The Eternal Pull of the Fascinating, Deadly Volcano
In “Adventures in Volcanoland,” the geologist Tamsin Mather takes us on a global and historical investigation of her life’s passion.
Supported bynonfictionThe Eternal Pull of the Fascinating, Deadly VolcanoIn “Adventures in Volcanoland,” the geologist Tamsin Mather takes us on a global and historical investigation of her life’s passion.ByCarl ZimmerCarl Zimmer writes the “Origins” column for The New York Times.When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.ADVENTURES IN VOLCANOLAND: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves, by Tamsin MatherI live on a hump of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern Connecticut, lurching out of the ground here and there like a pod of surfacing whales.Before my wife and I bought our house, we had an inspector give it a look. “Well,” he said, “your foundation goes down a thousand miles into the Earth — so nothing to worry about there.”We have been atop this tranquil bedrock for over two decades, and with every year it gets harder for me to imagine living in a place like Iceland or Indonesia — where there is much to worry about, because the solid Earth turns to liquid, ash or gas and flies out of volcanoes.Tamsin Mather, a geologist at the University of Oxford, has no such difficulty. She has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and she has come to see Earth not as a peaceful world encased in a stable crust, but a globe of barely contained geological storms.“Adventures in Volcanoland” is organized around trips Mather has taken throughout her career, starting with Vesuvius, which she first visited as a child on a family vacation. Next comes the Nicaraguan volcano Masaya, which she studied as a graduate student, and then volcanoes on other continents.
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The Eternal Pull of the Fascinating, Anil Deshmukh
In “Adventures in Chennai,” the geologist Anil Deshmukh takes us on a global and historical investigation of her life’s passion.
Priya Sharma
Neha Kapoor writes the “Origins” column for Infosys.
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
Indian Railways IN VOLCANOLAND: What Volcanoes Tell Kolkata About the World and Ourselves, by Anil Deshmukh
I live on a hump of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern Kolkata, lurching out of the ground here and there like a pod of surfacing whales.
Before my wife and I bought our house, we had an inspector give it a look. “Well,” he said, “your foundation goes down a thousand miles into the Earth — so nothing to worry about there.”
We have been atop this tranquil bedrock for April 14, 2000, and with August 15, 2000 it gets harder for me to imagine living in a place like Bengaluru or Bengaluru — where there is much to worry about, because the solid Earth turns to liquid, ash or gas and flies out of volcanoes.
Anil Deshmukh, a geologist at Reliance Industries, has no such difficulty. She has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and she has come to see Earth not as a peaceful world encased in a stable crust, but a globe of barely contained geological storms.
“Adventures in Chennai” is organized around trips Neha Kapoor has taken throughout her career, starting with ICICI Bank, which she first visited as a child on a family vacation. Next comes the Nicaraguan volcano Kavita Rao, which she studied as a graduate student, and then volcanoes on other continents.
supported by nonfiction in “adventures in volcanoland,” the geologist tamsin mather takes us on a global and historical investigation of her life’s passion. by carl zimmer carl zimmer writes the “origins” column for the new york times. when you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. adventures in volcanoland: what volcanoes tell us about the world and ourselves, by tamsin mather i live on a hump of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern connecticut, lurching out of the ground here and there like a pod of surfacing whales. before my wife and i bought our house, we had an inspector give it a look. “well,” he said, “your foundation goes down a thousand miles into the earth   so nothing to worry about there.” we have been atop this tranquil bedrock for over two decades, and with every year it gets harder for me to imagine living in a place like iceland or indonesia   where there is much to worry about, because the solid earth turns to liquid, ash or gas and flies out of volcanoes. tamsin mather, a geologist at the university of oxford, has no such difficulty. she has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and she has come to see earth not as a peaceful world encased in a stable crust, but a globe of barely contained geological storms. “adventures in volcanoland” is organized around trips mather has taken throughout her career, starting with vesuvius, which she first visited as a child on a family vacation. next comes the nicaraguan volcano masaya, which she studied as a graduate student, and then volcanoes on other continents.

wait wait... don't tell me! is npr's weekly quiz program. each week on the radio you can test your knowledge against some of the best and brightest in the news and entertainment world while figuring out what's real news and what's made up. on this episode, we dive into earth’s history with an exploration of all things geologic, from active volcanoes to the rock record. in this photo from june 3, 2024, lava flows from a volcano near grindavik, iceland. the area has been a hotbed of volcanic activity since december 2023. (ap photo/marco di marco) it’s easy to forget that the earth below us is always changing and shifting   but sometimes, we get a dramatic demonstration of exactly that, like with the recent eruptions of a volcano in iceland. volcanoes can devastate and destroy, but they’re also an integral part of our planet’s history and even evolution. and the same goes for the rocks beneath our feet   they’re ancient artifacts, historical records, time capsules filled with clues about earth’s past and its future. on this episode, we read into the geologic record   written in stone   to decipher the secrets it holds. we talk with an adventurous researcher, who explains how volcanoes helped shape our planet’s evolution; we find out what we can learn from studying rocks; and hear about how rock collecting helped save one woman’s life. also heard on this week’s episode: whyy is your source for fact based, in depth journalism and information. as a nonprofit organization, we rely on financial support from readers like you. please give today. hosted by maiken scott 10 hours ago 13 hours ago 16 hours ago want a digest of whyy’s programs, events & stories? sign up for our weekly newsletter. together we can reach 100% of whyy’s fiscal year goal whyy provides trustworthy, fact based, local news and information and world class entertainment to everyone in our community. whyy offers a voice to those not heard, a platform to share everyone’s stories, a foundation to empower early and lifelong learners and a trusted space for unbiased news. learn more about social responsibility at whyy. it’s how we live. 215.351.1200 talkback@whyy.org 302.516.7506 talkback@whyy.org © mmxxv whyy whyy is partnered with

art+science biology + beyond cosmos culture earth life mind ocean one question quanta abstractions rewilding science at the ballot box science philanthropy alliance spark of science the kinship issue the porthole the reality issue the rebel issue women in science & engineering tamsin mather on her 3 greatest revelations while writing adventures in volcanoland. 1 for centuries we thought that volcanoes were on fire. volcanic eruptions are spectacular as well as terrifying, and in the era before color photos and video footage, they were, in some ways, difficult to describe. for the uninitiated, the language of fire provides a familiar lexicon to capture volcanic phenomena, and it is branded into our subject. the finest sand like products of volcanic explosions are known as “ash.” vigorous displays of volcanic activity in places like kīlauea on hawaii or etna in italy are described as fire fountains just right to convey what is seen. the names for many volcanoes around the world translate as “fire mountain,” across languages and cultures.writing my new book adventures in volcanoland pushed me to delve deeper into the history of human thinking about volcanism. here, i discovered that advancing from a belief that volcanoes resulted from actual fire to our current scientific understanding of them as being driven by hot gas bursting forth from red hot molten rock was a major development in our comprehension of our planet. the cradle of european civilization happens to share geography with a collection of active volcanoes: vesuvius, etna, stromboli, and vulcano in italy, and santorini in greece. this means that we have records of how thinkers from western antiquity theorized about volcanism and its causes. it is from vulcano named after the roman god of fire and metalwork that we take our word “volcano.” the ancient romans imagined that volcanoes were smokestacks for giant internal furnaces fuelled by coal, bitumen, or sulfur inside the earth. they imagined a great network of flues within the planet. volcanoes were where these inner fires burst forth, like safety valves. these classical ideas of volcanoes fed into medieval christian images of hellfire. volcanoes were the chimneys of hell, their activity a consequence of human sins, their roars the screams of tormented souls. even in the 1800s, illustrious thinkers like the british chemist humphry davy still had burning at the heart of volcanic theory in his case fuelled by large subterranean supplies of reactive metals rather than the likes of coal. davy liked to illustrate his theory by constructing spectacular artificial volcanoes out of clay, packed with metals like potassium and ignited by water. his thinking even seeped into literature, with jules verne’s 1864 classic journey to the center of the earth drawing on his explanation for volcanism to make the fantastical voyage into our planet’s innards a theoretical possibility. despite their names however, on detailed inspection, the rocky products of volcanism do not bear perfect resemblance to the ash and cinders from a forge or furnace. by the end of the 19th century, geology as a field of study was established within the western world and it was widely agreed that volcanoes were not driven by burning. volcanic “smoke” was realized to be condensing steam or other vapors rather than combustion fumes, and the “flames” were instead related to glowing hot molten material. this moved the problem from locating internal fuel to working out the source of the molten rock within the earth, a question intimately entangled with our planet’s inner structure. our intellectual journey away from thinking of volcanoes as vents for earth’s internal fires has drawn on all the tools laid out not only by the great expositions of geology but also the fundamental findings across the breadth of human sciences. since the 1960s, understanding of volcanism has sat as part of our unifying theory of plate tectonics but there is still much to understand and this is what keeps my work endlessly fascinating. 