From Pompeii to the present, Tamsin Mather’s Adventures in Volcanoland is a fiery exploration of Earth’s most explosive power
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In 1987, on a family holiday to the Amalfi coast at the age of 10, Tamsin Mather had her first encounter with a volcano. The majestic peak of Mount Vesuvius did not, she admits, leave the lasting impression you might have expected, given that Mathers has dedicated much of her life to researching volcanoes. A visit to Pompeii and the death casts of Vesuvius’ victims, earlier that same week, had left a much more vivid mark on her memory. Today, she wonders whether the agonising deaths of Pompeii could have been avoided with modern knowledge and instrumentation. ‘As volcanologists,’ writes Mather, ‘we like to hope so.’ However, as we learn in Adventures in Volcanoland, things aren’t quite that simple.
In Mather’s new book, we take a deep dive into the science of volcanology, via historic accounts of devastating eruptions – recorded in helpful detail by the likes of Roman senator Pliny the Younger – and centuries of scientific discoveries, mistakes and questions we have yet to answer. Mather is a volcanologist at the University of Oxford, where her research focuses on how volcanic eruptions have and continue to affect planetary-scale change. As such, Adventures in Volcanoland includes chapters on how volcanoes form, the different types of eruptions and what can be learned from volcanic gases.
Mather takes us to fieldwork sites on volcanoes such as Masaya in Nicaragua, Campi Flegrei in Italy and Kilauea in Hawaii, where tales of misadventures – the struggle to boil a pan of rice or the acidic gases that eat a hole through the seat of a colleague’s trousers – help illuminate the science behind volcanoes. But Adventures in Volcanoland is as much a story of our own complex relationship with volcanoes as it is a scientific study. After all, ‘volcanism,’ Mather writes, ‘has been fundamental to shaping this beautiful world we call home.’
Despite our achievements, our research on volcanoes cannot always avert the loss of lives or livelihoods, but it can help us to evaluate our own increasingly damaging influence on Earth. It’s sheer luck that our planet has evolved along the tight parameters that make life possible and, as Mather says, we don’t have to look too far into our own solar system to see how things might have played out differently.
