Island on Fire

The extraordinary story of Laki, the forgotten volcano that turned eighteenth-century Europe dark

First published in 2014 by

Profile Books, 3A Exmouth House

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Island on Fire © 2014 by Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

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eISBN 978 184765 8418

Island on Fire

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe

ALEXANDRA WITZE is a correspondent for Nature.

JEFF KANIPE is the author of Chasing Hubble’s Shadows and The Cosmic Connection: How Astronomical Events Impact Life on Earth.

Contents

Preface: Heimaey, 1973

1. Laki Erupts: June 1783

2. Land of Ice and Fire: The volcanoes of Iceland

3. Supervolcanoes: The world’s hotspots

4. Fire, Famine and Death: The poisoning of Iceland

5. Horrible Phenomena: Europe’s ‘year of wonders’

6. The Big Chill: Laki’s global fallout

7. Laki Today: Life in the mountain’s shadow

8. Death by Volcano: The many ways eruptions can kill

9. The Next Big Bang: How worried should we be?

Epilogue: Return to Heimaey

Endnotes

Photo credits

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE

Heimaey, 1973

AT LEAST EVERYONE WAS AT HOME, snug in their beds, when the world began to end.

It was late January, 1973, and the harsh Icelandic winter had been even rougher than usual on Heimaey, an island off the country’s southern coast. On a normal night, Heimaey’s fishermen would be out plying the rich waters of the North Atlantic for cod, haddock and herring. But on this night, high winds and stormy seas had kept the crews off their boats. Instead, they hunkered down in the trim little clapboard houses that sprawled above the island’s spectacular black-cliffed harbour. So when the earth ripped open on 23 January, nearly all of Heimaey’s 5,300 residents were there to see it.

It began just before 2 a.m., in a field on the island’s eastern side. Only 200 metres from a serene little hamlet called Kirkjubær, or Church Farm, a line of flame spouted from the ground. It looked like a fire in dry grass, but of course it wasn’t: it was the Earth’s crust coming apart, spewing fountains of lava into the air. Within minutes the spouts of fire were 150 metres high. Within hours the rift was 1.5 kilometres long, almost splitting the island in two.

Had the eruption begun just a few hundred metres to the west, the volcano might have incinerated islanders as they slept. As it was, most of them found out about it when neighbours or police started pounding on their doors. Dazed, they staggered outside and stared at the fiery jets as close as the end of their street. Then they turned their backs, went inside and started packing.

In those first confused hours, no one knew what might happen to Heimaey. Would the eruption ignite the oil tanks down by the harbour? Would the entire town be engulfed by lava? Families grabbed what they could and made their way to the waterfront. One musician reportedly left wearing his pyjamas, clutching a frozen leg of lamb. Farmers at Church Farm shot their cows to spare their suffering, then fled.

Iceland’s civil patrol sprang into action. They had practiced for just such an emergency, and the evacuation went swiftly and smoothly. Between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. nearly all of the island’s residents left Heimaey – via the fishing fleet that fortuitously had been left in the harbour, or via planes sent from Reykjavík. Those who left knew they might never return. Those who stayed knew they faced a battle like nothing before.

Seen in retrospect, it’s not surprising that the eruption happened where and when it did. Heimaey is the biggest in a chain known as the Vestmannaeyjar or Westman Islands, named after the Celtic ‘west men’ who fled here in the ninth century after murdering one of Iceland’s first permanent settlers. Volcanism is a way of life here; the islands are the tips of mostly dormant volcanoes poking above the waves.

But not entirely dormant. In November 1963, the Westman Islands increased by one, when new land rose above the sea southwest of Heimaey. This was Surtsey, built up from the ocean bottom by successive eruptions. The first people to spot the plume of smoke, from a nearby fishing vessel, thought it must be a ship on fire. But soon a fresh island appeared above the water, and eruptions built it up sporadically over the next three and a half years. Surtsey soon became a natural laboratory for the study of how plants and animals colonize a barren, newborn terrain.

The Heimaey eruption, a decade after Surtsey, would come to occupy a special place in the annals of volcanology. After all, it’s not every day that the Earth’s crust is blown apart directly beneath a town, forcing the evacuation of nearly the entire population. More significantly, the islanders who stayed decided to fight back. The idea of battling a volcano may sound crazy, but humans have tried controlling the flow of lava before. In 1942, the U.S. military dropped bombs at strategic spots along a river of molten rock that was threatening Hilo, Hawaii, hoping to divert it away from the city. (The eruption stopped at around the time of the bombing, so although Hilo was saved the military couldn’t take credit for it.) In Italy, over the years, authorities have also built earthwork barriers to try to divert Mount Etna’s lava from the surrounding villages. But what happened on Heimaey dwarfed anything ever tried in Hawaii or Italy. Icelanders knew they would have to fight the volcano or abandon the island altogether. And that would have meant giving up the country’s most productive, and most lucrative, fishing port.

To those who stayed on Heimaey after the evacuation, it became clear within days that something would have to be done. A huge cinder cone had already risen 150 metres above Church Farm. The volcano was spewing huge amounts of black ash and rock fragments, which buried half the town. Photographs from the time look like stills from a disaster film: men stand on rooftops, desperately shovelling the ash before it can accumulate enough weight to crush the buildings. Groups of people are silhouetted in front of burning houses and geysers of fire. Flames consume a hotel; black ash covers everything except the roof of a house. (Islanders saved dozens of homes by barricading windows and doorways with galvanized steel, to keep out flaming debris.)

