The endless fascination of volcanoes

Volcanoes, volcanoes, volcanoes. You wait years for a good book or a film about volcanoes to come along and then they blow up all at once. In 2022, Sara Dosa’s incredible, unmissable – incroyable! incontournable! – documentary about the eccentric French filmmakers and volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, Fire of Love, was nominated for an Oscar. It should have won. Then, last year, volcanology’s own Brian Cox, Clive Oppenheimer – professor of volcanology at the University of Cambridge and Werner Herzog’s companion and guide in his documentary film about volcanoes, Into the Inferno (2016) – published Mountains of Fire: The Secret Lives of Volcanoes. Now erupting on to the scene is Tamsin Mather with Adventures in Volcanoland.

Mather is yet another highly literate, thoughtful, brave, imaginative and articulate volcanologist. Which makes one wonder, how many of these people are there? (There are only 1,500 members of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior, apparently. Are they all multidisciplinary daredevil savants?) Fire of Love was a film about very, very French volcanologists being very, very French. Oppenheimer’s book was wide-ranging and entertaining. Adventures in Volcanoland is altogether more serious. Mather is a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford and the book reads like an academic summa, whose publishers were perhaps hoping for something a little racier, more like a memoir or a travelogue. There are some nice hints of this throughout, but it is fundamentally and insistently about the science, because the science is what matters.

It begins at the Osservatorio Vesuviano, the world’s longest established volcano observatory (established in 1841), and then moves around the world, from Nicaragua to Santorini to Ethiopia, combining memories of Mather’s various research expeditions and field trips with a history of thinking and theorising about volcanoes and volcanism, plus a nice summing up of the state of the science for the non-specialist general reader.