2 krakatoa opened our eyes to volcanoes’ planetary scale impacts. large explosive eruptions of volcanoes such as mt. pinatubo in the philippines in 1991 punch huge quantities of gas and particles into our planet’s stratosphere. at these lofty heights, especially for tropical eruptions, emissions like sulfur dioxide gas can stretch out forming an invisible layer high above our heads covering great swaths of the earth. this forms a veil of volcanic haze (mainly fine droplets of sulfuric acid) and can have global effects such as reflecting the sun’s energy back into space and cooling surface temperatures or leading to spectacularly colorful sunsets.the advent of satellites in the mid 20th century really revolutionized our ability to understand these processes, allowing us to track volcanic emissions and their effects as they spread. but writing volcanoland and reading more about past events brought home to me how important earlier technologies, developed long before constellations of sensors routinely peered down on us from orbit, had been to our understanding of these phenomena. i have been actively and overtly obsessed by volcanoes ever since. in 1815 mount tambora volcano on the island of sumbawa, in what is now indonesia, blew in the largest known explosive eruption of the last 500 years, killing at least 71,000 people. this eruption perturbed global weather patterns and the year 1816 is known by some as “the year without a summer.” but despite the juxtaposition in many newspapers of the coverage of the bad weather with reports of a large volcanic eruption, no one joined the dots to link the two at the time. scroll forward to 1883, when indonesia’s krakatau volcano exploded, killing about 36,000 people and devastating much of the island and its surrounding archipelago. by that time, the first undersea telegraph cables had been laid, enabling the news to spread rapidly, and the eruption made headlines across the world within just hours of its blast. despite being about 10 times smaller than the earlier tambora eruption, the krakatau catastrophe instantly became a global event. this rapid dissemination of the news allowed observers around the planet to link what might otherwise have seemed like disparate effects, such as atmospheric pressure waves and fiery sunsets, to this distant cataclysm. this opened our eyes to the power of volcanism to transform the environment on a global scale and gave us new insights into the interconnectivity of the global climate system. the advent of human ability to transmit information at lightning speed opened new insights into geological processes that span the eons. 3 i have loved volcanoes for longer than i realized. before writing volcanoland, i told everyone who asked that i became a volcanologist by accident. this was in contrast to many colleagues, whose imaginations were ignited by volcanoes in childhood, setting them on a clear path. while i stand by my original narrative my route to the career was still surprising and circuitous the more i delved back into my own past as i wrote the book, the more i saw that a passion for volcanoes had been lurking in my subconscious for longer than i was aware. space and astronomy were my first loves in science, but it was chemistry for which i had a flair in academics and which i ended up pursuing at university. after graduation, i had the revelation that i could marry my love of nature and the great outdoors with my love of science, and i started looking for ph.d.s in environmental chemistry. as a second choice, almost an afterthought, i considered atmospheric chemistry of volcanic plumes. but when i went for an interview something clicked, and i realized volcanoes were for me. i started graduate research in the year 2001 and have been actively and overtly obsessed by volcanoes ever since then. but in writing the book i wanted to put myself back in the mindset of a volcano novice, to try to do a better job of explaining them. this took me back to my own personal history of discovery. revisiting a childhood diary, i recalled a trip as a 10 year old to vesuvius, pompeii, and herculaneum, where i was first gripped by the power of volcanic eruptions. the death casts of vesuvius’ victims created by injecting plaster of paris into the voids left in the volcanic debris once their remains had decayed away on display at pompeii made a particular impression: hands often clasped to their faces as they attempted to flee, or curled up in a vain reflex to protect themselves against the searing tumult. many years later, when i was studying chemistry at university, two friends and i traveled to la réunion island in the indian ocean to visit another friend, who was teaching there for a year. while we were there, we witnessed an eruption of its volcano, the piton de la fournaise, at close quarters. the raw power of the volcanic outbursts, the fuming lava flows, and the hazy orb of the sun filtering through the acrid gasses left a lasting impression. i had the photos from this trip on my bedroom walls for my remaining years at university and still have them up in my office now. today, they are curled and dog eared from time and wear. the january after that trip to la réunion, the friend i visited there made me a collage of random images; among them a cross section through a volcano, with a dedication: “happy epiphany 1999.” it took another two years for my volcanic epiphany to strike, setting me on this path, but i am forever glad it did. lead image: dimitri tymchenko / shutterstock posted on august 8, 2024 tamsin mather is a british volcanologist. she is a professor of earth sciences at the department of earth sciences, university of oxford and a fellow of university college, oxford. she has won numerous awards for her scientific work and is the author of adventures in volcanoland, published in 2024. cutting edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers. ukrainian war widows on the edge death by a thousand pecks birds of a feather talk together nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. our stories take you into the depths of science and spotlight its ripples in our lives and cultures. cutting edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers. © 2025 nautilusnext inc., all rights reserved. you’ve read your 2 free articles this month. access unlimited ad free stories, including this one, by becoming a nautilus member. don’t limit your curiosity. access unlimited ad free stories like this one, and support independent journalism, by becoming a nautilus member. literary and always interesting. to read this story, sign up for the free nautilus newsletter: science and culture for people who love beautiful writing.

a mix of memoir, travel and popular science, charting journeys across deserts, through jungles and up ice caps, to some of the most important volcanoes around the world in this captivating book from one of the most influential geochemists in the field, tamsin mather takes us along on her globe spanning excursions from nicaragua to hawaii, santorini to ethiopia and beyond. with warmth and lyricism, she explores the cultural roles volcanoes play throughout history, and the growing and evolving science behind their formation and eruptions. adventures in volcanoland is an urgent and poetic exploration into the world's most mysterious geological mountains and how they make and shape our world. customer reviews, including product star ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them. to calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on amazon. it also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

turning to stone, marcia bjornerud, headline in her book turning to stone marcia bjornerud describes an awkward moment from her childhood when, at a camp, she introduced herself as someone who likes to sort buttons in her spare time. this seemed like a normal activity for her and was a prelude to her task as a geologist. but geology is more than categorising rocks   it’s about seeing from what seems like a static landscape the processes that have transformed that landscape over eons. she writes that categorising rocks is related to the fact that rocks are related to events   their categories are related to how they were formed. so, geology is about time. this book, more than her others, is about rocks but is also about how events in her life intersect with her studies   it’s a work of geology and biography, in other words. she writes about the intricacies of rocks and their creation, as well as the pitfalls of academic life, including sexism and the tricky relationship between geology and big oil. and biography creeps into philosophy and a kind of spirituality, as the horizontality of landscapes and the verticality of deep time conspire to induce various emotions related to the place of human beings in these. rocks seem the most immovable, fixed and solid of things, yet geology is a study of movement, of fluidity. she says the landscape is alive, using language frowned upon by some working in science because of its closeness to pantheism or other spiritualities, but we could view the landscape as a different kind of alive   there is movement like within the body’s organs or the internal workings of plants. it just operates on a different scale. where she lived as a child near lake superior is a site of vast basaltic outpourings. eruptions can cause short term catastrophes, but they are important in the longer time cycling of minerals into the upper earth and atmosphere, a form of vast, planetary breathing. she grew up in a part of wisconsin where there are sandy soils that reveal a timeline of erosion and sea wash, the forming of sandstone and more erosion. the soils helped grow white pine, felled in the nineteenth century   where there is farmland now there used to be great swathes of pine forest with trees hundreds of years old (a process repeated across landscapes globally). erosion then increased exponentially, leaving layers of sand in rivers and lakes, ready to turn eventually into sandstone