Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
8
he Shifting Furnace
Volcanic eruptions are continuous and inevitable. As photographs
from the International Space Station reveal, on earth at any one
time some volcano somewhere is smoking, bubbling or erupting.
At the bottom of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans this process goes
on in silence all the time, spawning life forms that have evolved
as a response to the continual heat. This planet never rests.
The amazement expressed by those who in 1811 witnessed
the birth of the island of Sabrina in the Azores, or in 1831 of
Graham island in the Mediterranean, was the same unparalleled
wonder that greeted the birth of Surtsey off the south coast of
Iceland in 1963. Recognising the fecundity of the earth, 'birth' is
the word generally given to the arrival of new volcanoes, from
Monte Nuovo near Naples in 1538 and Paricutin in 1943-44, to
Sabrina, Graham and Surtsey. Sabrina and Graham were rapidly
swallowed up again, but Monte Nuovo, Paricutin and Surtsey -
named after Surtr the Norse god of fire - remain and look like
becoming fixtures. Birth from the sea is itself a deep-rooted con-
cept, with many echoes across time and art, such as the story of
the birth of Venus and the medieval mystery of the origin of
Barnacle Geese.ยน But it is nothing new: Iceland itself bubbled
up from the volcanic Atlantic Ridge around thirty million years
ago, long after the dinosaurs had come and gone from the earth,
as did the Azores archipelago and, in the Pacific, all of Hawaii.
Artists are not usually in the first wave of shock troops to
arrive at a volcanic event. When the walls of the crater of Mount
Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo failed in
