fire in dry grass, but of course it wasn’t: it was the Earth’s crust coming apart, spewing fountains of lava into the air. Within minutes the spouts of fire were 150 metres high. Within hours the rift was 1.5 kilometres long, almost splitting the island in two.

  Had the eruption begun just a few hundred metres to the west, the volcano might have incinerated islanders as they slept. As it was, most of them found out about it when neighbours or police started pounding on their doors. Dazed, they staggered outside and stared at the fiery jets as close as the end of their street. Then they turned their backs, went inside and started packing.

  In those first confused hours, no one knew what might happen to Heimaey. Would the eruption ignite the oil tanks down by the harbour? Would the entire town be engulfed by lava? Families grabbed what they could and made their way to the waterfront. One musician reportedly left wearing his pyjamas, clutching a frozen leg of lamb. Farmers at Church Farm shot their cows to spare their suffering, then fled.

  Iceland’s civil patrol sprang into action. They had practiced for just such an emergency, and the evacuation went swiftly and smoothly. Between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. nearly all of the island’s residents left Heimaey – via the fishing fleet that fortuitously had been left in the harbour, or via planes sent from Reykjavík. Those who left knew they might never return. Those who stayed knew they faced a battle like nothing before.

  Seen in retrospect, it’s not surprising that the eruption happened where and when it did. Heimaey is the biggest in a chain known as the Vestmannaeyjar or Westman Islands, named after the Celtic ‘west men’ who fled here in the ninth century after murdering one of Iceland’s first permanent settlers. Volcanism is a way of life here; the islands are the tips of mostly dormant volcanoes poking above the waves.

  But not entirely dormant. In November 1963, the Westman Islands increased by one, when new land rose above the sea southwest of Heimaey. This was Surtsey, built up from the ocean bottom by successive eruptions. The first people to spot the plume of smoke, from a nearby fishing vessel, thought it must be a ship on fire. But soon a fresh island appeared above the water, and eruptions built it up sporadically over the next three and a half years. Surtsey soon became a natural laboratory for the study of how plants and animals colonize a barren, newborn terrain.

  Man vs lava: giant pumps sprayed seawater onto Heimaey’s advancing lava flow.

  The Heimaey eruption, a decade after Surtsey, would come to occupy a special place in the annals of volcanology. After all, it’s not every day that the Earth’s crust is blown apart directly beneath a town, forcing the evacuation of nearly the entire population. More significantly, the islanders who stayed decided to fight back. The idea of battling a volcano may sound crazy, but humans have tried controlling the flow of lava before. In 1942, the U.S. military dropped bombs at strategic spots along a river of molten rock that was threatening Hilo, Hawaii, hoping to divert it away from the city. (The eruption stopped at around the time of the bombing, so although Hilo was saved the military couldn’t take credit for it.) In Italy, over the years, authorities have also built earthwork barriers to try to divert Mount Etna’s lava from the surrounding villages. But what happened on Heimaey dwarfed anything ever tried in Hawaii or Italy. Icelanders knew they would have to fight the volcano or abandon the island altogether. And that would have meant giving up the country’s most productive, and most lucrative, fishing port.

  To those who stayed on Heimaey after the evacuation, it became clear within days that something would have to be done. A huge cinder cone had already risen 150 metres above Church Farm. The volcano was spewing huge amounts of black ash and rock fragments, which buried half the town. Photographs from the time look like stills from a disaster film: men stand on rooftops, desperately shovelling the ash before it can accumulate enough weight to crush the buildings. Groups of people are silhouetted in front of burning houses and geysers of fire. Flames consume a hotel; black ash covers everything except the roof of a house. (Islanders saved dozens of homes by barricading windows and doorways with galvanized steel, to keep out flaming debris.)

  Meanwhile, the half of Heimaey not smothered by ash was rapidly being covered by lava. More alarming still, the lava was heading directly for Heimaey’s harbour. If it got there, it would cool and solidify into a huge natural dam, blocking the port. If that happened, Heimaey might as well shut down entirely, for without the fishing harbour the island was nothing.

  That’s when Thorbjörn Sigurgeirsson, an Icelandic physicist who had trained with Niels Bohr, came up with a plan for stopping the lava. His tools would be not bombs but water – seawater sprayed on the advancing flow to cool and slow its movement. Maybe, Thorbjörn said, workers could even redirect the lava to less crucial areas, away from the harbour.

