Island on Fire Read online

  More so than the rest of Iceland, Heimaey is a fairly religious community, perhaps because of its history of loss. In 1627, pirate ships attacked the island, kidnapping some three-quarters of the residents and murdering most of the rest. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Heimaey again lost a fair chunk of its population when about 200 islanders converted to Mormonism and followed missionaries to Utah. Those who remained drew together closer than ever. Heimaey, after all, means ‘home island’ in Icelandic.

  So when it seemed that the 1973 eruption was about to bury their town in lava, the islanders turned to the church. Surely, they thought, it couldn’t hurt to come together and renew the fight with a little spiritual backing. Thorsteinn Lúther Jónsson, one of the town’s two priests, agreed to conduct the service.

  That evening, nearly everybody on the rescue teams crowded into the church. Grim-faced men, wearing traditional lopapeysa sweaters, came to hear Thorsteinn. They lit long tapers to illuminate the dim church, even as the lava fountains sprayed brilliant orange fire outside.

  It didn’t work. Despite the prayers of hundreds of people, a new lava flow broke out that night and headed directly for the town. Within eight hours 64 houses were burned or buried under lava, and the following day 30 more homes were destroyed. That was when islanders started to joke with Pastor Thorsteinn about how ‘his mass’ didn’t work as well as Jón Steingrímsson’s mass in Klaustur. He is said not to have found that funny at all.

  Perhaps Heimaey’s fire mass wasn’t heartfelt enough. Or perhaps Pastor Jón just got lucky two centuries ago. There is no obvious way to cope when your town is on the brink of destruction, and it’s probably worth trying every weapon in the arsenal – from seawater spraying to divine intervention – to save it. The planet is not going to rein in its volcanic fire on our behalf.

  Endnotes

  INTRODUCTION

  The classic narrative of Heimaey’s 1973 eruption lies in John McPhee’s The Control of Nature (in a piece originally written for The New Yorker). A vivid description from the islanders’ perspective appears in the 2003 issue of the now-defunct Icelandic Geographic, by Hjálmar R. Bárdarson and Margrét Jónasdóttir. For accounts of the engineering that stopped the lava, we relied on U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 97–724, in which Richard S. Williams, Jr., collected English translations of some of the key Icelandic descriptions of the lava-cooling operations. More technical details of the eruption appear in a USGS booklet, Man Against Volcano, originally published in 1976 and written by the same author along with James G. Moore. Additional context can be found in ‘The Eldfell Eruption, Heimaey, Iceland: A 25-Year Retrospective,’ by Alan V. Morgan in the March 2000 issue of Geoscience Canada.

  CHAPTER 1

  The writings of Jón Steingrímsson have been translated into English in recent decades. His famous chronicle (of which there were actually three versions) appears as Fires of the Earth: The Laki Eruption 1783–1784, translated by Keneva Kunz and published in 1998 by the Nordic Volcanological Institute and the University of Iceland Press. Michael Fell’s 2002 translation of Jón’s autobiography, A Very Present Help in Trouble: The Autobiography of the Fire-Priest, from Peter Lang Publishing, was of great help in understanding Jón’s childhood and world view. For statistics on Laki’s lava flows and gas emissions, we referred to the seminal work of Thorvaldur Thordarson and Stephen Self, which will be referenced many times to come: notably ‘Atmospheric and environmental effects of the 1783–1784 Laki eruption: a review and reassessment,’ which appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2003.

  CHAPTER 2

  Haraldur Sigurdsson’s Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions (Oxford University Press, 1999) is notable not only for its scholarship but also the extensive collection of volcano images from the author’s personal collection. For more on the concept of plate tectonics, see Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, edited by Naomi Oreskes (Westview Press, 2001). Alfred Wegener’s seminal 1915 publication was The Origin of Continents and Oceans, available in several English-language translations.

  Details on Iceland’s geologic past (including the Katla magic trousers story, plus many volcano statistics) come from the thorough field guide that is part of the Classic Geology in Europe series: Iceland by Thor Thordarson and Armann Hoskuldsson (Terra Publishing, 2002). Hekla on Fire by Sigurdur Thorarinsson (Hanns Reich Verlag, 1956) describes the history and geology of Iceland’s most famous volcano; see also The History of Iceland by Gunnar Karlsson (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Katla 1918 flood calculations come from John A. Stevenson of the University of Edinburgh on his invaluable blog, volcan01010 (all-geo.org/volcan01010).