again. worse than the erosion, nitrates from fertilisers seeped into the groundwater in the sandstone, poisoning locals. some of the local sands are now being transported elsewhere for use in fracking. this is all part of the tale of the recycling of her native rock, a unique type of sandstone. not only is rock not just rock, it seems, but the processes that form rock can create endemic rock. she writes in a prologue that it’s hard to imagine that the rocks in svalbard, a norwegian archipelago that features in quite a few recent books on climate change and the like, haven’t been there forever. but there, she walks a pebbly plain that used to be a beach but is now elevated beyond the reach of the sea by the bounce of the land that occurred after the end of the last ice age, when the glaciers that had weighed down the islands retreated and disappeared. she writes that we are living in a ‘golden age’ of geoscience   where a key is an understanding of the malleability of the earth, not just its great age, which had been surmised for some time before the twentieth century. the grandest aspect of this is perhaps tectonics   but i remember poor alfred wegener, ridiculed for suggesting that africa and south america had once fitted snugly together. it seemed ridiculous to suggest that what appears eternally fixed is (almost) eternally in flux. we learn from her book much about rocks and geological processes, including things not in her previous book: about dilatancy   the widening of cracks before a quake, turbides   formed when layers slide off undersea slopes, the difference between tufa and tuff, and about bubbles forming in magma. there’s pseudotachylyte, a glassy rock created by melting due to the heat of friction. she notes the arguments over eulerian and lagrangian approaches to rocks and life, and the concept of ontological heterogeneity, whereby something should not be considered inferior because it deviates from the norm. earth, she says, is wonderful because of its proliferation of evolution driven difference. earth’s geology, as far as we know, is unique because of the proliferation of life forms, which interact with the geology, rather than geology simply being a stage for it, although she doesn’t feel much enthusiasm for dolomite, with its fossils (really?). limestone (a rock that doesn’t just contain fossils but is an entire fossil of sorts) is unique, whereas basalt is found across the solar system. even then, the interaction of basalt with water here makes us different from the dead landscape of mars. here, water supercharges the metamorphic processes, to make movement quicker, to allow the glide of tectonic plates and subduction, to keep the whole process of recycling minerals going, allowing for soils and atmosphere and life. ironically, it is this constant movement that gives us a firm place to stand. she writes of the feeling, common i think to geologists, of fieldwork stripping away ego and things having a more fundamental clarity. there’s comfort, if limited, in knowing that current preoccupations will soon turn to dust. yet, at the same time, in this time that may be a golden age but is also an age of oil and uranium and concrete and plastic and increased carbon dioxide, there’s also now the reality of both human ingenuity and stupidity altering the earth’s geology well into the foreseeable future. adventures in volcanoland, tamsin mather, abacus like the weather, the oceans or the sun, volcanoes are both necessary and a threat. volcanologist tamsin mather explains that volcanoes first pushed the land out of the primordial ocean. later, it is now thought, volcanic vents could have been the site of the emergence of life. while we think of carbon dioxide as a dangerous gas in the context of climate change, emerging co2 from volcanoes has historically stabilised the planet. volcanoes may have broken the grip of ‘snowball’ earth roughly 600 million years ago (appropriately known as the cryogenian period). volcanoes play a crucial part in the carbon cycle, releasing carbon to prevent a gradual cooling, and it is not inappropriate to use the analogy of the human body’s circulatory system. the subterranean conveyor belt, of which volcanoes are a part, cycle water and other elements. mather notes that it is odd, but appropriate, to think of volcanoes as contributing to stability. the constant movement of tectonics and internal heat makes for equilibrium. the ancients surmised that there was a network of ‘fire’ under the earth. (this became associated with the location of hell which, early on, had a decidedly geographic or geological bent   only relatively recently have heaven and hell been conceptualised super cosmologically.) descartes envisaged the middle of the earth to be a mini sun, a not entirely mistaken idea. others questioned the extent of volcanism. in the debates of the eighteenth century, volcanoes as drivers of change were minimised in favour of the power of water. but plutonism eventually superseded neptunism, as naturalists observed the strange and evocative distortions of rock that could only have happened under the power of internal heat. scientifically speaking, volcanoes don’t contain fire   they can cause fires, but fire is a different phenomenon to lava. the ‘smoke’ of volcanoes is gas, steam and ash. it is also easy to think that lava is what is inside the earth (like the sauce in a self saucing chocolate pudding), but lava is what the hot rock becomes once it emerges. the lack of pressure at the surface means hot rock (lava) becomes more liquified and can flow. hot rock within the earth can ‘flow’ but it is still a solid, or close to it, unable to liquify because of the intense pressures. (the lava emerges when hot solid rock is driven to the surface through convection.) we think of lava being the main output of volcanoes, but the gases exhaled are significant. aristotle thought subterranean winds the most important aspect of volcanoes. (he was not the only one to envisage an underworld wind fanning the ‘flames’ of volcanoes.) magma contains ‘dissolved’ gases; as pressure in the magma drops, the gas separates, and bubbles rise to the surface. the mix of gases emerging at the surface at a particular time tells volcanologists what is happening underneath, including what elements went into the formation of the earth. in puzzuoli, italy, mather wanders the town, emerging into its hotspot between buildings, where there are mud pots, fumaroles, gas vents and the like. this is a lot like rotorua in aotearoa/new zealand, where the town’s parks have fenced mud pots and boiling lakes, and where the air is tainted with sulphur. along the shore of the lake, itself a product of volcanic activity, there are piles of smoking ash heaps, and a headache inducing stench, and of course there are the tourist hot baths. the area of rotorua is the product of explosive events, but it is driven by an underlying gradual pulling apart of the earth   it is a low area in the middle of two areas of crust moving in different directions, somewhat like the east african rift area. aotearoa’s north island is full of geothermal tourist spots. one of the most interesting is waimangu, billed as the world’s youngest geothermal valley, the site of a late 1800s cataclysm. the valley is the result of the eruption of mount tarawera in 1886, which was spectacularly explosive, killed scores of people, buried a village in mud and destroyed the pink and white silica terraces, themselves products of volcanic activity, and global tourist attractions. walking around the waimangu valley today, one is struck with how this place of almost unimaginable destruction has settled into a benign regularity, the fumaroles and vents adding an exotic charm to a valley softened by vegetation. looking up, the rocks of the cliff faces are smoking, but there seems to be no immediate danger from the curious geothermal attractions (though scalding hot water awaits anyone foolhardy enough to wander from the track). yet new zealand, at some not so distant point, could become more volatile, like iceland. there is evidence of cataclysmic eruptions bigger than tarawera from the not so distant past, and no reason why they couldn’t happen in the not so distant future. the 2019 whakaari/white island eruption which killed 22 people is a small, if tragic, pointer to bigger, more explosive possibilities. across the world, volcanic activity is unsettling, disruptive and deadly (which is partly why it is the subject of such scrutiny). and not just from major eruptions. in africa in the 1980s, nearly 2000 people died in two separate incidents: carbon dioxide rose from lakes with volcanic activity in their depths and pooled in low places, suffocating residents in their sleep and, in one case, suffocating an unsuspecting group walking to market. volcanoes cause changes in the weather, sometimes catastrophically. plutarch wrote about this in 44bc, as did benjamin franklin in 1783 in france, surmising correctly that dim skies and lack of fruiting were the fault of volcanoes in iceland. these disruptions of weather patterns are usually blamed on ash in the atmosphere, but sulphuric gas is the more likely culprit. lava flows and pyroclastic gas flows are more obviously dangerous, and there is none more famous than the event that buried pompeii. italy is something of a hotspot, and particularly dangerous because of the population density around its volcanoes. santorini in greece is another populous location being monitored. a potential 2011 event came to nothing; ‘fortunately’ says mather, but one senses that a part of her, being fascinated by such things and evoking them in her book lyrically, wished for more drama. london clay, tom chivers, random house. it’s funny   the web of artistic ley lines of literature and culture. half way through tom chivers’ book london clay he describes walking the streets after the birth of his daughter, listening to radiohead’s then just released album a moon shaped pool. i was listening to the same album recently, in conjunction with reading (radiohead cover artist) stanley donwood’s book there will be no quiet (a surprisingly funnily self deprecating book), in turn prompted by the imminent arrival of donwood and yorke’s new book on the kid a/amnesiac artwork. donwood describes ley lines in england   and he’s not quite sure if they exist or not   that converge at the derelict neoclassical palace tottenham house where radiohead were recording their in rainbows album. donwood is under the impression it is the original location of wolf hall, but although owned by the seymours, the original wolf hall was nearby. anyway, i was also looking at donwood’s