Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
We were at the bottom of the cone in half an hour, mounted
our asses returned to Resina where the carriage waited us and
got back to Naples by five o'clock tired indeed but not too
much so but dirty beyond imagination.²²
Mary Somerville, through courage and a powerful sense of
adventure, saw the grumbling mountain from its very lip, as did
Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday. All reported the intense
colours and heat of the active volcano. The historian Anna Jame-
son, on the other hand, noticed the noise, taking a longer view
in 1826:
Mount Vesuvius is at this moment blazing like a huge
furnace; throwing up every minute, or half minute, columns
of fire and red-hot stones, which fall in showers and bound
down the side of the mountain. On the east there are two
distinct streams of lava descending, which glow with almost
a white heat, and every burst of flame is accompanied by a
sound resembling cannon at a distance.²³
Volcanoes were not, however, just magnificent natural firework
displays for those lucky enough to be able to watch from a safe
distance. They had knock-on effects that by the late eighteenth
century were becoming closely observed in Britain and Europe.
Distant volcanoes were gradually seen to be the cause of new
erratic behavioural patterns in the weather. The volcanic fissure
running northeast across Iceland cracked in 1783, and for eight
months, from June until the following February, spewed out lava
and sulphur dioxide. This reacted with the water in the atmos-
phere to create a poison belt of sulphuric acid. The volumes of
lava were so great along a line 30 or 40 kilometres (around 20 or
more miles) long, and the poisons so overwhelming, that 9,000
square kilometres (3,500 square miles) of land were covered by
lava or ash, and crops and cattle perished.²4 Within weeks the
contagion had spread south. Its effects were observed by the nat-
uralist Gilbert White (1720-1793), who described events in his
garden at Selborne in Hampshire:
