Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The role of the artist is to follow, or to create, an iconography
of the subject in hand. Georgia Papageorge (
b.
1941) is among
the first artists to begin the task of creating an iconography for
Kilimanjaro, the dormant volcano in Tanzania. Her palette con-
sists of paint and canvas, photographs, charcoal, tree bark, red
and white chevron barrier cloth and the fertile product of the
volcano's own interior, lava dust. The earliest known photograph
of the mountain, taken in 1898, is enlarged by her and streaked
with trails of liquid lava, and articulated by a red zigzag line
representing temperature fluctuations and glacier melt on the
volcano over the twentieth century. Other works deploy sacks
of charcoal, the 'black gold' made from burning the hardwood of
the surrounding plains, thus destroying for small local gain the
very same trees that resist the process of desertification and global
warming. Papageorge warns us of the ruination being wrought
on the landscape and thus on the climate by uncontrolled cutting
and burning.
Growing knowledge of the origin and causes of volcanic
eruptions gives scientists the ability to predict them and warn
of their imminence. Earth tremors are the harbingers of erup-
tions, and to measure them systems of sensors are installed by
the World Organization of Volcano Observatories (wovo) on
the sides of active volcanoes to measure earth movement. While
eruptions can therefore be more or less effectively predicted close
to the event, they cannot be stopped or averted. We are living by
mutual consent on top of the furnace that keeps us alive, and
from time to time the furnace shifts and resets itself through
the cracks in the shell that keeps its heat in. The myth of Typhon,
scratching himself, and tossing and turning beneath Etna, is
not, as it turns out, all that far from the truth. A report published
by the Geological Society of London in 2005 discussed the global
effects and future threats of super-eruptions, those massive vol-
canic events that disrupt the regular cycle of the planet.7 They
have occurred before, at Jemez Mountains, New Mexico (1.1
million years ago); at Toba, Sumatra (74,000 years ago); at the
Phlegraean Fields outside Naples (35,000 years ago); and at
Kikai, Japan (6000 years ago) - to name only four, in increasing