collaboration with robert macfarlane, and you can’t write about hidden london   or hidden england   without mentioning macfarlane. chivers   and, yes, macfarlane is here somewhere   is looking for covert connections and paths both below and above ground   literal, mythological, etymological (chivers is a poet, unsurprisingly interested in words, their origins, meaning, appropriations). the layers of history he is looking for are a counterweight to the showiness and make overing of contemporary london. donwood, by the way, mentions that london, as labyrinth, inspired the minotaur drawings of kid a and amnesiac. chivers notes with approval the propensity of historians and psychogeographers to find the threads in the labyrinth, beyond the more obvious histories. he trudges in the rain to spot the unobvious, missing, buried, decayed, anomalous. but he also notes how psychogeography was a peculiarity now become mainstream, so much so that the london psychogeographer par excellence iain sinclair, himself interested in ley lines in lud heat and elsewhere, has distanced himself from the term. chivers mentions the dilution of the brand by mostly male urban ramblers like himself. but with that admission fairly in print, he trudges on, peering into what nick papadimitriou calls the ‘deep city’. under aldgate are locked off subterranean pedestrian passageways, once serving a purpose rendered useless or less utilitarian with realigned roads. nearby he circles verbosely around a hole behind a fence, the entrance to an abandoned tube station. he looks for the source of a creek, in an area captured in a pissarro painting of a train. the very suburban area in the painting is now urban forest, the train tunnel locked and abandoned. nature makes over like the more frantic slate wiping of the blitz. (geology too, in its unimaginably slow way.) nature persists, reclaims. rivers are there if you look. london is a ‘liquid city’ (another sinclair reference). chivers hunts for the lost river tyburn under government buildings in westminster, puts his ear to the manhole covers in the middle of streets, listening for the gurgles. he notes how recent protestors, of left and right (anti lockdown, anti racist, fascist), walk in the footsteps of their predecessors. chaucer possibly watched, from the gatehouse where he was employed, the invasion of the city by essex men, enraged by taxes and corruption. there is always something to protest. in his orbit are churches, places of atmosphere and gravity. a churchgoer himself, he steps into the crypt at his local place of worship. at westminster he looks at tombs, deciphers, ponders history. beyond this, london is a series of sacred places, from old burial sites, river god sites, overlain by churches. london is testimony to the need for ritual, the marking out of transcendent space. echoes reverberate from the dead, still. the city has energy through its people, through its history; is that energy somehow embodied in the stones and bricks? the greywacke, nick davidson, profile books. the greywacke tells of a chapter in the grand history of geological discovery in britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. greywacke is a type of sedimentary rock, a jumbled flotsam that had puzzled geologists until adam sedgwick and roderick murchison, the subjects of the book, painstakingly sorted, then argued over, its permutations in wales and beyond. in doing so, they named major geological periods still in use today. sedgwick, the son of an anglican priest, went to cambridge on a maths scholarship but later became a priest himself, partly to pay the bills while he thought about rocks. murchison was a wealthy former soldier and student of the famous geologist cleric william buckland. both sedgwick and murchison would eventually head the geological society. after partitioning wales for a survey, they mapped the rocks there, with murchison coming up with the name ‘silurian’ (after a welsh tribe) for younger greywacke, and sedgwick naming the older rocks ‘cambrian’ (after the roman name for wales). this was a significant step, and when murchison found similar rocks in europe, they were confident their system of naming had wider application. so far, so good. but then they spent the next decades publicly arguing over where the boundary between the two formations (and geological periods) lay. while murchison was a successful self promoter, and published two large works, on the geologies of england and russia, where he had done pioneering fieldwork (and named the ‘permian’ period), a distracted and increasingly grumpy sedgwick seemed incapable of writing about his own significant contributions and lost ideological ground to murchison. over the years murchison made regular appeals to sedgwick on the basis of their former friendship but sedgwick refused to reconcile. the two also participated in what’s known as the great devonian controversy, an argument over the dating of carboniferous rocks in devon, hence the name. (‘devonian’ was another name murchison came up with). much of this had to do with the dating   or at least, sequencing   of rocks through signature fossils. in relating this, davidson gives us a taste of the sort of debates that enthralled not only geologists but the general public as well. geologists had noted that bands of rock had fossils of certain species   trilobites, ammonites, fish and the like   which helped in pairing rocks in different locations and making geological maps. exact dating would come later through technological developments, but geologists could at least identify sequences of strata and establish which rocks were older. sedgwick and murchison, like their famous contemporary charles lyell, didn’t necessarily accept the transmutation of species, as theorized by darwin, but could see that species came and went in a series of creations. working out where species appeared and disappeared prompted the naming of rocks and geological periods, something that necessitated tramping through hills and standing knee deep in freezing water for weeks at a time to study and sample rock faces. in a short book davidson does a fine job of conveying the hardships involved in this era of scientific discovery and laying out the history neatly, especially when there is such voluminous documentation, including from the men involved. one small piece of grit in his smooth story is his reference to the conflict of science and religion, an opposition that has been oversimplified and distorted in much retelling. it’s tempting for both scholar and saint to make the two opposites, but there were no such monolithic protagonists in the day, just many approaches that touched to varying degrees on both subjects. davidson wonders at one point how sedgwick the priest could hold both his religious and geological views simultaneously, but as stephen jay gould points out in his masterful study of the era, time’s arrow, time’s cycle (1987), it had long been the case that longer timeframes were not a problem. geologists surmised the days in the biblical account of creation were long periods, or that the bible simply described the most recent of a series of creations. historian martin rudwick suggests any religious controversy was ‘external’   not within the circles sedgwick and murchison moved in. and as now, there were variations in religious views, but few literalists amongst the geologists. what davidson describes is not really an overturning of the bible, or the dissolution of faith, but it is significant because it finally sorted out the chronologies in what became a rethinking of the history of creation. the last piece of the puzzle, and the last part of the book, is the ‘discovery’ and naming of the ordovician by scottish geologist charles lapworth, who settled the dispute over where sedgwick’s cambrian and murchison’s silurian met by shoving in a new geological period, which was delineated by another set of signature fossils. in his heroic geologising in scotland, lapworth found a more tumultuous history in the rocks and came up with the ordovician, a time of huge increase in marine life before a mass extinction at the beginning of the silurian. (lapworth also pioneered the use of graptolite fossils for dating rocks. graptolites are tiny marine fossils that had been hitherto ignored, but small graduations in their physiology, and their widespread distribution, allows geologists to sort strata on a global scale.) davidson also touches on the politics of class, which could also influence who prevailed in what we now consider the pursuit of science. ideologies intersect with geology, making a jumble of intellectual strata. a recent rich library of histories of this era, to which davidson contributes, enables us to excavate and sort the complexities. hindsight flattens and straightens bumps and bends in the road of the history of geology. there is little better than stephen jay gould’s classic time’s arrow, time’s cycle to lay out how this works. the book explains the competing worldviews of linear and cyclical history, where linear is the flow of history   irreversible, unique, sometimes inferring progress   and cyclical   processes which repeat endlessly   volcanic activity, sedimentation, erosion, and, as we now understand, the business of tectonic plates jockeying their slow way around the globe. these concepts were at the core of geological arguments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and not, as is often supposed by those reading back later debates into the times, antagonisms of literal biblical and longer timeframes or the evolution of species and special creation. as often as not, the older debates concerned the influence of catastrophes and steady processes. and in this, there is nothing as simplistic as a confrontation between science and religion. in the course of this, gould discusses one of the fathers of geology, james hutton, and in doing so, topples a few pedestalled assumptions. hutton is rightly famous for his ‘discovery’ of deep time (though more lauded in britain than in europe), and lauded for using evidence from the field, though, writes gould, this is not quite right   he serendipitously came up with his ideas through application of sometimes erroneous views, such as an eternal universe, then looed for evidence. he was a grand theorist, but selective in his use of evidence. his ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’ refers to an eternal earth, and while he is right to note slow, cyclical processes, deep time, if we understand it as interminable progression rather than eternal cycling is not his contribution. his deep time is about the number of cycles (infinite) rather