Meanwhile, the half of Heimaey not smothered by ash was rapidly being covered by lava. More alarming still, the lava was heading directly for Heimaey’s harbour. If it got there, it would cool and solidify into a huge natural dam, blocking the port. If that happened, Heimaey might as well shut down entirely, for without the fishing harbour the island was nothing.

That’s when Thorbjörn Sigurgeirsson, an Icelandic physicist who had trained with Niels Bohr, came up with a plan for stopping the lava. His tools would be not bombs but water – seawater sprayed on the advancing flow to cool and slow its movement. Maybe, Thorbjörn said, workers could even redirect the lava to less crucial areas, away from the harbour.

Fifteen days after the eruption had started, the battle for Heimaey began in earnest. Bulldozers piled ash and dirt near the northwest margin of the lava flow, to create protective ramparts and divert it from town. Firemen positioned water pipes along the ramparts and sprayed seawater onto the creeping mass. And to almost everyone’s surprise, the cooling plan seemed to work. The lava, chilled and thickened, went mostly where the firemen wanted it to go.

This struggle, however, could do nothing to staunch the flow at its source, and the eruption continued unabated. Some of the lava broke away and ran directly into the sea, dangerously close to the harbour entrance. Thorbjörn’s team now enlisted two boats to pump more seawater onto the lava, but one of those boats, the Sandey, had been built for dredging sand, and its high-volume pipes were so large that a bulldozer would be required to position them across the flow. An intrepid driver duly did what was necessary. This might have been the first time anyone had ever driven heavy earth-moving equipment across flowing lava.

By mid-March, Heimaey looked like a battle zone: a network of pipes and hoses sprawled across the black mountainside, all the way down to the harbour. Wherever the water poured onto the lava it generated huge clouds of steam, so workers had to crawl atop a shifting mass of incandescent lava, feeling their way through a dense and hot fog. One team quickly got the nickname of ‘the suicide squad’. (Amazingly, the only person who died in the eruption was not a lava worker but someone asphyxiated by volcanic gases in a poorly ventilated basement.)

Soon, by default, the Heimaey warriors became the world’s experts on cooling lava. They learned that huge amounts of water were needed to stop the inexorable flow. The U.S. government sent more than 30 additional industrial-sized pumps, which let workers spray about 100 metres higher than before. In the meantime, Thorbjörn’s team discovered that although plastic pipes would melt if empty, those filled with flowing water stayed cool enough to be laid intact across the lava surface. Workers hauled new pipes out onto the flow, where the plastic shifted safely with the flowing lava rather than fracturing as metal pipes had done.

At the peak of the lava cooling, some 75 men worked on the project. Most worked 13 days in a row, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and then took two days off. Supervisors worked one week in Heimaey, then had one week off on the mainland. Occasionally, the spraying did more harm than good. Several times, a chunk of lava broke from the water-cooled dam and started drifting downstream. The biggest of these chunks, dubbed Flakkarinn or ‘The Wanderer’, weighed some 2 million tonnes. Thorbjörn’s team figured out where Flakkarinn was heading and focused their spraying there. When the Wanderer smashed into the cooled lava wall, the errant mass broke apart.

By Easter week, lava had stopped flowing westward toward town, and on Easter day it moved safely eastward toward the sea – from then on, this was the only direction it ever went. By the time Heimaey’s eruption was over, five months and five days after it began, the volcano warriors had pumped more than 6 million cubic metres of seawater, and the flow had stopped less than 100 metres from the quayside. Most of the lava was diverted to the north and east, where it spread out and added nearly 20 per cent to the island’s area. Still, more than 400 homes were destroyed, and one-third of the town obliterated.

Drive across Heimaey today, and you can see how dramatically the island was reshaped by the 1973 eruption. Instead of one cinder cone dominating the landscape above town, there are two. The new one, Eldfell or ‘Fire Mountain’, has already oxidized to a rusty brown colour; soon grasses will cover it just like the older peak, Helgafell. Look down toward the harbour and you can see fresh black lava piled up against the back yards of houses. On the east side of town, residents have kept one reminder: a street buried in cinder ash, where you can peer into the remains of buildings destroyed during the eruption. Windows gape open, blown out by volcanic fire. Roofs crumple under the weight of black ash. Pompeii of the North, they call it.

Closer to the harbour, though, you can drive across roads freshly cut into the new lava and even visit a ‘lava garden’ with flowers, statues, pinwheels and other sun-bleached, wind-battered decorations. At the harbour itself you can stand on the edge of the 1973 lava flow and watch ships pass directly in front of you, through the narrow channel that still provisions Heimaey’s harbour. On the cliffs opposite, puffins call to one another.

Heimaey has eked some good things out of the eruption. Ash was used to add a second runway at the island’s airport and as landfill for new homes. The harbour is also easier for ships to manoeuvre into now, since it has a natural breakwater formed by a shallow underwater flow near its entrance. The high cone of Eldfell shelters the town from the strong winds that used to rake it. And for nearly a decade after the eruption, Heimaey residents plugged directly into the geothermal heat fuelling the volcano and used its energy to light their homes.

In the end, Heimaey represents the quintessential struggle between humans and nature, between engineering know-how and natural disaster. It shows Icelanders at their very best, rallying to save their homes and livelihoods from almost certain destruction. But our story is about another confrontation with lava, one with a very different outcome. It begins nearly two centuries earlier, to the north and east of the Westman Islands.

We begin in the heart of Iceland’s volcanic fire, and with one extraordinary man who lived there.