  CHAPTER 3

  For an overview of Toba research, see the papers collected as volume 258 of Quaternary International (2012). For Santorini, see Floyd W. McCoy and Grant Heiken, ‘The Late Bronze Age eruption of Thera (Santorini), Greece: regional and local effects,’ Geological Society of America Special Paper 345 (2000), as well as Andrew V. Newman et al., ‘Recent geodetic unrest at Santorini Caldera, Greece,’ Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 39, L06309 (2012).

  Vesuvius is well represented in many scholarly works, including a 1982 overview from Haraldur Sigurdsson et al., ‘The eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79: reconstruction from historical and volcanological evidence,’ American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 86, pp. 39–51, and Gillian Darley’s Vesuvius (Profile Books, 2011). Also see Richard B. Stothers and Michael R. Rampino, ‘Volcanic eruptions in the Mediterranean before A.D. 630 from written and archaeological sources,’ Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 88, pp. 6357–6371 (1983). For more recent research see, for instance, Lucia Pappalardo and Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo, ‘Short residence times for alkaline Vesuvius magmas in a multi-depth supply system,’ Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol. 296, pp. 133–143 (2010).

  Papers on the global impact of Tambora are collected in a workshop volume edited by C.R. Harington, The Year Without a Summer?: World Climate in 1816 (Canadian Museum of Nature, 1992). Sir Thomas Raffles’s History of Java is readily available online. For insight into the Indonesian records and beliefs, see Bernice de Jong Beers, ‘Mount Tambora in 1815: a volcanic eruption in Indonesia and its aftermath,’ Indonesia, pp. 37–60 (1995). The Alsace farmer’s quote comes from Tom Bodenmann et al., ‘Perceiving, explaining and observing climatic changes: an historical case study of the “year without a summer” 1816,’ Meteorologische Zeitschrift, vol. 20, pp. 577–587 (2011). The Irish doctor’s quote is cited in Clive Oppenheimer, ‘Climate, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historical eruption: Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815,’ Progress in Physical Geography, vol. 27, pp. 230–259 (2003). W.J. Humphreys’s observations on volcanic dust appear in vol. 6 of the Bulletin of the Mount Weather Observatory (1913).

  Everything you ever wanted to know about Krakatau is in the exhaustingly complete Krakatau 1883: The volcanic eruption and its effects by Tom Simkin and Richard S. Fiske (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983). Also see the original Royal Society report The eruption of Krakatau and subsequent phenomena, edited by G.J. Symons (London, 1888).

  CHAPTER 4

  See the notes for Chapter 1 for many of the sources used here. Once again, Thor Thordarson has done much of the seminal work; for instance, there are actually three Eldrits written by Jón Steingrímsson, and Thordarson compares them meticulously in the hard-to-find journal Jökull, number 53 (2003).

  Magnús Stephensen’s account appears in English translation in the second edition of William Jackson Hooker’s A Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809 (London, 1813).

  CHAPTER 5

  Accounts of Laki’s European effects are collected in Thorvaldur Thordarson and Stephen Self, ‘Atmospheric and environmental effects of the 1783–1784 Laki eruption: a review and reassessment,’ Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 108, D1 (2003). Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne can be found in vari
ous printings; we relied on The Folio Society version (1994). His journals can be found at naturalhistoryofselborne.com.

  Richard Stothers wrote an overview of ‘the great dry fog of 1783’ in Climatic Change, vol. 32, pp. 79–89 (1996). William Herschel’s journals are collected digitally by the Royal Astronomical Society. Professor Van Swinden’s account, translated by Susan Lintleman and commented on by Thordarson and Self, appears in Jökull, number 50, pp. 65–80 (2001).

  Public perceptions of the dry fog are collected by John Grattan and Mark Brayshay in ‘An amazing and portentous summer: environmental and social responses in Britain to the 1783 eruption of an Iceland volcano,’ The Geographical Journal, vol. 161, pp. 125–134 (1995). A wider-ranging paper of Grattan and Brayshay, exploring the effects in all of Europe, appeared in Volcanoes in the Quaternary, edited by C.R. Firth and W.J. McGuire, Geological Society Special Publication 161, pp. 173–187 (1999). Also see Sven Laufeld, ‘The Lakagígar 1783–84 eruption and its environmental impact in the Nordic countries,’ GFF, vol. 116, p. 211–214 (1994). One Leeds Intelligencer quote is sourced from Alwyn Scarth, Vulcan’s Fury: Man Against the Volcano (Yale University Press, 1999).