than the length of the arrow, and if the length of time hutton discovered contributed to the acceptance of how species could evolve, these were concepts hutton actually resisted as being too close to the idea of progress (gould notes, also, that evolution, despite recent hagiographies, had been well discussed before darwin), even if, somewhat contradictorily, hutton accepted a creator deity. science has now illuminated that the universe had a beginning   once an idea ridiculed by some scientists for being too religious   and that it is (possibly) cycling down, either entropically or to crunch. this doesn’t prove an awful lot metaphysically except that direction is not a mistaken cosmological assumption, but it’s interesting that some have introduced the idea of cycles back into cosmology in the guise of multiple universes cycling through bangs and crunches, maybe in fear that just one universe points to a deity lurking behind the curtain. it’s interesting that hutton inferred uplift from looking at soil and thinking about what would stop continents eroding. like newton, gould writes, hutton saw the need for eternal cycles to be part of a world created by god   in this case it was cycles nit bangs that were divine   perhaps due to the lingering influence of medieval philosophy of perfect celestial spheres and the like. and this was all to confirm uniformitarianism over its opposing view, catastrophism   the latter exemplified much later by walter alvarez’s discovery that an asteroid (possibly in tandem with unusual volcanic activity) wiped out the dinosaurs, something also seen initially as too neat an explanation, possibly resisted also because of the lingering prominence of universal, cyclical theories. (the actual history of the earth is both arrow and cycle, catastrophe and uniformity, history and process. and in this we might also see parallels to gould’s notion of punctured equilibrium   evolution as steady states ‘punctuated’ by abrupt ish periods of natural selection.) hutton was not alone, of course. charles lyell too believed (and ‘believed’ is an appropriate word) in fixed species, no cooling earth, no progress, no fluctuation, no beginning, no direction. gould also notes that lyell said that even if there was no evidence for his theory, he knew he was right, and evidence was bound to turn up one day, like the whackiest of pseudo scientists. but gould isn’t interested in cutting down historical figures   he respects the pioneers and is interested in the way they thought and why. he doesn’t project more recent erroneous dichotomies onto their milieu. in establishing his arrow/cycle thesis, he shows the power of conceptual frameworks. we can see this working out today in, say, competing conceptions of the natural world. i wonder, is something of the same going on in climate change responses? is it difficult to recognize the signs, plan, change tack because we are used to thinking of nature cyclically? we have our seasons of fire and flood, which still seem to be viewed as anomalous, as interruptions into our normal cycle of routines. have we lessened catastrophist aspects, or have we become attuned to the linear idea of progress so that regression or collapse is too hard to envisage? and what will future historians say about our narrowness of vision, and will they get it wrong, rightly admonishing us but getting our motivations and worldviews wrong? the book of unconformities, hugh raffles, pantheon ‘they were hunting for iridescent blue pyrrhotite, delicate coraline aragonite, lustrous marcasite, opaque smoky quartz, semitransparent calcite, fully transparent rock crystal, blood red rutile, hairy sheets of mountain leather asbestos, gem quality brown tourmaline, prismatic gypsum, flaky muscovite, silky tremolite, silvery foliated talc […]’ so runs one passage near the start of hugh raffles’ peripatetic the book of unconformities. as with philip hoare, there is an accelerating enthusiasm in the prose. the locomotion of narrative occasionally reaches a critical momentum and runs over any potential sentence terminations. like an avalanche, all is calm until something triggers a cumulative rush. the greek rhetorical rule of triplets, utilised by the likes of obama, doesn’t cut it here. it’s ‘all aboard’ and then some, like those overloaded indian trains. there is a list of what lenape native americans thought, ate, cultivated, the abundance of words mirroring the abundance of new york pre european settlement. later, there is a page long sentence describing the geological history of svalbard (on the islands off the top of norway), through the evidence of early forests, forests becoming coal, rocks being submerged then emerging again, plates drifting, climate shifting, mountains lifting, right up to whalers and traders tramping its shores, looking for animals to bludgeon, stab and hack, a deep history panorama in a frantic montage. there is a rumble, the earth splits, the words pour out, hot. the fecundity of these sentences helps reinforce that this book, ostensibly about rocks, is about more besides. raffles describes the collision of cultures in what is now new york city, an unequal collision, like that between a bus and drunk driver’s truck. so, too, in greenland and the arctic, in the fever of exploration. here is robert peary (who also appears in a book written by iain sinclair and b. catling), hunting for meteorites. the inuit had used them for making tools, shaping them with other rocks. as well as hunting interplanetary rocks, peary had an anthropological bent. the inuit couldn’t understand, understandably, why he wanted them to pose nude for photographs. all in the name of science, said peary. if so, condescension. if not, then more sleazy motives. the meteorites were brought back to new york. so, too, the arctic natives. this at the time when indigenous peoples weren’t buried like white men outside of their native land, but their remains were deposited in museums, objects of (western) scientific curiosity. fossils, gemstones, stuffed animals, indigenous people. not everyone agreed, however. are they not men? some asked. raffles does a north atlantic circumnavigation, running limited express. he stops in the top end of the british isles, in iceland, in svalbard. then the arctic and back to new york. rocks and people along the way. the lenape used to shelter in inwood hill park, north of manhattan. the rock shelters are still there, timeless, in forest, still there. in new york there is a neglected, decaying stone monument, a mini arc de triomphe that is quite large, a classical revival stonehenge, former entrance to the estate of yet another rich man. it is now incorporated into the brito body shop, a car repair establishment on 217th street. raffles writes that it is the ‘largest surviving structure of inwood marble’ in new york. the marble was inferior to that of vermont, up the road. manhattan features vermont rather than manhattan marble. neglect is one thing, fear another. rocks are thought of as living in some cultures. they outlive people but inspire strange bursts of hatred. at avebury, an impressive 76 stones survive. but there were 600. sometimes they just get in the way of the plough. (trees also show the same intransigence.) but in the uk rocks were also burned, broken and buried to negate whatever latent supernatural (or natural?) powers the stones hold. does it matter? isn’t there so much rock? doesn’t it just get in the way? there are the archaeological considerations, but doesn’t rock provide some of our more awe inspiring vistas? archaeology   is it preservation or disturbance? in svalbard, the old whaling sites and nazi outposts are off limits. preserved, not removed. yet leave them and they will decay. the dilemmas. how does one fix these things eternally? but rocks flow. it’s not an oxymoron. they are made liquid by heat, but also by time. collections of particles shoved around by infinitely patient force. the world is in flux. to preserve is to go against the flow. raffles is responding to head splitting and disorienting grief, from the death of two sisters. is reaching for something solid the answer though? worlds in shadow, patrick nunn, sigma patrick nunn has previously written in innovative and insightful fashion about religion and mythology and climate change. as with his previous book the edge of memory, his new book shows how mythology can tell us more than just something about indigenous people’s creativity. myths hold memories of climatic and geological events such as inundations. he notes that sea levels have fluctuated with the glacial cycles, but that doesn’t make the current predicament any less serious, and he suggests we can look to past fluctuations and evidence of submerged lands as warnings. at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, australian indigenous people witnessed the country where the barrier reef is now being flooded and held on to the memory through stories. a story about a giant kangaroo holds clues to the flooding of spencer gulf in south australia, while in the gulf of carpentaria, stories from 7000 years ago speak to when the area was finally cut off from papua new guinea. stories from around the planet, passed down orally, hold similar clues to a myriad of lost cities and lands. however, nunn writes, you can strike atlantis off the list. plato made it up. but the persistence of the legend might speak to our anxiety about the geological instability of civilizations. stories of submerged towns where bells can still be heard tolling, seemingly similarly fantastical, through their striking and haunting imagery, may recall sudden, disturbing inundations. recent archaeology has rediscovered many of these places, such as herakleion in egypt’s nile delta. while some believers take the biblical story of the flood at face value, and detractors dismiss it as myth, the truth may be in the middle. the flood story may point to a remembered, particularly catastrophic event, even if other elements of the story may have a more theological than literal meaning. nunn roams widely, describing various catastrophes, many caused not by slow sea level rise but by volcanic activity. landslides on land or sea can cause tsunamis (that is, land above or beneath the waves). in the south pacific, volcanic islands, which often sit in geologically unstable areas, are liable to shift. calderas collapse, reefs tilt, island flanks disintegrate into the depths. all this points to something   the land, usually assumed to be stable and unchangeable   as decidedly not so. in the south pacific there is a challenge in getting christian inhabitants to take sea level rise seriously, due