Island on Fire Page 14

  In 2011, the town got perhaps a bigger taste of volcanic tourism than it may have wished. That year, Klaustur endured an eruption that, while not nearly as bad as Laki, at least gave a taste of what those panicky days in 1783 must have been like.

  Along Iceland’s southern coast, 21 May 2011 was a peaceful spring day, sunny and still. Then evening came. Jón Helgason remembers looking up at about 5.30 p.m. and seeing what he thought was smoke rising above the hills behind Klaustur. He realised that another volcano must have gone off. Helgason had seen many eruptions in his eight decades, and so he wasn’t worried. He went to check on his wife, who was in a nursing home not far from their farm, and told her everything was okay.

  Some things never change: the Grímsvötn eruption of 2011 had farmers around Klaustur scrambling to get their livestock out of ashfall.

  By the time he got back to his house, though, a dark mist was coming down from the mountain, heading straight for town. ‘Then I was thinking, maybe it would not be okay,’ he says. Soon the darkness descended, plunging the town into a midnight gloom that caught many people unaware. A shepherd, out in the fields when the murk came on, had to grope his way along the ground to find his way home. Helgason stayed inside, watching the ash blow and worrying about his wife.

  Over at the hotel, Sveinn sprang into action. The hotel asked its guests to close all their windows, and sealed off air ducts to prevent ash from being sucked in. Across town, Trausti Ísleifsson was trapped in his family’s summerhouse, worrying about the fate of his expensive quad bikes and vans.

  The culprit for this eruption was the obvious one. Grímsvötn, the most active of all Icelandic volcanoes, lies under the Vatnajökull ice cap north and east of Klaustur. Ash from Grímsvötn regularly settles over Klaustur, and most townspeople regard the volcano as a background sort of annoyance, a part of the landscape as inescapable as rain or lightning. But this time Grímsvötn was not just a mild problem. The outburst of May 2011 would become the most powerful eruption in Iceland for half a century.

  On the same evening that Helgason was watching dark clouds rise above Klaustur, geologist Bergrún Óladóttir was in Reykjavík getting ready for a party. It was the 50th birthday celebration for one of the University of Iceland’s leading volcanologists, Magnús Tumi Gudmundsson, who has specialised in studying Grímsvötn. Just before everyone was scheduled to gather, word spread quickly that Grímsvötn was erupting. ‘I was thinking, that’s kind of good,’ Bergrún says. ‘Some people get fireworks for their birthday; others get an eruption.’

  Bergrún had moved to Klaustur when she was an infant and her husband now works at the front desk of the Hotel Klaustur with Sveinn. Nowadays Bergrún divides her time between the town and the city, raising her children while working on her university studies. When Grímsvötn went off, she was in the right place at the right time: as a graduate student at the university, she was able to land a seat on one of the first flights that ferried scientists to study the volcano’s ash plume. Within hours the plume had soared to an altitude of twenty kilometres, far greater than Grímsvötn’s previous eruption in 2004.

  From the plane Bergrún could see the ash billowing like the ash from Eyjafjallajökull the year before. ‘You thought, oh my god is this happening again?’ she remembers. ‘I don’t know how to describe it when you see things like this up close. It’s just so much bigger than you’d think, and you can’t do anything. It’s just there, and you have to respect it.’

  Her family was back in Klaustur, smack in the path of the oncoming black cloud. Was she scared? ‘No,’ Bergrún says. ‘Just surprised at how big it was.’

  Early the next morning, Bergrún and another geologist set out from Reykjavík, heading for Klaustur to collect ash samples. As they drove east on the ring road, Bergrún kept getting text messages from her father: the air was getting blacker; her parents could barely see outside the house.

  Bergrún made it to Klaustur that afternoon, but when she and her colleague drove into town, the ashfall was too heavy to do anything but go inside and wait it out. Black debris rained down like an evil snowstorm. ‘I lost all sense of direction,’ she says. Anyone who ventured outside had to wear a mask, as well as sunglasses or goggles to keep the sand-like material out of their eyes. Winds blew dark gray ash through the town, where it piled up like a filthy snow on the roofs.

