Volcano explorers: between fear, myth and cultural fascination | Culture

One night in mid-September 2021, the painter Erika Gallo went to the sink and when she lifted the toilet lid she saw that the water in the bowl was boiling. Previously, some neighbors had talked about underground noises and a strange smell, like rotten eggs, but it was sulfur dioxide. It happened in the volcanic mountain range of Cumbre Vieja, where the Tajogaite volcano emerged shortly after, transforming that part of the island of La Palma into the new ground zero in the constant recomposition of planet Earth. He tells it in the documentary La Palma: the last volcano (César Armas, Desirée Hernández, 2022), available on Movistar.

It happens all the time. Beneath our feet, geography is alive. On Sunday, December 28, Etna, the volcano that rises above the city of Catania, in Sicily, woke up amid explosions, and rivers of lava emerged from one of its craters. On November 15, the Sakurajima eruption in Japan ejected rocks more than a kilometer away. And a few weeks earlier, the lava fountains of the Kilauea volcano reached 500 meters, once again transforming the Hawaiian landscape.

“Volcanoes are the foundation of our history,” writes Tamsin Mather in her book volcanic adventuresrecently published in Spanish by Alianza. For Mather, a professor of Earth Sciences at Oxford, these geological entities make her feel happy, scared, excited, calm, frustrated and fulfilled. Everything at once. “They keep me in the present moment while illuminating the almost unimaginable eons of geological time,” he explains.

It is a movement that does not stop. There are 1,500 potentially active volcanoes on earth, a fact that most forget, but that keeps those who live in areas of high geological activity in suspense. “In the Canary Islands a volcano can emerge from under your feet,” explains Carmen Romero, an expert in volcanological history, in the aforementioned documentary. La Palma: the last volcano.

The fascination with the life of the soil beneath our feet also extends to fiction. Netflix offers the Norwegian miniseries The Palmwhich tells the story of a family on vacation on the Canary Island when the Tajogaite volcano emerged. The reality is that in those black days of 2021, lava and ash devastated entire homes, infrastructure, businesses and crop fields. The noise that could be heard from the bowels of the earth was so deafening that two people talking could not be heard. When it was all over, on December 13, 2021, the magma had shaped a new territory, and the island had reclaimed 47 hectares from the sea.

The amazement at the beauty and danger of the volcano has always accompanied humans. In the West, ancient Greek sailors attributed the Stromboli explosions to the seclusion of Aeolus, guardian of the winds. For the ancient Romans, volcanoes were chimneys from gigantic internal furnaces fueled by sulfur deep inside the Earth. In the Middle Ages they were the entrance to the underworld and their roar was due to the screams of souls in pain (in 1714, Tobies Swinden, parish priest of Cruxton, in Kent, reasoned that the underground is too small for “the infinite number of damned”, and that the most logical place for all those poor creatures was… the sun).

Later, 19th-century scientific minds concluded that Vesuvius’ incessant activity was the best scenario for figuring out what a volcano actually was. In 1841 the first volcanological observatory was built in what is perhaps the best-known volcano in the world, since the year 79 AD. C. an eruption buried the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplonti and Stabia. An inferno of lava, ash and heat of such force that it killed more than 10,000 people and evaporated the brains of some of its victims, according to Professor Luigi Capasso, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Chieti in The world of volcanoes (BBC, 2025), a Movistar Plus.

A hobbit facing a dragon

Like a fiery oracle, the volcano is an inexhaustible source of knowledge. It tells us about the universe -Venus has active geological life-, about the Earth -before being the blue planet it was a place of large scorching expanses of black and orange tones- and about ourselves: according to Mather, one of the mysteries to be unraveled is whether the chemical boiling of volcanoes created the necessary ingredients for the emergence of life.

But the scientific view cannot encompass all the meanings that a volcano radiates. Mather confesses that in 2009, during one of his research projects at the Santiaguito volcano, in Guatemala, he felt like he was in a story by JRR Tolkien, like “a small hobbit talking to an immense dragon, coiled over his shining mountain of treasures.”

Mather’s fascination is shared by many. For example, Frank A. Perret, a brilliant New York engineer – he worked with Edison, founded the company that practically invented elevators – who left everything and decided to become a volcanologist after traveling to Naples in 1903, contemplating Vesuvius and remembering the deep impression that an engraving of the destruction of Pompeii that was in his family’s store in Brooklyn had made on him as a child. Or Dr. RV Matteucci, who studied its great 1906 eruption from the Osservatorio Vesuviano, located just two kilometers from the 450-meter-diameter crater, so subjugated by his work that he said that he and the volcano lived “together in a mysterious and terrible solitude.” Or the couple formed by volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died engulfed in 1991 by the pyroclastic flow of Mount Unzen, in Japan, as the documentary recalls. Fire of Love (Sara Dosa, 2022), available on Disney +.