  Fifteen days after the eruption had started, the battle for Heimaey began in earnest. Bulldozers piled ash and
dirt near the northwest margin of the lava flow, to create protective ramparts and divert it from town. Firemen positioned water pipes along the ramparts and sprayed seawater onto the creeping mass. And to almost everyone’s surprise, the cooling plan seemed to work. The lava, chilled and thickened, went mostly where the firemen wanted it to go.

  This struggle, however, could do nothing to staunch the flow at its source, and the eruption continued unabated. Some of the lava broke away and ran directly into the sea, dangerously close to the harbour entrance. Thorbjörn’s team now enlisted two boats to pump more seawater onto the lava, but one of those boats, the Sandey, had been built for dredging sand, and its high-volume pipes were so large that a bulldozer would be required to position them across the flow. An intrepid driver duly did what was necessary. This might have been the first time anyone had ever driven heavy earth-moving equipment across flowing lava.

  By mid-March, Heimaey looked like a battle zone: a network of pipes and hoses sprawled across the black mountainside, all the way down to the harbour. Wherever the water poured onto the lava it generated huge clouds of steam, so workers had to crawl atop a shifting mass of incandescent lava, feeling their way through a dense and hot fog. One team quickly got the nickname of ‘the suicide squad’. (Amazingly, the only person who died in the eruption was not a lava worker but someone asphyxiated by volcanic gases in a poorly ventilated basement.)

  Soon, by default, the Heimaey warriors became the world’s experts on cooling lava. They learned that huge amounts of water were needed to stop the inexorable flow. The U.S. government sent more than 30 additional industrial-sized pumps, which let workers spray about 100 metres higher than before. In the meantime, Thorbjörn’s team discovered that although plastic pipes would melt if empty, those filled with flowing water stayed cool enough to be laid intact across the lava surface. Workers hauled new pipes out onto the flow, where the plastic shifted safely with the flowing lava rather than fracturing as metal pipes had done.

  Ship traffic today can make it through the narrow channel approaching Heimaey’s harbour, thanks to the cooling and stopping of the 1973 lava flow (foreground).

  At the peak of the lava cooling, some 75 men worked on the project. Most worked 13 days in a row, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and then took two days off. Supervisors worked one week in Heimaey, then had one week off on the mainland. Occasionally, the spraying did more harm than good. Several times, a chunk of lava broke from the water-cooled dam and started drifting downstream. The biggest of these chunks, dubbed Flakkarinn or ‘The Wanderer’, weighed some 2 million tonnes. Thorbjörn’s team figured out where Flakkarinn was heading and focused their spraying there. When the Wanderer smashed into the cooled lava wall, the errant mass broke apart.

  By Easter week, lava had stopped flowing westward toward town, and on Easter day it moved safely eastward toward the sea – from then on, this was the only direction it ever went. By the time Heimaey’s eruption was over, five months and five days after it began, the volcano warriors had pumped more than 6 million cubic metres of seawater, and the flow had stopped less than 100 metres from the quayside. Most of the lava was diverted to the north and east, where it spread out and added nearly 20 per cent to the island’s area. Still, more than 400 homes were destroyed, and one-third of the town obliterated.

  Drive across Heimaey today, and you can see how dramatically the island was reshaped by the 1973 eruption. Instead of one cinder cone dominating the landscape above town, there are two. The new one, Eldfell or ‘Fire Mountain’, has already oxidized to a rusty brown colour; soon grasses will cover it just like the older peak, Helgafell. Look down toward the harbour and you can see fresh black lava piled up against the back yards of houses. On the east side of town, residents have kept one reminder: a street buried in cinder ash, where you can peer into the remains of buildings destroyed during the eruption. Windows gape open, blown out by volcanic fire. Roofs crumple under the weight of black ash. Pompeii of the North, they call it.

  Closer to the harbour, though, you can drive across roads freshly cut into the new lava and even visit a ‘lava garden’ with flowers, statues, pinwheels and other sun-bleached, wind-battered decorations. At the harbour itself you can stand on the edge of the 1973 lava flow and watch ships pass directly in front of you, through the narrow channel that still provisions Heimaey’s harbour. On the cliffs opposite, puffins call to one another.

  Heimaey has eked some good things out of the eruption. Ash was used to add a second runway at the island’s airport and as landfill for new homes. The harbour is also easier for ships to manoeuvre into now, since it has a natural breakwater formed by a shallow underwater flow near its entrance. The high cone of Eldfell shelters the town from the strong winds that used to rake it. And for nearly a decade after the eruption, Heimaey residents plugged directly into the geothermal heat fuelling the volcano and used its energy to light their homes.

