Mountains of Fire
Clive Oppenheimer (Hodder & Stoughton)
IF YOU are one of the billion or so people who live within 80 kilometres of an active volcano, the chances are that you have wondered what an eruption might mean for you. Volcanic eruptions can be disastrous for communities in the immediate vicinity. Very large ones can also be disastrous for the planet, as ash and gas from Earth’s innards encircle the stratosphere, cooling or, as in the case of the 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in the South Pacific, warming the climate.
But as , a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge, writes in Mountains of Fire: The secret lives of volcanoes, they are more than mere mountains of doom. Volcanoes are also unceasing sources of life, change and sublime myth. “They are places that connect past, present and future, where land, water and sky animate custom, belief and knowledge, and vice versa,” he writes.
Advertisement
The book is organised around Oppenheimer’s dizzying travels to many of the world’s great volcanoes, from the mounts of the Chilean Altiplano to Indonesia’s Merapi, considered by some to be the “kingdom of ghosts”. He treks to the volcanic Tibesti mountains of the Sahara and all the way down to Antarctica’s icy Erebus. For each region, Oppenheimer offers tales of the volcanologists who came before him, intrepidly measuring gases and quakes to make sense of the mountains, elegantly weaving derring-do with insights into the mechanics of how volcanoes work.
Some scenes will be familiar to anyone who has seen Werner Herzog’s 2016 documentary Into the Inferno, which features a wide-eyed Oppenheimer making visits to volcanoes and the communities that live around them on several continents. The book includes the fascinating back story of one of the film’s more memorable moments, in which a troupe of singing North Korean schoolchildren march atop the rim of the Korean peninsula’s sacred Mount Paektu.
The book pushes deeper than the film ever could, however, setting all the volcanoes in a much wider context. At every step, Oppenheimer finds fresh ways to depict volcanoes and their outbursts. We learn eruptions come in different types, including vulcanian, with moderate, intermittent explosions that produce columns of ash; plinian, with extreme explosions, creating ash clouds that spiral kilometres into the sky; and peléan, which generate terrifying pyroclastic flows containing dense mixtures of volcanic fragments.
Oppenheimer draws on all his senses when talking about eruptions, describing one on Mount Semeru in Java, Indonesia, as “a siren, a blizzard and a wailing child all at once – an animal really – and it was followed by a sonorous chugging, like a steam train gathering speed”.
Then there are the tastes. On the Italian island of Stromboli, “volatile molecules just unfettered from the inner Earth” reached the young Oppenheimer as he tried to measure the temperature of lava in order to confirm satellite measurements. The particles tasted “like sour milk at the back of my throat, were now in my lungs, in my bloodstream”.
Images like these grippingly convey one of the book’s big ideas: that the experience of being within range of the heat and stink of a volcano is a necessary part of science. “I’ve often found that putting in the groundwork is the best way to give serendipity a chance to play its hand and thereby learn things beyond my imagination,” he writes.
What makes this book stand out isn’t its poetry or scientific explication, but all the ways Oppenheimer finds to connect the majestic lives of volcanoes to the ephemeral lives of people. Alongside the science, well-represented by his experience, is the mystical. He takes seriously the spiritual, cultural and political meanings of volcanoes for those who live in their shadow, both now and millennia ago.
The overall result is a scientific memoir that is unusually full of human feeling and myth, an achievement for which we might give some credit to the volcanoes themselves. “There is no doubt: volcanoes changed me,” writes Oppenheimer, “and I believe strongly that they offer us all a different and unexpectedly human way of seeing the world.”
We can’t all travel the globe to risk our lives at the crater’s edge, but we have Oppenheimer’s prose to get us nearly there.