  For more on the year of wonders, see ‘Meteors and perceptions of environmental change in the annus mirabilis AD1783–4’ by Richard J. Payne, North West Geography, vol. 11, pp. 19–28 (2011). For more on mortality, see C.S. Witham and C. Oppenheimer, ‘Mortality in England during the 1783–4 Laki Craters eruption,’ Bulletin of Volcanology, vol. 67, pp. 15–26 (2005), as well as John Grattan et al., ‘Volcanic air pollution and mortality in France 1783–1784,’ Comptes Rendus Geoscience, vol. 337, pp. 641–651 (2005).

  The Marie Antoinette story, and details on the European floods, come from Rudolf Brázdil et al, ‘European floods during the winter 1783/1784: scenarios of an extreme event during the “Little Ice Age”’, Theoretical & Applied Climatology, vol. 100, pp. 163–189 (2010). Also see Emmanuel Garnier, ‘La ville face aux caprices du fleuve,’ Histoire Urbaine, number 18, pp. 41–60 (2007).

  A wealth of US weather information can be found in David M. Ludlum’s Early American Winters 1604–1820 (American Meteorological Society, 1966).

  CHAPTER 6

  Franklin’s ruminations on the dry fog can be found in his Meteorological Conjectures. Also see Richard J. Payne, ‘The Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures of Benjamin Franklin,’ North West Geography, vol. 10, pp. 1–7 (2010).

  For more on the debate over who first linked the dry fog to an Icelandic eruption, see Sigurdur Thorarinsson, ‘Greetings from Iceland: ash-falls and volcanic aerosols in Scandinavia,’ Geografiska Annaler, vol. 63, pp. 109–118 (1981).

  The Labrador haze sighting appears in Gaston R. Demarée et al, ‘Further documentary evidence of northern hemispheric coverage of the great dry fog of 1783,’ Climatic Change, vol. 39, pp. 727–730 (1998). The possible Inuit link is described in G.C. Jacoby et al, ‘Laki eruption of 1783, tree rings, and disaster for northwest Alaska Inuit,’ Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 18, pp. 1365–1371 (1999). Reports of southern hemisphere observations are in Ricardo M. Trigo et al, ‘Witnessing the impact of the 1783–1784 Laki eruption in the Southern Hemisphere,’ Climatic Change, vol. 99, pp. 535–546 (2010).

  Thordarson’s calculations of fluorine content in the Laki magma are in ‘Sulfur, chlorine, and fluorine degassing and atmospheric loading by the 1783–1784 Laki (Skáftar Fires) eruption in Iceland,’ Bulletin of Volcanology, vol. 58, pp. 205–225 (1996).

  Anyone interested in the question of whether Laki’s aerosols really reached the stratosphere can check out a pair of competing papers, left out here for reasons of space and clarity. One argues against a stratospheric impact: Alyson Lanciki et al, ‘Sulfur isotope evidence of little or no stratospheric impact by the 1783 Laki volcanic eruption,’ Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 39, L01806 (2012). Countering that is Anja Schmidt et al, ‘Climatic impact of the long-lasting 1783 Laki eruption: inapplicability of mass-independent sulfur isotopic composition measurements,’ Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 117, D23116 (2012). We, naturally, side with the latter.

  The modelling work of Robock and others appears in two main papers: Luke Oman et al, ‘Modeling the distribution of the volcanic aerosol cloud from the 1783–1784 Laki eruption,’ Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 111, D12209 (2006), and Oman et al, ‘High-latitude eruptions case shadow over the African monsoon and the flow of the Nile,’ Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 33, L18711 (2006). For a possible modern analog to the winter that followed Laki, see Rosanne D’Arrigo et al, ‘The anomalous winter of 1783–1784: was the Laki eruption or an analog of the 2009–2010 winter to blame?’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 38, L05706 (2011). For more on historical European climate, see Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age (Basic Books, 2000). For a possible link to volcanoes, see Gifford H. Miller et al, ‘Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks,’ Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 39, L02708 (2012).

  CHAPTER 7

  Most of this chapter is based on our June 2012 trip to Klaustur and its environs. For an interesting citizen-science angle on the 2011 Grímsvötn eruption, in which UK residents collected ash samples on sticky tape to generate a map of ash dispersal, see John A. Stevenson et al, ‘UK monitoring and deposition of tephra from the May 2011 eruption of Grímsvötn, Iceland,’ Journal of Applied Volcanology, vol. 2, number 3 (2013).