  In the end, Heimaey represents the quintessential struggle between humans and nature, between engineering know-how and natural disaster. It shows Icelanders at their very best, rallying to save their homes and livelihoods from almost certain destruction. But our story is about another confrontation with lava, one with a very different outcome. It begins nearly two centuries earlier, to the north and east of the Westman Islands.

  We begin in the heart of Iceland’s volcanic fire, and with one extraordinary man who lived there.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Laki Erupts

  June 1783

  AROUND 9 A.M. ON SUNDAY, 8 JUNE 1783, Reverend Jón Steingrímsson stepped out of his small farmhouse, mounted his horse and began the five-kilometre journey to church. Sunday services were always his favourite part of the week, but he was particularly looking forward to today’s observance. It was Pentecostal Sunday, also known as Whitsun, which commemorates the appearance of the Holy Spirit among the disciples of Christ after his resurrection. It was to be a day of celebration and reflection, and Jón was expecting his little Lutheran church to be brimming with worshippers.

  For the past five years, as priest of the Sída district in southern Iceland, the 55-year-old clergyman had overseen what he considered to be a happy and prosperous spiritual flock. Jón and his family too had prospered, so much so that his farm was nearly overrun with sheep and cattle. His affluence had allowed him to host expensive weddings for two of his daughters, including a substantial dowry for each. He was the very model of a successful rural preacher.

  Jón knew well how strenuous life in Iceland could be. But on this bright and clear Whitsun morning, with sunlight playing over the lush pastureland and the sheep and lambs grazing among the wildflowers, God seemed to be smiling. Then Jón chanced to look northward over his shoulder, and abruptly his reverie dissolved. He pulled up his horse and gazed in wonder and alarm. Looming over the foothills was an enormous, roiling black cloud.

  Laki erupted in 1783 along a long straight fissure, similar to the fire fountains seen here in a 1984 eruption of Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

  This, Jón thought, was the end. The earthquakes that had shaken the ground over the last few days, some strong enough to frighten people out of their homes, had been but a clamorous prelude to something he had grimly foreseen. God’s patience had run its course; the hour of afflictions had arrived. Whitsun would not be a day of celebration, but one of weeping and lamentation.

  Within minutes the cloud was so thick it shut out the sun and drove everyone indoors, where even lamplight could barely dispel the enfolding darkness. People caught outdoors had to grope their way home in the blackness. Soon, a blizzard of powdery fluff began falling out of the cloud, settling thickly on the ground like coal ash. A light drizzle followed, turning the flakes into an inky slurry.

  A brief respite came later in the afternoon, when a southeasterly sea breeze drove the ash cloud back across the foothills. Jón managed to conduct his services under a clear sky, but the relief was only momentary. That night the earthquakes returned. Then all hell broke loose.
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br />   In the days that followed came more tremors, more ash and cinder falls, darkness, filthy air and bitter acidic rains that burned the eyes and skin and scorched the pastures. Thick haze rolled across the countryside, accompanied by a devilish stink. Pastoral Iceland, once full of lush grassy meadows, became a grey and poisonous place.

  At the time, neither Jón nor anyone else knew that the source of these earthly convulsions was the eruption of a new volcanic fissure system in the Icelandic highlands, some 45 kilometres to the northwest. Later the system would be given a name: Lakagígar, or the Laki craters, after Mount Laki that stands at the centre of the fiery seam. (Throughout this book, ‘Laki’ will be used as shorthand for both the Laki crater row and its 1783–84 eruption.) Laki erupted for eight months, and eventually, indirectly, it killed at least half of the country’s livestock and one-fifth of its people. Icelandic historians would come to consider the eruption the single most devastating event since Víkings settled the island in 871 C.E.

  The terrible irony was that the people in Jón’s district had just clawed their way back to relative prosperity. A decadeslong string of disasters had begun in 1750 with bitterly cold temperatures. Sea ice congealed around the coasts, preventing farmers from open-boat fishing during the winter, a practice that normally sustained them through the off season. Livestock perished, villages were devastated and several thousand people starved to death. As if that weren’t enough, the volcano Katla erupted in the autumn of 1755, destroying much of the pastureland with ash fall and floodwaters. The weather improved slightly thereafter, but a smallpox outbreak ravaged the country in 1760, followed by scabies, which in eighteen years slashed the country’s precious sheep population by nearly half.

  Since then, however, the climate had moderated, the epidemics had diminished and Icelanders had enjoyed great bounties from the land. Good fishing had returned, the hay meadows were lush again and everyone had more than enough livestock for milk and meat. The country’s population, which had dwindled to 43,000 in the depths of the famine, now surpassed 50,000.