Mount Vesuvius erupted on August 24, 79 CE, burying the 13,000 inhabitants of Pompeii and vicinity, a 700-year-old settlement that had evolved into a complex urban environment. The Vesuvius eruption is one of history’s iconic lessons on the mutability theme, and the excavation of the Pompeii-Herculaneum region, ongoing since the early eighteenth century, is one of the triumphs of archeology.
The scholars continue to dig and debate, says the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard in The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, and the human story of those buried instantly under fifteen feet of pumice and ash remains hauntingly compelling. The site “offers more vivid glimpses of real people and their real lives than almost anywhere else in the Roman world,” says Beard: “the medical man who died clutching his box of instruments . . . the slave found in the garden of a large house in the center of town, his movements surely hampered by the iron bands around his ankles.” Even the streets and houses, now recovered in minute detail, preserve their human tales:
We meet unlucky lovers (“Successus the weaver’s in love with a barmaid called Iris and she doesn’t give a toss” as one scrawled graffito runs) and shameless bed-wetters (“I’ve pissed in bed, I haven’t lied / But, dear landlord, there was no chamber pot supplied,” boasts the rhyme on a lodging house bedroom wall). We can follow the traces of Pompeii’s children, from the toddler who must have had great fun sticking a couple of coins into the fresh plaster of the main hall . . . to the bored kids who scratched a series of stickmen at child height in the entranceway to a suite of baths . . .
Another legendary volcanic eruption is tied to this week, that of Indonesia’s Krakatoa on August 27, 1883, which killed 40,000 (perhaps many more) in a variety of elemental ways: superheated gas, molten rock, and tsunami. Simon Winchester’s bestseller Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded, which tracks the catastrophe backward to earlier eruptions on the site and forward to the still-lingering regional aftermath, recreates the inexorable details of the volcano’s “paroxysmal phase”:
An immense wave then leaves Krakatoa at almost exactly 10:00 A.M. — and then, two minutes later, according to all the instruments that record it, came the fourth and greatest explosion of them all, a detonation that was heard thousands of miles away and that is still said to be the most violent explosion ever recorded and experienced by modern man. The cloud of gas and white-hot pumice, fire, and smoke is believed to have risen — been hurled, more probably, blasted as though from a gigantic cannon — as many as twenty-four miles into the air . . .
Krakatoa may have been the most violent modern planetary explosion, but surely the “volcano felt round the world” is the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, throughout the spring of 1815. In The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History, William and Nicholas Klingaman describe the worldwide repercussions, which rippled beyond meteorological upheavals and agricultural disasters to altered migration patterns and religious revivals, and even impacted literary history. “We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake,” wrote Mary Shelley of the extreme storms at Lake Geneva, “observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens . . . ” Driven inside by the unusually bad weather, Shelley and her famous friends entertained themselves with the ghost stories that helped to inspire her Frankenstein.
In Waking the Giant, the volcanologist Bill McGuire discusses the growing body of evidence indicating that, through our recent contributions to climate change, we are collectively creating an environmental monster of our own:
Many geological systems such as extant volcanoes, active faults, and unstable slopes are shown to be often critically poised so that even tiny external perturbations can be capable of triggering reactions in the form, respectively, of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and landslides. In this light, it would be surprising indeed if the melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, and changing weather patterns that will undoubtedly characterize the coming century and beyond, did not go some of the way — at the very least — towards reawakening the slumbering giant beneath our feet.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2bgbSML
Sig Nordal 