Volcanoes are the homes of gods, language tells us – across most of Europe, people who may never have laid eyes on one call them after the smoking forge of Vulcan, Roman god of fire and smithery. (In the tectonic hotspot of Iceland, where people live cheek-by-jowl with 130-odd volcanoes, they are simply “fire mountains”.) Even in our unenchanted modern age, they are capable of inspiring a kind of divine madness in devotees such as the French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died in an eruption on Japan’s Mount Unzen in 1991. In recent documentaries by Werner Herzog and Sara Dosa, the Kraffts appear astronaut-like in eerie silver fire-proximity suits, silhouetted against glowing torrents of the Earth’s molten innards. “If I could eat rocks, I’d stay in the volcanoes and never come down,” Maurice proclaims.
Tamsin Mather, professor of Earth sciences at Oxford University, is an altogether more sober kind of scientist. Adventures in Volcanoland, the result of two decades of painstaking international research, is structured around pragmatic questions such as “What messages do volcanic gases carry from the deep?” But its roots lie in childhood memories of perhaps the most famous volcano of all: Vesuvius, and the plaster casts of the townspeople it killed in Pompeii in AD79. “It was the fear and distress twisted into the bodies of the people it claimed that stayed with me,” Mather writes. This isn’t simply a geological study, it’s a book about the entwined destiny of humans and volcanoes: how they helped create the conditions for our life on Earth, how they have threatened and destroyed communities, and how they point to the consequences of our current planet-destroying behaviours.
