Undivinable Eruptions and the Automatic Earth Why volcanoes happen, what happens when they do, and what we say it all means.

Wild comes the molten ore

out of the earth

Something keeps pushing volcanoes into my path. Buried rage, perhaps—or the zeitgeist? The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari was, inexplicably, the top show on Netflix Christmas week, the Grinch’s mountain swept aside by sulfurous steam and rushing lava. Promised a chance to look into an “amazing lake of steaming acid,” tourists emerged with burnt skin sloughing off their bodies (if they lived at all). Jaw set, I watched to the end.

The next day, by sheer coincidence, a friend sent a video about a more recent volcanic eruption. Soon YouTube was feeding me one documentary after another. “Guy flys [sic] into an active volcano.” “The Man Who Eats Lava for a Living.” “The Largest Volcano Ever Is About to Crack Open Earth.” Hypnotized, I moved on to disaster movies like Dante’s Peak, with its endless footage of people running blindly, unable to escape the cascade of lava, rock, ash, and toxic gases that was about to burn, steam, crush, or suffocate everybody but Pierce Brosnan.

By then, I was clicking daily on the Kīlauea livecam, which zooms in on a little fountain of orange lava bubbling up through the black basalt. No licking flames, just a gurgling, bright as the sparks in a charred marshmallow—but sinister. Overnight, the lava streaks squiggly, glowing lines through the black basalt until it looks like broken porcelain, the cracks seamed with gold. Smoke drifts across the screen and erases them. But the next morning, the ground is covered with even more of those delicate, random tracings—a web spun by a spider with vertigo. Grace without symmetry. Nature going wherever the hell it wants.

Which might explain my fascination.

Worrying about climate change is the sad new habit of the commonweal. A white noise of guilt and eco-anxiety thrums behind every niggling decision and every imagining of the future. I needed something big and powerful and natural to blast all that away. Molten rock erupting from the core of Earth? That would do nicely.

It feels good to read about destruction that is not our fault.

News reports move from the loss of species to the drying up of rivers, the logging and pulping of the rainforest, the melting of Arctic ice, the end of seasons. Meanwhile, AI is poised to take all the fun jobs, God may or may not be dead, gender has ceased to be a useful category, marriage has been pronounced an impossible institution, celibacy and porn and biotech are replacing old-fashioned intercourse, mass shootings and daily shootings are on the rise, democracy is in peril, and we have depleted the resources that keep us going. When a volcano explodes, the destruction happens a lot faster—and it leaves the earth more fertile, its surface sometimes scattered with diamonds and precious minerals. We just trash the joint.

I realize that massive, uncontrollable eruptions should not be soothing. Still, there is a certain relief in the thought of something wiping out our paltry greed and showoff technology and burying the idiots who are not paying attention. Burying all of us, that is. Reminding us that we are temporary guests—and nature still has the upper hand.

… Able to swerve,

traverse the whole world with a sly mud.

They can tilt planets. Create mountains. Wipe out species. Raise tsunamis 150 feet high. Melt plastic thirteen miles away. Set off sonic waves that circle the globe.

Last year’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption released more energy than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated. Ash, dust, and gas billowed thirty-six miles high, through the atmosphere into the mesosphere. The eruption wiped out a slew of weird microbes scientists had just discovered. It also released four million metric tons of water vapor into the stratosphere, an amount not likely to dissipate soon. Winds from the blast changed the weather in space.

Tonga looks insipid next to the Youngest Toba eruption 74,000 years ago. It ushered in a global winter that lasted at least six years—and may have triggered a cooling that lasted a millennium.

A series of volcanic eruptions darkened the Dark Ages, fogging the world and dimming daylight for months on end. Eruptions in medieval times started the Little Ice Age, casting a chill on both sides of the North Atlantic. The Laki eruption in Iceland in 1783 caused a weirdly warm summer, a dry fog, an icy winter, and a haze that ruined crops across Europe, caused famine in Japan, and sucked water from the Nile.

Like Laki, the Tambora eruption in 1815 deposited 300 million tons of sulfuric acid in the polar ice. But Tambora was far more explosive, and it remains the deadliest eruption in human history. Its ash blanket caused The Year Without a Summer, and entire towns in New England shuttered, their residents moving to the Midwest. Indiana became a state in 1816, Illinois in 1818, Missouri in 1821.

Tambora also paved the way for a cholera epidemic. Contagion often follows a massive eruption, because when ash steals the sun, crops fail. Famine then weakens immune systems and scatters entire populations, spreading plagues. The resulting instability can topple entire civilizations. Scholars have implicated volcanoes in the end of Egypt’s Ptolemaic Kingdom and the collapse of several Chinese dynasties.

Volcanoes can destroy our cities, burn away our flesh, suffocate us with toxic gases, crush us with flying boulders. Most volcanologists keep a safe distance from their subject. But they still emerge rapt.

Doug Wiens, a seismologist who holds the Robert S. Brookings Distinguished Professorship here at Washington University, stayed well back to watch a volcano in Costa Rica throw out what looked like small boulders. Then he realized they were the size of houses. Michael Wysession, also a professor in earth, environmental, and planetary sciences and one of the first geologists to map Earth’s core-mantle boundary, walked on flowing lava in Hawai’i. “You cannot stand on it long before your boots melt,” he says. “I poked a stick into the flow, and the radiant heat—2000 Fahrenheit—singed all the hair off my arm.” Michael Krawczynski, assistant professor in the same department, was on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula not long ago, hiking up a volcano when it began to erupt. Even for him, the experience was eerie: “The sound was at such a low frequency that you felt it rumble more than you heard it.” He shows me video he shot: volcanic lightning slashing through a billowing ash plume.