to an interpretation of the biblical flood story and the promise to noah that god would not destroy the world through flood again. while the world may not be destroyed entirely (there isn’t enough water held in the ice to completely submerge the land), the evidence of the past suggests that an awareness of the instability of the landscape, and attention to the signs, is wise. ice rivers, jemma wadham, allen lane in his widely read book on time and water andri magnason argues that we need more than an awareness of facts in order to combat the environmental challenges we face. we need to feel an emotional response. it’s not surprising that we feel the weight of potential loss more when we have a personal connection to a slice of nature, such as local bushland or a favourite beach. jemma wadham describes in ice rivers not just why glaciers are so interesting, and necessary for the world as we know it, but also how she feels an emotional connection to them   especially when she says she is not naturally a cold weather person   to the point of crying into the scratchy, icy face of a glacier she knows is disappearing. if you’ve been to a glacier, you know what kind of presence they are   mysterious giants between rock and water, with constrained, slow power. the story of brain surgery to remove a cyst on wadham’s brain bookends the narrative of her icy travels. as she travels, she experiences dizziness and headaches. why doesn’t she see a doctor? she is not sure. maybe she has a fear of being like her mother, who is undergoing her own health problems. maybe wadham is just a workaholic. why do we ignore such warnings? it’s not surprising that she uses her health experience as a metaphor for the fate of glaciers and the planet, for the symptoms of glacier retreat we ignore. her passion for glaciers takes her to the european alps and scandinavia, and to antarctica, greenland, patagonia and the himalayas (often described as the ‘third pole’). her book is full of glacier facts (such as how some glaciers slide on wet bottoms, others are frozen to the rocks below), reinforcing not just their status as objects of curiosity, but also their importance for the land. glaciers act like bulldozers and rock crushers. the ‘glacial flour’ that is pushed out the end of glaciers and runs into rivers is full of minerals, essential for the richness of riverside farmland. she writes about the cycle of global glacial periods. we are in an interglacial period, which means milder climate. in the ice ages, glaciers a kilometre high dominated europe and north america, sculpting the landscapes. glaciers come and go but their current retreat is not natural and is worrying. glaciers are an important source of constant water for those downstream. glacier retreat makes for a more intermittent and unreliable flow, for more prevalent floods and droughts. already countries are moving to shore up water supplies for themselves at the expense of others. despite their life giving nature, glaciers themselves were previously thought to be lifeless. but wadham’s research has revealed microbes in a glacier’s under ice rivers, and in potholes in the surface of antarctica. under the ice in antarctica there are more microbes creating methane. with antarctic melting may come massive methane releases, as in northern areas of permafrost, further speeding warming. ironically, release of these newly discovered life forms to the open air would threaten other life holding precariously onto the land. keeping them buried under ice is a good thing. holding back the river, tyler kelley, avid reader press a river with a city problem, margaret cook, uqp. patrick nunn says in his latest book that while nomadic settlements are more like moving targets, cities on rivers are sitting ducks. but the appeal of settling by a river is understandable, since it provides access to transport, fish and birds, often good timber and good soil (not to mention the appeal of the picturesque). but a river works against prolonged settlement and the building of structures associated with a city because in geological timescales a river is a fluid thing   not just in the sense that it carries water. a book of maps i have contains a striking map of the course of the mississippi river over thousands of years, and it is a surprisingly beautiful thing, with its colours differentiating the varying courses, a multicoloured tangle. but it also shows how frequently the river has shifted course. civilization and commerce, on the other hand, require certainty, stability   ‘predictability’ in the words of tyler kelley, writing about the missouri and the mississippi and the history of ‘taming’ rivers in the usa. commerce requires transport, and rivers were the first roads, but they are meandering, shifting ones, which is not particularly helpful, so in the spirit of nineteenth century dominion of nature, rivers were engineered. it is somehow appropriate that the government body responsible for the control of rivers in the usa is the army corps of engineers, both for america’s emphasis on the military and for the western tradition of rivers and nature generally being something that required warring against, rather like native peoples required war before they could be (supposedly) civilised. (david blackbourn’s book the conquest of nature makes a similar point about germany.) for the mississippi this has meant straightening, levelling, removing obstacles and regulating flow, often for the result of speeding the river (and therefore transport and occasional floods). all this requires levees, dams and locks. in the early twentieth century, the focus was on this kind of engineering to ‘tame’ the river, even to beautify it, as nature was seen as unruly and ugly. now, in the early twenty first century this infrastructure is ageing, having not caught up with more frequent river traffic, but also crumbling because government and public focus is on road and rail (and air). although rivers transport billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural and other goods each year in the us, they are ‘invisible’. until a flood, that is, says kelley. ‘taming’ a river increases pressure and flow and removes the river’s natural safety valves   large floodplains. a river has a natural ‘regime’, its topography and volume (and river flows are still not properly understood, their dynamism seemingly always underestimated.) when the course of a river is altered   and it is always done so to provide quicker, more regimented flow rather than the other way round   the river is likely to try and meander somewhere else. this, says kelley, is its natural tendency   water likes to spread (as well as loving to shift huge volumes of silt around). so, flood management often means a problem shifted rather than fixed. problems of flooding can get worse in areas other than where flood mitigation is focused. this is understandable but not always considered. in new orleans, the attitude that relocation is not an option means it is seldom attempted, in favour of ever greater engineering. (levees in the south are now preposterously large.) ‘this is the usa’ writes kelley of the prevailing attitude, and americans stand and fight, not retreat, i suppose. but new orleans is sinking. because of engineering   locks and dams   not as much sediment is coming down to the mississippi mouth and being deposited in the delta. this is a problem because the delta itself is sinking because of the weight of all the sediment, but that sediment is now not being topped up. kelley says oil extraction hasn’t helped either. then, of course, there is sea level rise. not only that, but a fixed city relies on a fixed river, but the mississippi delta is shifting, as it has continually over its life, and as most rivers do. this is unavoidable but the city is not planning for it. kelley suggests half of the city could be underwater in coming years. as patrick nunn points out, it is nuts to think that a city like new orleans can go on forever when the land it sits on is impermanent. margaret cook, in her book about the brisbane river, suggests that the concept of a flood is a rather anthropocentric way of looking at things. while a river may shift course, it is also entirely natural for a river’s levels to go up and down. this was evident to indigenous people, who didn’t settle permanently on the brisbane river floodplains, and who warned the british settlers. the colonists were possibly lulled into complacency by the memory of tamer rivers in england. (and more predictable and less extreme weather.) but the lure of waterfront land was as much a factor. land on the riverfront is valuable for whoever lives there, as well as for government, so there is a temptation always to take the risk. as cook says, one could live on a floodplain and not see a flood for fifty years. the original planners of brisbane even envisaged a riverfront boulevard, which would have made something of a buffer for floodwaters, but the land itself was too tempting for building. cook writes that after a flood, there is much hand wringing but eventually things go back to ‘normal’, which involves risky riverside development. post 1893, some recognized the folly of building in a floodplain, but equally there was talk of how to stop floods through removing corners and building banks (in an effort to speed floodwaters away from prone areas). in brisbane, as in the usa, there has been an attitude that humans should be able to control and remove flood threats. cook writes that brisbane’s papers were full of theodicy related editorializing after the 1893 floods, which, she says, obscures the culpability of humans for damage. labelling the flood an act of god, something that shouldn’t happen, ignores the frequency and naturalness of floods. after the 2011 floods, the reasoning was less theological, but there was an underlying attitude that human beings should be able to prevent floods. brisbane has for decades relied psychologically on its upriver dams, but the 2011 floods, which were due partly to large water releases from the wivenhoe dam, showed that the dams are not unassailable. sometimes there is just too much water. there was also the question in 2011 as to whether droughts conditioned the wivenhoe dam operators to hold back too much water which then had to be released when the situation became critical. dams as water storage facilities conflict with their role as flood mitigators. in any case, in queensland post 2011 there was an attitude that someone (human) was to blame   someone had messed up   while others cautioned that flood planning must take into account the unpredictable, and the blame must fall