The man who loves volcanoes

Being a volcanologist demands a quiverful of skills. You need to be in command of multiple branches of science, including geophysics, geochemistry and seismology. But you must also understand people for whom science matters less than sorcery: people living near volcanoes, for whom they are sacred places, homes to ancestors, sites of miracles, mountains where God’s intervention in human affairs is made manifest in ash, fumes and flame. And you have to be brave. When it comes to studying volcanoes, risk and reward go hand in hand. So a volcanologist must be willing to peer over the edge of a crater, breathing in smoke ‘inconvenient to respiration’, crying acid tears. On Mount Erebus, Clive Oppenheimer tells us, this means looking down on a vat of molten lava throwing up red-hot bubbles the size of the cupola of St Paul’s cathedral, which distend, then pop, flinging dollops over the crater’s rim. Thudding to the ground, they look like the turds of giants.

A professor of volcanology at Cambridge, Oppenheimer is nonchalant about what it was, 30 years ago, that drew him to this line of work. ‘I turned to volcanoes because I’d never had a better idea’, he says – as if he might just as easily have become an accountant or a traffic warden. But after a gap year spent among the volcanoes of Indonesia, he was captivated. His speciality is spectroscopy: measuring the proportion of different gases – water vapour, carbon dioxide and sulphur – in volcanic emissions. One Japanese chemist, Sadao Matsuo, has called volcanic gas ‘a telegram from the Earth’s interior’. Correctly interpreted, it can signal what a volcano might do next. Oppenheimer has also spent time investigating the possibility of taking the temperature of a volcano from space.