Roundtable

Volcanoes are generators of unintended planetary consequences to a far greater degree than are earthquakes. However monstrous a seismic event may be, however fierce its intensity or however elevated its Richter vibrations, an earthquake is invariably defined by its very brevity. Lisbon lasted for fifteen minutes in 1788. San Francisco for three in 1906. Anchorage in 1964 for four. Tangshan in 1975 for two. Haiti this winter for ninety seconds. Each invariably offers up a short and painfully sharp reminder of the forces that slumber under the earth’s skin. An earthquake occurs, it levels and it kills, but then it ends.

Volcanoes, on the other hand, do not end. They may not kill so widely—the total number of casualties from the hundred greatest of the world’s volcanoes barely approach the hundreds of thousands of deaths from one almighty earthquake—but they remain standing, haughtily reminding those below of their terrible potential. They then can and do erupt for long and debilitating periods—Eyjafjallajokull, which is causing such uncertainty and apprehension in today’s Europe, poured out its gases and rock ash for two full years when it last erupted in 1821. They are gigantic spigots which once opened, can be turned off only when some kind of equilibrium is restored in the hadean chambers beneath them—and even then they are prone to be opened once again when pressure below become unsustainable.

The geographical extent of a volcano’s wind-borne ash-clouds, and the duration of the eruptions, are often such as to effect changes in society itself. Tambora, which erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in 1815, remains a classic of its kind. It was immense: almost 40 cubic miles of pulverized rock were hurled into the sky, producing clouds which darkened, cooled and polluted a world that was already well populated and widely civilized. The consequences ranged from the dire—a lowering of temperature that caused frosts in Italy in June and snows in Virginia in July, the failure of crops in immense swathes across Europe and the Americas and the infamous “year without summer” of 1816—to the frankly ludicrous. Irish migrants, promised better weather in New England, found it on landing to be every bit as grim as the Connemara and Cork they had left, and so either went home, or pressed on in hope to California.

And Tambora's eruption had its effects on art also: a gloomy Byron wrote the gloomiest of poems, “Darkness” (“Morn came and went, and came, and brought no day / And men forgot their passions in the dread / Of this their desolation…”); Mary Shelley, it is said, became so fed up with the rain while visiting Byron in Geneva that she followed suit and wrote her exceptionally gloomy novel Frankenstein. Only J.M.W. Turner rose more cheerfully to the occasion: the lurid colors of many of his paintings, it is said, owe much to the flaming Tambora sunsets that had half the world astonished, and Turner evidently inspired.