Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
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While Sodom and Gomorrah were real cities of the plain
near the Dead Sea, and archaeological evidence has established
that they were destroyed by a natural cataclysm around 1900 bc,
this is likely to have been an earthquake rather than a volcano,
as no volcanic activity has taken place in that region in the past
4,000 years. Muddled superstition and dogma led to the obvious
conclusion that volcanoes marked the entrance to hell. Follow-
ing Plato, and in commentary on the Book of Revelation, St
Augustine wrote in
City of God
of hell as having 'a lake of fire
and brimstone',¹³ while variously Etna and Vulcano were both
believed to be mouths of hell. Drawing boundaries out into the
cold north, the Cistercian priest Herbert of Clairvaux opined,
after its 1104 eruption, that Hekla in Iceland was the mouth of
hell. This story was repeated again and again until Jules Verne
used Hekla and another Icelandic volcano, Snaefells, as the gate-
ways to the centre of the earth in
Journey to the Centre of the
Earth
(1864).
The embryonic Icelandic parliament, the Althing, met in ad
1000 at Thingvellir, a volcanic cliff with remarkable acoustic
properties some 48 kilometres (30 miles) northeast of Reykjavík.
The eruption
of Hekla in 1104,
in a 19th-century
wood-engraving.
