We’re accustomed to hearing about the damage done by tornadoes, hurricanes and snow storms, but a rarer occurrence has been garnering news lately—the power of molten rock. “Volcanoes,” a word created after Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii, have wide-ranging and sometimes surprising results.
Last month 23 people were injured in Hawaii when a lava bomb struck their tour boat. They assumed they were far enough away to avoid direct contact with the Kilauea Volcano.
The explosion of Mount St. Helens in 1980, the largest eruption in recent history, left scores dead, most of whom were told they were safely outside the ejecta radius.
The eruption in Iceland in 2010 disrupted air travel between Europe and North America. The Icelandic government received scads of hate mail from angry travelers. The up-side was that tourism skyrocketed. Any country that could bring the powerful Western nations to a standstill was worth visiting.
The largest eruption in recorded human history, however, was Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 which was 80 times greater than the Mount St. Helens eruption. The human and environmental toll was staggering.
On the Fourth of July a year later, rivers in Virginia still had ice as crops failed and frozen birds dropped dead in the streets of Montreal at a time that became known as “The Year without Summer.”
In their book by the same name, William and Nicholas Klingaman wrote, “Europe also suffered mightily: the cold and wet summer led to famine, food riots, the transformation of stable communities into wandering beggars and one of the worst typhus epidemics in history.”
Not coincidently, the non-summer of 1816 inspired author Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.
Fortunately, scientists are now usually able to predict volcanic eruptions, but the toll in human suffering will always exist when the earth releases its core into the atmosphere. Perhaps, someplace will see an indirect tourism benefit. Will the rest of us enjoy a pause in global warming?