  Many people evacuated. Trausti and his brother gave up after three days and drove back to Reykjavík, as did Sveinn’s parents. For those who stayed, emergency officials and the local priest telephoned every house in town to make sure everyone was all right. One saving grace was that communications remained intact. Electricity stayed on, and phone and Internet connections held, so people could stay abreast of the news even though they couldn’t see anything out of their windows. This part was crucial to maintaining calm and order: everyone had access to information and knew what was going on.

  In the end, the 2011 eruption of Grímsvötn spewed out twice as much material as Eyjafjallajökull had done the year before, and in one-tenth the time. Ash blackened skies around the entire island, but because winds weren’t blowing toward Europe, most planes kept flying as planned. Some flights were cancelled, notably in Scotland and Germany, along with those from Reykjavík, but Heathrow airport remained open. Which is why most people neither heard nor cared about Grímsvötn. This time, Iceland kept its volcanoes close.

  After bidding goodbye to Klaustur, we wend our way back to Reykjavík to spend a few more hours in 1783 Iceland: we’re hoping to get a look at the manuscript of Jón’s chronicle of the eruption. It includes, in his words, ‘all that I had written down, day by day and interval by interval, while the fiery chastisement lasted until God gave relief and brought this plague on our country to a fortunate end.’ His stated purpose in writing it was to serve as a warning to his fellow Icelanders so they could learn about ‘the castigation of the Lord… for their own betterment.’ But it has endured as a scientific document, and is now preserved for the country’s heritage at the National and University Library of Iceland in Reykjavík.

  A page from Jón’s Eldrit, or Book of Fire, records the members of his household at Prestbakki (and others). Below his name is that of his wife, Thórunn Hannesdóttir, marked like others with two squiggles that denote their deaths.

  The library itself is an impressively modern three-storey complex, with the main façade painted a rich red, the same colour as the roofs of traditional Icelandic farms. We make our way past exhibits on Víking history and descend into the heart of the building. Jón’s text is stored in the manuscript collection, which holds some 15,000 items, dating back to the year 1100. We put in our request with an elderly gentleman who nods and motions us toward a pile of white archivist gloves on a lower shelf. He disappears through a pair of double doors, and we wait.

  After a while he emerges holding a small parcel, a four-flapped envelope tied together with laces. He says nothing, but places it on the table. The title on the envelope’s cover reads simply ‘Eldrit of Reverend Jón Steingrímsson.’

  On go the white gloves. We undo the laces, and the envelope flaps open to reveal the manuscript cover. It is in the style of a composition notebook, except that the cover’s marbling is a sombre blood-red. It’s smaller than we thought it would be, about six by eight inches. Gingerly we open the cover and begin to page through this remarkable document. For a manuscript written in the eighteenth century, it is in excellent condition, and the meticulous, calligraphic script is still quite legible. We can imagine Jón painstakingly bringing his exacting penmanship to bear in the dark of night, a candle or fish-liver-oil lamp providing the only illumination.

  We’ve read the main text many times in English translation, so we can pick out a few relevant Icelandic words in the first part of the document. But then we come to the back pages, where Jón has appended additional material not in the English version. It contains a census listing all the people who died in the various parishes and farms in Jón’s district. We re
cognize the names of villages as well as some personal names. Under the listing for the farm at Prestbakki, we see Jón Steingrímsson’s name and, below that, his wife Thórunn Hannesdóttir. Beside her name are two curious squiggles – a hieroglyph that Jón uses throughout the census to signify that a person is deceased. What, we wonder, must have gone through his mind as he officially inscribed the death of his own wife?

  Five other names in Jón’s household are also noted as deceased – three men and two women, most likely workers on his farm. In all, some 224 names in this census bear Jón’s mark of death. Some would have been family; all would have been friends.

  The last passage of the text contains two poignant notes. The first is a solemn report that the dead ‘were buried in the graveyard behind the church’. The second footnote states Jón’s wish to be buried ‘just to the side of my dear wife Thórunn where I also want to be buried within sight of her if God allows me to die here (as I hope).’

