ICE TSUNAMI IN THE ALPS - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 87

In other words, the highest peak in Europe would be nothing without Shelley there to exalt
it.
Percy's day trip to the glacier of Bossons, which skirts the southern slopes of Mont Blanc,
had produced conflicting emotions. He was struck, as all Alpine tourists were, by the im-
mense rivers of ice descending from the mountains to the valleys and by the contrast between
“the green meadows & the dark woods with the dazzling whiteness of its precipices and pin-
nacles.” But he seems to have been genuinely appalled by his guide's information that the
glacier was advancing at the rate of a foot a day over the valley, swallowing up the pretty
Swiss landscape like a giant white python: “These glaciers flow perpetually into the valley,”
Shelley wrote that evening, “ravaging in their slow but irresistible progress the pastures &
the forests which surround them, & performing a work of desolation in ages which a river
of lava might accomplish in an hour, but far more irretrievably.” Poet-scientist that he was,
Shelley could look over the white stillness of the Bossons glacier and intuit within it the rage
of a volcano, like the slopes of Vesuvius he would climb two summers later. Shelley had read
educated accounts of the glaciers that theorized their perpetual advance and decay, but his
guide assured him that the local people held a darker view—namely, that the glaciers would
eventually smother the entire valley, as they had done in the ancient times.
The French-American travel writer Louis Simond, traveling through the same valley the
following summer, observed that the winter of 1816-17 had been “remarkably mild” around
Chamonix but that snowfall levels on the mountains were tremendous. As a result, the val-
ley's twin glaciers—the Bossons and the Mer de Glace—had advanced more than a hundred
feet beyond their usual range. He gives a vivid account of the glacier's slow-motion destruc-
tion in terms reminiscent of Shelley's “Mont Blanc”:
With slow, but irresistible power, the ice pushes forward vast heaps of stones, bends down
large trees to the earth, and gradually passes over them…. Streams of water of a milky ap-
pearance, continually issuing from under the glacier, formed new channels through the ad-
jacent meadows.
These meadows represented cultivated land, dotted with valuable farmhouses, barns, and
mills, whose icy submersion the local farmers were powerless to prevent. Simond witnessed
the quiet unfolding of this human tragedy in the Chamonix valley in 1817: “The miserable
inhabitants, collected into melancholy groups, looked on dejectedly…. Several dwellings are
actually under the glaciers, and others await the same destruction.” 6
The dejection of the montagnards of Chamonix is understandable. The climate historian
Christian Pfister has established a triangular correlation between cold summers, glacial ad-
vance, and historical peaks in grain prices in Switzerland. 7 For the Alpine peasantry, ener-
gized glaciers signified the risk of starvation, not merely an interesting geological phenomen-
on. By the end of the Tamboran cooling regime in 1818, the Bossons glacier had submerged
some five hectares of farmland in the valley and threatened the village of Monquart. The hap-
less residents, taking a providential view of the glacier's expansion, performed a ceremony of
appeasement in which they planted a large cross at its voracious rim. 8
The prospect of a greater glaciated Alps upset Shelley, whose feelings of excited wonder
on first entering the valley now gave way to creeping dread. Observing the lines of forest
trees flattened by the encroaching tongue of the Bossons glacier, Shelley found “something