  CHAPTER 8

  Survivor stories from the Lake Nyos disaster are collected in F. Le Guern et al, ‘Witness accounts of the catastrophic event of August 1986 at Lake Nyos (Cameroon),’ Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, vol. 51, pp. 171–184 (1992). For myths of the exploding lakes, see Eugenie Shanklin, ‘Exploring lakes and maleficent water in Grassfields legends and myth,’ Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, vol. 39, pp. 233–246 (1989). For an overview of degassing efforts, see Michel Halbwachs et al, ‘Degassing the “killer lakes” Nyos and Monoun, Cameroon,’ EOS, vol. 85, pp. 281&285 (2004).

  Estimates on total number of volcanic fatalities are fraught with error, but for one attempt see Tom Simkin et al, ‘Volcano fatalities: lessons from the historical record,’ Science, vol. 291, p. 255 (2001). We also relied on the excellent reference Volcanic Hazards: A Sourcebook on the Effects of Eruptions by R.J. Blong (Academic Press Australia, 1984). Estimated fatality numbers are recorded in Lee Siebert, Tom Simkin and Paul Kimberly’s Volcanoes of the World (University of California Press, third edition, 2010).

  A good overview of Iceland’s volcanic risks can be found in Magnús T. Gudmundsson et al, ‘Volcanic hazards in Iceland,’ Jökull, vol. 58, pp. 251–268 (2008). More on the 1996 Grímsvötn eruption, often known by the name of the Gjálp fissure that erupted, is in Gudmundsson et al, ‘Ice-volcano interaction of the 1996 Gjálp subglacial eruption, Vatnajökull, Iceland,’ Nature, vol. 389, pp. 954–957 (1997).

  Hawaii’s vog dangers appear, among other places, in Bernadette M. Longo et al, ‘Acute health effects associated with exposure to volcanic air pollution (vog) from increased activity at Kilauea volcano in 2008,’ Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, vol. 73, pp. 1370–1381 (2010). Longo reported the asthma numbers at the Cities on Volcanoes conference in Colima, Mexico, in November 2012.

  Fluorine in the Laki magma chamber is described in Maryjo Brounce et al, ‘Insights into crustal assimilation by Icelandic basalts from boron isotopes in melt inclusions from the 1783–1784 Lakagígar eruption,’ Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, vol. 94, pp. 164–180 (2012). Fluorine estimates for Eyjafjallajökull are in E. Bagnato et al, ‘Scavenging of sulphur, halogens and trace metals by volcanic ash: the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption,’ Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, vol. 103, pp. 138–160 (2013).

  Egil’s Saga makes for great reading on its own, but for fluorine details see Philip Weinstein, ‘Palaeopathology by proxy: the case of Egil’s bones,’ Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 32, pp. 1077–1082 (2005). The 2004 exhum
ation project is described by Hildur Gestsdóttir and colleagues in Fluorine poisoning in victims of the 1783–84 eruption of the Laki fissure, Iceland (Fornleifastofnun Íslands, Reykjavík, 2006).

  Witham and Oppenheimer (2005) addressed the two mortality peaks in England after the Laki eruption. The Donora smog is described in James G. Townsend, ‘Investigation of the smog in Donora, Pa., and vicinity,’ American Journal of Public Health, vol. 40, pp. 183–189 (1950).

  Mayor Ken Livingstone’s office published a descriptive booklet in 2002 on ‘50 years on: The struggle for air quality in London since the great smog of December 1952,’ with some historical detail. Other figures come from Michelle L. Bell et al, ‘A retrospective assessment of mortality from the London smog episode of 1952: the role of influenza and pollution,’ Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 112, pp. 6–8 (2004), and Andrew Hunt et al, ‘Toxicologic and epidemiologic clues from the characterization of the 1952 London smog fine particular matter in archival autopsy lung tissues,’ Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 111, pp. 1209–1214 (2003).

  Laki’s health effects are addressed in many publications by John Grattan, but for historical reports here we relied on Michael Durand and Grattan, ‘Extensive respiratory health effects of volcanogenic dry fog in 1783 inferred from European documentary sources,’ Environmental Geochemistry and Health, vol. 21, pp. 371–376 (1999). For an overview, also see Living Under the Shadow: The Cultural Impacts of Volcanic Eruptions, edited by John Grattan and Robin Torrence (Left Coast Press, 2007).

  Anja Schmidt’s work appeared in Schmidt et al, ‘Excess mortality in Europe following a future Laki-style Icelandic eruption,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 108, pp. 15710–15715 (2011).