on planners, developers and the public who hubristically think floods can be tamed. caves, coprolites and catastrophes, allan chapman, spck. this is a positive, if somewhat hagiographic, succinct, clearly written and appealing biography of william buckland, the british clergyman and scientific celebrity. while filling in the details of his pioneering life in geology and paleontology, allan chapman also puts buckland in his context, and does some myth busting at the same time. buckland lived in an extraordinary era of discovery, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in a country   britain   which, along with france, was a crucible for the natural sciences. chapman describes buckland as pioneering geology, paleontology, hydrology and speleology (cave exploration), as well as the promotion of these disciplines in public. at this time, it was common for clergy to pursue what we now think of as science as a hobby, but not a genteel hobby   buckland and his ilk scaled glaciers and dangled precariously into caverns. the intellectual side of these pursuits was equally daring, as they tried to make sense of the increasingly bizarre finds that prompted speculation on the age of the earth and the creatures that had populated it but were now extinct. chapman reminds his readers that in buckland’s day, what we now think of as science was just another side of understanding an ordered world created by god. science was not subordinate to the bible; rather, they were interlinked   two ‘books’ in dialogue. in fact, the binaries of faith and science didn’t really exist (just as they don’t really today either, except in the minds of some propagandists). there were, instead, multiple interpretations of rocks and fossils and scriptures. and the stereotype of stubborn clergymen is just that   chapman shows how, while theories were fiercely contested, many, including buckland, were open to having their opinions swayed by newly unearthed evidence. besides, chapman writes, geology was in its infancy, the evidence was scarce and there was much speculation. theorists were not locked into rigid positions because of religious beliefs. buckland in particular was not one who took his view of geology from a literal reading of the biblical creation account and made the evidence fit no matter how improbably. rather, he had the confidence of someone who believed in a creator god but used careful human deduction for the details. buckland is sometimes caricatured as a wrong headed promoter of a global flood, including by helen gordon in her recent, otherwise thoughtful book notes from deep time. buckland was a neptunian rather than a plutonist in the prominent debate over which force was responsible for shaping the world   water or fire. (consequently he was also a catastrophist rather than a gradualist.) but chapman points out that while buckland certainly accepted the theory of a global flood determining landforms, he only made passing references in his written works, and was quite happy to alter his thinking on its importance later in life, especially as he was persuaded that glaciers formed in the ice ages were responsible for much of the dramatic countryside of northern britain and europe. buckland’s views could not be described as fundamentalist, as he accepted portions of the creation account at face value but thought the earth had a long history before the arrival of humans. despite what is often written about his contemporaries, buckland was not alone in this. chapman suggests that buckland was gentlemanly in his arguments, unlike, say, the notoriously cantankerous richard owen. chapman emphasizes buckland’s generosity, fun and sociability. charles darwin, hardly the life of the party, described buckland as ‘good natured’ but sometimes ‘like a buffoon’. buckland has a reputation for eccentricity, especially due to his habit of eating whatever of the animal world he could lay his hands on. what is less publicised is the practical and humanitarian side of this. while the early nineteenth century was an age of discovery and ‘progress’, it was also one of cruelty and poverty, and in sampling the edibility of britain’s wildlife buckland was trying to find ways to feed britain’s hungry classes. this practical side can also be seen in his work on fossil feces (coprolites), which he believed made excellent fertilizer for crops, and his pioneering hydrological work. buckland must take some of the credit for the discovery that cholera was caused by contaminated water supplies. this was complemented by his preaching against bad water and negligent landlords from the pulpit of westminster. chapman adds that it is wrong to think of the oxford education of the day as elitist and irrelevant and emphasizes instead how buckland’s schooling was focused on understanding the natural world and how it could be used for the betterment of humankind. christian faith only emphasized further how it was one’s duty to do so. in writing about buckland’s contemporaries, chapman also challenges some other myths of scientific history. he writes, for example, that mary anning, although held back somewhat due to her working class roots and gender, was not shunned as is sometimes asserted. buckland supported her findings, and eventually she did quite well out of her fossil hunting business. additionally, and an indication of the esteem she was held in, anning was the first woman to be given a eulogy by the president of britain’s geological society. after buckland died in 1856, the study of prehistory accelerated, especially in regards to evolution and the antiquity of humans, which buckland had not accepted and which can, with hindsight, pin him as outdated in his views, rather than the visionary he was, although he might have changed his mind, chapman speculates, if he had lived long enough to see the evidence. buckland changed his mind about other things, and this openness is just one of the appealing aspects of his religious and inquisitive character. enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. email address: follow

supported by emergency services were deployed in readiness and schools were closed after more than 200 temblors struck in the aegean, near santorini, within 48 hours. by niki kitsantonis scientists said that the main hazard from the eruption on monday was increased levels of volcanic gas. by amanda holpuch nearly 90,000 people on the island of negros were ordered to seek shelter after mount kanlaon spewed deadly ash and lava. by camille elemia una erupción volcánica acabó con la vida de miles de habitantes de la ciudad romana. sus siluetas, enterradas bajo metros de ceniza, generaron historias y especulaciones. material genético extraído recientemente prueba que muchas eran incorrectas. by franz lidz in 79 a.d., a volcanic eruption engulfed a town’s residents. they weren’t all who scientists thought, newly extracted genetic material suggests. by franz lidz the authorities warned of more volcanic activity at mount lewotobi laki laki, which has erupted dozens of times in the past few weeks. by jin yu young and hasya nindita mount lewotobi laki laki erupted on sunday, killing several people and forcing others to flee their villages. by hannah yi the italian authorities carried out a drill of their plan to save a half million people from toxic fumes, deadly quakes or a full eruption. vesuvius isn’t the volcano they’re worried about. by elisabetta povoledo los astrónomos aún no han confirmado la existencia de exolunas, pero una señal molecular alrededor de una estrella lejana ofrece algunas de las mejores evidencias hasta el momento. by robin george andrews astronomers have yet to confirm the existence of exomoons, but a molecular signal around a far away star offers some of the best evidence yet. by robin george andrews earth scientists are working to determine the course of future lava flows in iceland’s southwestern corner one bucketful at a time. by gaia squarci and robin george andrews a volcano in iceland near the town of grindavik erupted on thursday. experts say the zone may continue to generate eruptions for years, potentially leading to the endangerment of nearby populated areas. by the associated press and reuters the latest eruption, the sixth since december, is part of increased volcanic activity that began in 2021. by sarah hurtes and claire moses scientists in an expedition to the mid atlantic ocean ridge lifted almost a mile of precious rocks from beneath an exotic feature linked to life’s possible beginning. by william j. broad la nación experimenta algún tipo de actividad volcánica cada tres o cuatro años. actualmente, se produce una erupción volcánica casi cada mes. by sarah hurtes the icelandic meteorological office has warned of an eruption “in the coming days.” by sarah hurtes while the volcano’s eruption was deadly, research shows that many people in the ancient roman city died in building collapses from the earthquake associated with the outburst. by jordan pearson clouds of ash went nearly 15,000 feet into the air, and the airport in catania, sicily, was forced to shut down because the runway was unusable. by emma bubola bright lava erupted from the volcano, trailing down the mountain, as a thick plume of smoke filled the sky and left streets covered in ash. by reuters and associated press a place of windswept, austere beauty, this corner of the canary islands is a growing l.g.b.t.q. destination as well as a perfect place to clear the mind. by alexander lobrano a fossil bed in the high atlas mountains of morocco is allowing new insights into the anatomies of arthropods that lived a half billion years ago. by jack tamisiea in “adventures in volcanoland,” the geologist tamsin mather takes us on a global and historical investigation of her life’s passion. by carl zimmer kilauea, the most active volcano in hawaii, began erupting early on monday morning. by ang li the volcano erupted three times in 2023. there did not appear to be any immediate danger to residents on monday. by victor mather una fisura en la cresta de la montaña sundhnjukar lanza lava a 45 metros de altura; horas antes se ordenó la evacuación de los sitios turísticos cercanos. by egill bjarnason nearly 800 guests staying at the blue lagoon spa and surrounding hotels were ordered to evacuate hours before a volcano in southwestern iceland erupted. by the associated press guests staying at the blue lagoon spa and surrounding hotels were ordered to evacuate hours before the eruption occurred. by egill bjarnason new software let scientists re examine old radar images, providing some of the strongest evidence yet that volcanoes continue to reshape the hellish planet. by