  Jón got his wish.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Death by Volcano

  The many ways eruptions can kill

  THE KILLER ARRIVED IN THE QUIET Cameroon evening, as people were sitting around fires talking or making their way to bed. Those who survived say the horror came swiftly. Around 9 p.m., on 21 August 1986, they heard strange explosions and the sound of a strong wind. Then came the smell, like rotten eggs. Almost immediately people lost consciousness, only to wake hours later with blisters on their skin and red marks on their clothing. Around them lay the corpses of people, cattle and other animals. Some malicious spirit had raced silently through the village, leaving devastation in its wake.

  Months later, survivor Joseph Nkwain told his story of that night:

  My skin became very hot and I perceived something making some dry smell. I could not speak, I became unconscious, I could not open my mouth because then I smelt something terrible and could not speak. I just closed my mouth and remained silent. All of a sudden, I heard my daughter snoring in a terrible way, very abnormal. So I forced myself to stand up from the bed, I was already weak… When crossing to my daughter’s bed, in the middle of the floor, I collapsed and fell… I was there until a friend of mine came and knocked at my door. The door was locked, he hit it very loudly, so much noise that he woke me. I heard it as if I was dreaming, I was surprised to see that my trousers were red, had some stains like honey: I saw some starch, some starchy mass on my body. My arms had some wounds… My daughter was already dead.

  Nkwain and his family lived on the shores of Lake Nyos, a body of water nestled in Cameroon’s northwestern highlands. In one quick exhalation, the lake had released a deadly cloud of volcanic carbon dioxide, which slithered down the valley bottoms and suffocated at least 1,700 people in a single night.

  The lake isn’t obviously linked to any active volcano, and the nearest recent eruptions are 300 kilometres away. But Lake Nyos fills a crater that is part of the Cameroonian volcanic chain, a line formed where two parts of the African continent are pulling apart from one another. Even though fresh lava isn’t erupting on the surface, magma seethes not too far below. That underground heat, along with volcanic gases, feeds the well-known soda springs at lakes such as Nyos and its neighbour, Monoun.

  Monoun had struck two years earlier. On 15 August 1984, a gas cloud erupted from that lake and smothered 37 people. The news hadn’t spread very far, in part because the Cameroon government tried to keep things quiet: when they found bodies marked with burns and blisters, they suspected chemical terrorism, so they hushed it up. After the Nyos disaster, however, headlines erupted. Scientists and humanitarian groups descended on the area, collecting stories from survivors and trying to analyze what had happened. It was an exercise in deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Bodies were found as far as 25 kilometres from the lake, in a pattern that hinted at the spread of some toxin. Many corpses remained inside houses. Some people had died instantly; others had managed to grasp torches and flee into the bush, only to be struck down by the invisible killer. Those who survived usually had no memory of what had happened, other than a vague sense of confusion followed by unconsciousness.

  A 200-metre-long pipe helped degas the deadly carbon dioxide lurking in the depths of Lake Nyos, Cameroon.

  Plants by the lake shore were flattened in places, as if something had rolled over the reeds. But they showed no signs of scarring or other damage that might be expected if the cloud were extremely hot or filled with sulphuric acid. That’s why scientists eventually converged on the carbon dioxide explanation: at carbon dioxide concentrations higher than about 10 per cent, people become confused; at concentrations higher than about 30 per cent, people pass out into a reversible coma – or die.

  But where had all the gas come from? Researchers eventually figured out that it had come from the bottom of Lake Nyos. Volcanic springs percolating into the lake bottom had injected carbon dioxide into the lower layers of the lake’s 208-metre depths. An inversion layer closer to the surface formed a sort of lid, trapping the dissolved gas at depth. Pressure built up until suddenly, disturbed perhaps by an underwater landslide, the trapping layer was breached and gas-rich waters erupted from the lake’s depths. It was like taking the cork off a bottle of champagne: bubbles burst forth, strewing carbon dioxide everywhere. And that gas, which is about 1.5 times as dense as air, flowed serpent-like along the ground, suffocating any living thing in its path.

