Geoscience Reference
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across the page. She depicts the hornitos as central, black, rigid
forms richly contrasted by the high colour of flowers, fields
and houses. We are in the midst of lush dampness in Barns-
Graham's paintings, with aridity and harsh reality just a cricket's
hop away.
The appearance of volcanoes, and thus their appeal to artists,
depends entirely on the type of magma from which they were
originally formed. As a general rule, the runnier the lava, the
flatter the form of the volcano in the landscape - this is obvious.
Low-viscosity lava is low in silica and high in basalt content: the
Hawaiian volcanoes emit low-viscosity lava, resulting in pools
and lakes, and long streams which, in Big Island, flow into the
sea, creating new land. This activity has been the subject of the
work of Ilana Halperin. The volcano Nyiragongo, on the borders
of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, has similarly
fluid lava that collects in a crater lake at the summit of the vol-
cano. This highly unstable mass erupted most recently in 1977 and
2002, when the walls of the crater collapsed, allowing the lava
Ilana Halperin,
Physical
Geology, No. 2
, 2008,
C-print.
