ICE TSUNAMI IN THE ALPS - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 96

professional bet on the merits of glacial theory. They abruptly left their families behind for a
months-long scientific expedition across the Alps.
Agassiz, who thought Venetz's notions “bizarre,” set out in the conviction that he would
win the wager. He returned with the equally ardent conviction that he had been wrong. Ven-
etz and Charpentier had converted the most influential scientist in Europe, for whom glacial
theory would become an obsession for the remainder of his glittering career. Unlike either
Venetz or Charpentier, Agassiz worked quickly and decisively, and had a talent for publicity.
The very next year he delivered his famous address at Neuchâtel in which he surprised his
audience of academic worthies—who were expecting a satisfying discourse on fossils—with
claims that the very place in which they were sitting had once been covered by a vast ocean
of ice that stretched from the North Pole to the Mediterranean Sea. Like Perraudin and Venetz
before him, it was now Agassiz's turn to be gazed upon with pity and irritation by respected
men of science, as if he had just that minute gone stark raving mad. 25
Percy Shelley's “Mont Blanc” has long been a favorite of the undergraduate classroom. Gen-
erations of English professors have presented it as a manifesto of Romantic thought in which
the poet exalts the human mind as a god-like vessel of the world. Shelley's poem boasts one
of the most celebrated openings in Romantic literature: “The everlasting universe of things /
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves.” History is full of coincidences in which
“the everlasting universe of things” flowing through the human mind takes the same course
through several minds at once. So it was with theories of glaciation in the Tambora period
1815-18. A Swiss engineer, a mine supervisor, and a chamois hunter each experienced his
own version of Shelley's vision of a glaciated Europe. Together they embarked on a halting,
intermittent collaboration that would evolve, two decades later, into a formal theory of cli-
mate change and cyclical Ice Ages, ideas that constitute the foundation stone of both modern
geology and climate science.
Shelley's image of the mind's “rapid waves” of impression reappears later in “Mont Blanc”
in his account of the Bossons glacier, where the same aquatic imagery turns abruptly sinis-
ter. In section 4 of the poem, the “flow” and “waves” of the creative imagination become
the destructive actions of the glacier, before whose immense power human beings shrink “in
dread.” Here the advancing Bossons glacier is not an image of human imaginative power, let
alone a picture-postcard vista, but rather “a city of death,”
… distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice,
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined parth, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. (105-14)
The remorseless glacier of Shelley's imagination destroys all plant and wildlife—“The
dwelling-place / Of insects, beasts, and birds”—obliterating “life and joy” and all trace of hu-