  Just as frightening, the 1986 disaster didn’t seem to have emptied Nyos of all the deadly gas lurking at depth. Scientists who visited the lake after the eruption lowered sampling bottles into Nyos; when they brought them up, the bottles exploded. Plenty of carbon dioxide was still dissolved there, a killer in waiting. In 2001 a French-Cameroonian team decided to see if it could de-gas Nyos by lowering several large pipes vertically into the lake and allowing water to shoot out like a Versailles fountain gone berserk. Ten years later, most of the pressurized gas had been vented off, and at nearby Monoun, three pipes inserted between 2003 and 2006 had completely de-gassed the lake by 2009. (The scientists are now working to see if they can use the same idea to extract methane for energy development from Lake Kivu, on the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.)

  Science may have tamed Africa’s killer lakes for now, but local memory runs deep. The late anthropologist Eugenie Shanklin argued that people living in this part of Cameroon had experienced deadly lake outbursts before, and that oral histories preserve a record of these disasters. At least thirty ethnic groups live in the Cameroonian highlands, including a group known as the Kom people. Their complex origin story includes a tale of a battle between a Kom leader and his counterpart from another group. On being outwitted, the Kom leader hanged himself but ordered that his body should not be cut down. His bodily fluids instead dripped to form a lake, and maggots from his corpse populated the water as fish. The other leader brought his group to this miraculous new lake – whereupon the lake exploded and sank into the Earth, taking all the Kom’s rivals with it.

  Another ethnic group, at the crater lake of Oku in Cameroon, has a similar story in which the waters of the lake leave its bed and destroy the homes of rivals. ‘Oku people still make elaborate annual sacrifices to the lake, which showed by its actions that it wished to belong to the Oku people,’ Shanklin wrote in 1989.

  Perhaps because of such tales, most Cameroonians live several miles away from these dangerous crater lakes. It turns out that at Nyos, the only people living by the water were a group who arrived in the 1940s and 1950s. They were apparently unaware that lands by the shore were unoccupied for a reason.

  Lake Nyos and its lethal clouds are far from isolated cases. There are an impressive number of ways in which volcanoes can kill you, and history records more than a quarter of a million deaths caused directly by some four hundred eruptions. When you take into account the many indirect deaths from volcanic eruptions, that number rises far higher.

  For a start, you can be incinerated in a fast-moving lava
flow. This type of death is a favourite of Hollywood scriptwriters, but it doesn’t happen very often in real life. When it does, though, the consequences can be dire: in 1977, a lava lake at Nyiragongo volcano in Zaire drained suddenly and unpredictably. Its lava was so hot and its chemistry so unusual that it flowed very quickly, swallowing villages and killing hundreds if not thousands of people.

  Far more dangerous than most lava flows are the sudden surges of hot gas, ash, rock fragments and other debris known as pyroclastic flows. The word comes from the Greek pyro (fire) and klastos (broken), reflecting how a volcanic explosion can blow magma and rock into tiny pieces. Pyroclastic flows can happen if an eruption ejects material that is heavier than the surrounding air: it collapses into a fluid-like avalanche that might move at speeds of more than 100 metres per second. They are what obliterated Herculaneum during the 79 C.E. eruption of Vesuvius, and Saint-Pierre during the 1902 eruption on Martinique, which knocked over metre-thick stone walls. If you’re buried by a pyroclastic flow, chances are that your body will never be found.

  Even modern scientists, with the best training and best equipment, can be caught unawares. French photographers Maurice and Katia Krafft, who between them had probably observed more eruptions than most twentieth-century scientists, perished in June 1991 at Unzen, Japan, when a pyroclastic flow stopped following the path that others before it had taken, and instead swept up and over the ridge on which they were standing. Some forty people died in Unzen’s eruption that day, including American volcanologist Harry Glicken. (Glicken had cheated death before. He had been observing Mount St. Helens for the U.S. Geological Survey in May 1980 when he left for a college interview; his replacement on the job, David Johnston, was killed in the blast.)