Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
is a further alternative: either one plate moves below the other,
as in the eastern Pacific, creating a subduction zone along the
active length, the Andes range of mountains; or they collide like
clashing cymbals in what is plainly known as a 'continental
collision'. This has created other mountain ranges, such as the
Himalayas or the Alps, by a crumpling effect.
The majority of the volcanoes on land, which are the subject
of artists' observation and inspiration, are the result of plates
moving towards each other and causing a subduction zone.
Examples of these are in the west coast of South America,
where the Nazca plate runs up against the South American
plate, and in Europe where the African plate presses the
Eurasian. These movements over millions of years created the
volcanic landscape of South America, and the volcanoes that
pepper the line from eastern Turkey to central Italy.
It remains an irony that an atypical volcano such as Vesuvius
should have attracted so much attention, but this is only because
the lonely spur of which it is a part happens to be at or near the
cradle of Western civilization. Dramatic though Vesuvius certainly
is when in eruption, it is the thousands of other volcanoes that
erupted unseen and unrecorded by the literate West until well
into the twentieth century that demonstrated the sheer energy
and destructive power of the earth's magma welling up through
the cracks in its surface. Over the wastes of time these have piped
out into the heavens, unseen and unheard, like a slow, mournful
concerto for organ. To imagine Italy's Vesuvius as representative of
the totality of the earth's volcanoes would be comparable to
regarding a comedy such as
Two Gentlemen of Verona
as represen-
tative of the range and mastery of Shakespeare's plays; or a Ferrari,
beautiful though it may be, as the only car worth talking about.
Volcanoes fall into a number of types, many of which are
depicted by the artists whose work will be discussed in these
pages. A volcanic 'fissure vent', as depicted by Finnur Jónsson,
is a typical feature of the Icelandic landscape, where the faultline
in the earth pulls slowly apart, releasing the energies within. In
the Icelandic landscape such activity produces low-lying broken
hill forms, characterized by blackened lava-rich earth, surface
Volcano Laki, Iceland,
fissure vent with spatter
cones.
