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. It’s a winning combination. There are all sorts of interesting asides. Mather notes, for example, that Frank Perret, an American engineer, prior to Vesuvius’s eruption in 1906, found that he could hear a continuous buzzing when he ‘set his upper teeth against his iron bedstead’. He had ‘transformed his own skull into a crude seismometer, detecting the hum created by the movement of magma and gas under the volcano’. Techniques have since moved on, as have some of the big questions. What can volcanoes teach us about the environment and the future?
What is unique about the book, apart from its obvious combinatory intelligence, is that the author has clearly and carefully considered how to write about complex scientific subjects for a non-scientific audience. She often begins an explanation, for example, with an act of imagining: ‘When I imagine this polymerisation process I sometimes get an image of the thickening custard crust that I used to detest so much when compelled to eat it at school lunchtimes.’ Ah, right, the old school custard – got it. ‘Sometimes I like to imagine magmatic plumbing as subterranean counterparts to the Earth’s surface rivers, with deep catchments and tributaries coalescing into the immense reservoirs and channels that feed Earth’s volcanoes.’ Subterranean rivers, yes, I see. It’s like learning about a difficult subject from your favourite sixth-form science teacher.
But even that’s selling the book rather short, because Mather also often rises to rather elegant prose. She loves a list:
Rocks in Volcanoland can take a great array of forms: foamy white pumices from Vesuvius; tumbling dark dense lava flows from Masaya; dusty ash from Santiaguito; the speckled shimmer of white quartz, pinkish feldspars and black sheety micas in the granites of places like Dartmoor; and the basaltic cooling columns of Giant’s Causeway.
And she has a tremendous ear and eye for the clinching detail.
The first time I stood up close to a lava flow was a July evening in 2006 on Etna in Sicily. The ground throbbed, the air stung and everything appeared red, orange and black. Above me a pulsating fire fountain roared. Bright trails of debris flew from the volcano’s mouth, then cooled and dimmed, creating a cone of broken black around the drama. A stream of lava wound its way out from the base of this cone and flowed down towards me with an unexpected metallic sound, clinking like a chain being dragged along concrete.
That final chain on concrete is very Mather.
Her favourite volcano, in case you’re interested – and you will be, because Mather, like any good teacher, makes you interested – is Villarrica, in south-central Chile. Why? Because she spent a hard-night’s partying –lashings of pisco and a spit-roast pig – the night before her first ascent. Truly, an inspiration for students of the future.
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