"The Control of Nature"

[fiefoe]

Now for something cooler, we get Icelandic volcanoes.

• a generally slow and viscous, magisterial lava—dark-shelled by day and a craquelure of red and black at night—began to move not only toward sections of the town but, more important, toward the entrance to the harbor.
• It was astonishing to see what an essentially liquid body of rock would carry on its surface. As lava moves, under the air, it develops a skin of glass that is broken and rebroken by the motion of the liquid below,
• so that it clinks and tinkles, and crackles like a campfire, which, in a fantastic sense, it resembles.
• If you rubbed away as little as a third of an inch, the ground was so hot you had to pull back your hand. The ash was such an effective insulator—not to mention the layers of solidified basalt underneath it—that the interior of the 1973 flow was still molten.
• It was soon apparent that bulldozers were required on the lava—to flatten the apalhraun (the jagged surface glass, known elsewhere in the world by the Hawaiian word “aa”),
• When the fog temporarily cleared, it was a straight shot of twenty miles across open water and up coastal slopes to the white walls of Eyjafjallajokull—at five thousand feet, a frozen cloud. A tenth of Iceland is capped with ice.
• The helmets were for protection against falling ash and, in proximity to the crater, huge volcanic bombs. The ash was typically about as large as bits of pea gravel.
• The bombs were ejections of molten lava that flew high into the air, became spherical, and, with contained gases, sometimes exploded like fireworks. In their interiors, bombs were generally molten. After they landed and broke, red-hot liquid poured out. Bombs that landed as much as two-thirds of a mile from the crater might weigh as much as sixty pounds. Bombs that carried half that distance could weigh a third of a ton.
• de rerum natura, almost every scientist of any description sooner or later turns into a volcanologist.
• Thorbjorn was later able to calculate that one cubic metre of water would change seven-tenths of a cubic metre of lava from incandescent flow to hard rock;
• began as the effluent of a few fire hoses would eventually amount to six million tons of water pumped on the !ava—the equivalent of turning Niagara Falls onto the island for half an hour.
• A small bulldozer was hoisted to the top of the hospital, where it pushed away tephra five feet deep.
• (Eventually, some of the ash-covered houses filled with steam and were cooked until their frames came loose like the bones of stewing chickens.
• When real snow fell, it made a black-and-white, silvery, surrealist world.
• On the thirteenth day, a fresh flow moved on a vector toward the south harbor wall—the breakwater nearer the volcano. Lava crept along the shoreline, its progress written in clouds of steam accompanied by flashes of lightning.
• They were like touches of pallesthesia, nothing more: little shivers in the bones.
• The baleful Katla is covered with ice. It lies under Myrdalslokulla glacier field of two hundred and seventy square miles.
• It was later determined by analysis of seismograms that the magma had moved forty thousand feet upward in the earth in less than a day.
• held her hand as Home of the Gods, in a ruddy glare, passed between the tips of the breakwaters and under the sheer cliffs of the north side of the harbor. To reach the open ocean, the boat had to cross the fissure, and it did so in a chaos of sound and steam. Dora looked down into the water. She saw red lava there.
• After seventeen or eighteen centuries, archeologists might arrive to scrape away indurated ash or mud, but digs do not happen in basalt.
• He swam about six hours—at least five times as long as anyone ever has in water that cold. When he reached Heimaey, he found himself in a hostile wave-battered niche in the new lava, up against a cliff. His purchase there being hopeless, he went back into the sea. He swam about half a mile south and, this time, climbed out on a broad flow of apalhraun, the sharpest and roughest texture of volcanic glass. Barefoot, he crossed it, and lost a good deal of blood.
• Magnus said instantly, “We must defend the harbor. There is no use of any town if we don’t have a harbor.”
• There was a long-standing omen in Vestmannaeyjar. One day, the son of a bishop would come to the island as a minister. Following his arrival, an eruption would take place.
• a deadly emission of carbon dioxide, they would serve as monitors in themselves. The gas came over the lip of the crater, flowed downhill, and went through the town like a river. When humidity was high, the river was visible, with its eddies of blue haze. It suffocated cats. It stalled cars. People’s heads were generally above it, but knees and elbows ached,
• Ordinarily, it worked in shallow water around Reykjavik, using a powerful pumping system to suck up seashells for use as construction material. (There is no limestone in Iceland.
• LIKE AN ICEBERG that had calved off a glacier, the great bulk of the north side of the volcano remained afloat in a molten sea. It was a mountain in itself, and, moreover, it moved. It was landscape on the loose, an incongruous itinerant alp,
• Something close to thirty million gallons of seawater was poured into that one chosen area to prepare it to repel Flakkarinn. As test drillings eventually substantiated, the volume of basalt that was solidified for this purpose was about the size of Yankee Stadium.
• There were islanders on the mainland who flew to Heimaey after learning that their property was certain to be destroyed. Reverentially, they swept out and otherwise brightened the appearance of their homes, preparing them for the lava.
• Mauna Loa has coated and recoated itself so often that it has never had time to erode.
• The long mountain is fifty miles long. Viewed from the edge of the ocean, it is an astonishing trompe-l’oeil, because it is so smoothly constructed that it appears in two dimensions and presents a deceptive depth of field. It looks like a low friendly hill,
• As is, it’s just a massive shield, composed of chilled magma, looking the way the Alps would look if a dentist could repair them.
• At Keflavik, the jagged aa has a green blush of moss; at Keahole, the apalhraun is black, without a hint of life.
• known as shelly pahoehoe (“pah-hoy-hoy”). Very different from jagged aa, pahoehoe is the other general texture of newly solidified lava. They are the results of varying gas content and viscosity, and their appearance is consistent wherever lava flows. In a magnified way, the version we were walking on might have been peanut brittle.
• We came to a skylight and inched toward it. Steam swirled above it but did not close off the view—of the racing orange currents of an incandescent river. By an order of magnitude, this was the most arresting sight I had ever seen in nature. The time spent gazing into it could not be measured.
• In the Archean Eon, before there was land, soft-shelled continents are thought to have slid about as scums, experiencing comparable tectonics. This is what was going on in the lava lake.
• The heat was so intense you could lean on it.
• I dipped the hammer into the stream, and discovered that the liquid lava had the elastic texture of egg-white chocolate mousse.
• While the Pacific lithosphere slides overhead, the Hawaiian heat source stays where it is, making islands.
• Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, from seafloor to summit, are by far the highest mountains on earth. Their base is a hundred miles wide,
• The Mid-Atlantic Ridge has drifted over the Icelandic thermal plume. Eastern Iceland is moving east with Europe. Western Iceland is moving west with North America.
• In two places, bays with rocky beaches have indented this new coastline. One is called Baetur the Beach of the Insurance Claim. The other is Vidlagafjara the Beach of the Catastrophe Fund.
• The puffin is among the nation’s emblematic birds. With its bright-white chest, its orange webbed feet, and its big orange scimitar bill, it could be an iced toucan.