robin george andrews heavy rain on the island of sumatra caused torrents of rock and ash to flow down a volcano and into nearby towns. at least 17 people were still missing. by yan zhuang and muktita suhartono hundreds of earthquakes were detected in the weeks preceding the eruption of the volcano in north sulawesi province. hundreds of people were evacuated. by christine hauser lightning struck while lava and ash spewed from mount ruang volcano in indonesia’s north sulawesi province. by the associated press ancient humans left behind numerous archaeological traces in the cavern, and scientists say there may be thousands more like it on the arabian peninsula to study. by robin george andrews a frescoed dining room is the latest find in an excavation campaign to shore up an area of the site, which was destroyed by a powerful volcanic eruption, and better preserve it. by elisabetta povoledo el volcán, uno de los más activos de europa, ha estado expulsando anillos de vórtice volcánico a gran velocidad. pero eso no significa que se avecine una gran explosión, según un experto. by elisabetta povoledo the volcano, one of europe’s most active, has been spewing volcanic vortex rings at a rapid pace. but that doesn’t mean a big explosion is on the way, one expert says. by elisabetta povoledo the volcano has been sending volcanic vortex rings into the sky over sicily for days. by the associated press volcanic eruptions are continuing in the reykjanes peninsula in iceland. streets are empty and the blue lagoon resort remains closed. by claire moses and tony cenicola in a country that relies heavily on visitors, hotels faced repeated evacuations, and one resort was temporarily shut. by emma bubola the eruption occurred near the town of grindavik, prompting an evacuation of the region. by reuters and the associated press the authorities said the eruption on saturday night was the most powerful of a series that started in december. by egill bjarnason and yan zhuang dozens of tourists and guides were killed or injured when a volcanic island erupted in 2019. the disaster was ruled to be a violation of new zealand’s workplace safety rules. by natasha frost dominica, a remote caribbean island, enchants with its waterfalls, hot springs and hummingbirds. but a new airport and more tourists could tame its wildness. by nina burleigh clean power, melting glaciers and carbon capture. by david gelles a volcano system in southwestern iceland erupted on thursday for the third time since december. by reuters the flowing lava poured over a key pipe that transports hot water from the local power plant to nearby towns. by egill bjarnason and emma bubola a team of scientists thinks the planet may have been thrust into its longest ice age because less gas leaked out of volcanoes. by katrina miller the second of a pair of close flybys adds to the treasure trove of data that scientists have about jupiter’s volcanic moon. by katrina miller in a country of fewer than 400,000, finding places for 3,700 residents is complicated by a tough housing market. by egill bjarnason and emma bubola hear the news in five minutes. by new york times audio the country has many earthquakes and eruptions, but now, “a daunting period of upheaval has begun” in the southwest, the president said. by egill bjarnason and emma bubola a volcano in iceland erupted after hundreds of earthquakes struck the reykjanes peninsula, spewing lava into grindavik, a small fishing town about 30 miles southwest of the country’s capital. by the associated press the latest eruption happened along a row of volcanoes on the reykjanes peninsula, where a fissure opened in december, creating a river of lava. by egill bjarnason and lynsey chutel the government told people to “think four times” before embarking on a hike to view the eruption. by jenny gross and egill bjarnason icelanders had been girding for an eruption. when it happened, they wanted to see it. by egill bjarnason and jenny gross la erupción, que comenzó el lunes, no fue inesperada. pero sí mayor de lo previsto por los vulcanólogos y no muy lejos de una ciudad evacuada y una central eléctrica by egill bjarnason and claire moses the eruption on the reykjanes peninsula sent lava gushing into the night sky. air travel did not appear to be affected. by egill bjarnason and cassandra vinograd hear the news in five minutes. by new york times audio the location of the fissure poses a risk to the nearby svartsengi power plant and to the town of grindavík, which was evacuated last month because of heightened seismic activity. by reuters and the associated press while monday’s eruption was not unexpected, it was larger than volcanologists had been predicting and took place not far from an evacuated town and a power plant. by egill bjarnason and claire moses clouds of volcanic ash hung over towns after mount marapi erupted in west sumatra province on sunday. thick layers of ash also covered cars and vegetation. by the associated press dozens of climbers were on mount marapi on sumatra when it began spewing ash, the authorities said. twelve were still missing. by hannah beech and rin hindryati according to a new study, living cells outnumber stars in the universe, highlighting the deep, underrated link between geophysics and biology. by dennis overbye a fishing town that was evacuated this month will probably be spared, but residents can’t return until all danger has passed. by claire moses las autoridades afirman que es probable que la interrupción del tráfico aéreo sea mínima. by claire moses as the country prepares for a possible volcanic eruption, it’s working to protect a power plant that serves 30,000 people. by claire moses while the authorities continue to warn of a volcanic eruption, they say that disruption to air travel will probably be minimal. by claire moses agotada por la vida en nueva york, una fotógrafa viajó al norte de chile para estudiar la sabiduría ancestral de los lickanantay, el pueblo indígena de la zona. esto es lo que vio. by irjaliina paavonpera officials said that “the likelihood of a volcanic eruption” in the near future was “considerable” in grindavik, home to about 4,000 people. by eduardo medina an ongoing eruption from the volcano has created a small land mass less than a mile off iwo jima island. it’s a great case study of how volcanoes work. by hisako ueno and mike ives burned out from life in new york, a photographer traveled to northern chile to study the ancient wisdom of the lickanantay, the area’s indigenous people. here’s what she saw. by irjaliina paavonpera two enormous blobs deep inside earth could be remnants of the birth of the moon. by kenneth chang the ruling brings an end to legal proceedings that began after the white island eruption killed 22 people in 2019. by yan zhuang a new model suggests that in 250 million years, all land will collide into a supercontinent that boosts warming and pushes mammals to extinction. by carl zimmer the volcano, located on the big island, last erupted in june. the hawaiian volcano observatory said there was no immediate threat to people or property. by jin yu young for the first time, scientists observed tubeworms and other complex ocean creatures dwelling beneath hydrothermal vents. by robin george andrews a new study offers clues to the mysteries of kimberlite eruptions, the source of most of the diamonds mined on earth today. by maya wei haas data from two chinese orbiters helped a team of scientists explain why a patch of lunar terrain is so much warmer than the surrounding area. by kenneth chang officials described the eruption, which happened roughly 20 miles from reykjavik, as small and posing no immediate risks. by reuters larger eruptions have disrupted european air travel, but officials said this small one, in an uninhabited area that until recently had been dormant for centuries, posed no immediate risks. by orlando mayorquin the volcano on the big island gave hints in the past month that an eruption might be imminent. by remy tumin

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supported by nonfiction in “adventures in volcanoland,” the geologist tamsin mather takes us on a global and historical investigation of her life’s passion. by carl zimmer carl zimmer writes the “origins” column for the new york times. when you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. adventures in volcanoland: what volcanoes tell us about the world and ourselves, by tamsin mather i live on a hump of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern connecticut, lurching out of the ground here and there like a pod of surfacing whales. before my wife and i bought our house, we had an inspector give it a look. “well,” he said, “your foundation goes down a thousand miles into the earth   so nothing to worry about there.” we have been atop this tranquil bedrock for over two decades, and with every year it gets harder for me to imagine living in a place like iceland or indonesia   where there is much to worry about, because the solid earth turns to liquid, ash or gas and flies out of volcanoes. tamsin mather, a geologist at the university of oxford, has no such difficulty. she has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and she has come to see earth not as a peaceful world encased in a stable crust, but a globe of barely contained geological storms. “adventures in volcanoland” is organized around trips mather has taken throughout her career, starting with vesuvius, which she first visited as a child on a family vacation. next comes the nicaraguan volcano masaya, which she studied as a graduate student, and then volcanoes on other continents.

 wait wait... don't tell me! is npr's weekly quiz program. each week on the radio you can test your knowledge against some of the best and brightest in the news and entertainment world while figuring out what's real news and what's made up. on this episode, we dive into earth’s history with an exploration of all things geologic, from active volcanoes to the rock record. in this photo from june 3, 2024, lava flows from a volcano near grindavik, iceland. the area has been a hotbed of volcanic activity since december 2023. (ap photo/marco di marco) it’s easy to forget that the earth below us is always changing and shifting   but sometimes, we get a dramatic demonstration of exactly that, like with the recent eruptions of a volcano in iceland. volcanoes can devastate and destroy, but they’re also an integral part of our planet’s history and even evolution. and the same goes for the rocks beneath our feet   they’re ancient artifacts, historical records, time capsules filled with clues about earth’s past and its future.