I think of Katia and Maurice Krafft, the pop-famous husband and wife volcanologist team who were not so careful. For years they photographed, filmed, and measured eruptions, standing closer to the crater’s edge than anyone else dared, their documentation helping geologists understand exactly what was happening. In 1991, the couple was in Japan for the eruption of Mount Unzen. Thick, boiling lava was tunneling channels down the mountain; the Kraffts were in their element. Then, unexpectedly, a pyroclastic flow of rock, ash, and toxic gases changed direction and hurtled straight toward them. Their bodies were found near their rental car, suggesting that unlike a colleague, they did not even try to flee. There was no outrunning it, after all. Pyroclastic flow can reach 430 miles per hour.

This was the death they had been risking for years.

What pushed the couple past caution, beckoning them ever closer? “We were disappointed in humanity,” Maurice once told a reporter. “Since a volcano is greater than man, we felt that was what we need—something beyond human understanding.”

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Let the fluent body

redefine heaven

as something more than human

The pink granite throughout our stately campus is volcanic, Krawczynski informs me, exposed after an eruption in the St. Francois mountains. It sparkles in the sunlight because it was compressed underground. The shiny wet rocks of Johnson’s Shut-ins are rhyolite, also from that ancient volcanic system. After roughly 1.5 billion years, we Missourians are out of the danger zone, so I have tended to think of eruptions mainly in human terms. The sweet elderly neighbor who ran outside in her bathrobe screaming profanity. The guy who throws hard punches to “let off steam.” The CEO who blows his top to keep the underlings alert.

This linkage is an ancient one: many a myth tells of a violent argument or vengeful punishment that created a volcano. Magma chambers are invisible, pressurized cauldrons, much like Freud’s subconscious. Describing a carnival in Weimar Germany, its revelers oblivious to the violence already stirring, composer Alban Berg added a terse summary: “Dancing on a volcano.”

We even personify volcanoes—quite a feat when you set a puny human next to one of these craggy monsters. Still, we say that they “belch” and “spew.” We speak with relief of a volcano that is “sleeping,” and we dread its “waking” as a child dreads the rousing of a mean, drunken parent. We know that the volatile emotions we “bury deep” can erupt without warning.

When the ancients personified volcanoes, it was as gods and goddesses. Volos, the Slavic god of earth, waters, and the underworld. Raumoko, the Maori god of earthquakes, volcanoes, and seasons. Pele, goddess of volcanoes and fire and creator of the Hawai’ian islands. And when Santorini erupted, they saw an island vanish into the sea and dreamed up Atlantis.

Without benefit of science and its sensitive instruments, people could only guess and imagine. But without realizing it, they were weaving the future’s hard science into their stories, selecting traits that foretold the downward slide of a tectonic plate, the depth of magma chambers, the explosive role of water, the prophetic power of earthquakes, the alteration of seasons.

When volcanoes were not gods, they were hellscapes. Etna, Vesuvius, Hekla, Masaya—all were thought to be gates to hell. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, murderers’ souls boiled in a river of blood. Hades was constructed with fire and steam and the stench of sulfur.

The WashU scientists I am learning from have no need of metaphors. They know volcanoes for what they are, a physical reality powerful enough on its own merits. Wiens would rather talk about the active volcano he just discovered in Antarctica beneath a mile of ice. Krawczynski has found exciting evidence that there is more water in magma than we realized.

Wysession, though, hesitates. He is remembering a book of poetry by a former student, Katy Didden (BA 1995), who researched the lava of Iceland and then adapted its persona.

“From her poems, you get this magisterial image of this slow, timeless, brooding spirit god, capricious and somewhat indifferent to all the ephemeral human activity at the surface,” he says slowly. “That resonates.”

Didden’s book is striking, her spare poems drawn from historic source texts and paired with layered images created by a college friend, designer Kevin Tseng. Ore Choir poses the question that has been haunting me: “What does it mean to be human in the face of such ancient forces, especially as climate change unsettles the earth that anchors us?”

The answer is tangled in the stories Didden tells, but I ask her straight up anyway. She answers by talking about deep time, and about redefining what “human” even means, “because the definition we have had is interfering with our right relationship with the world. This project—thinking about these massive forces at this time scale—shifts priorities. It shifts how we relate to each other. It reminds us how fragile it is to be human. It stops us from taking anything for granted.”

Mt St. Helens erupts. (Flickr)

I am pre-species,

the demon-loosing

            Exposure,

Imagining a volcano as either god or hell does make sense; what else could be this creative and destructive at once?

Volcanoes began us. They covered the planet, and their eruptions released water vapor, and their gases mixed with gases from asteroids and icy comets to create our atmosphere. Bacteria grew in the boiling water that bubbled out of deep-sea rift volcanoes, starting a food chain.

Then lava gushed out of what we know as Siberia for 100,000 years, emitting carbon dioxide and methane, igniting coal until the globe grew so warm that between 90 and 96 percent of all species were extinguished. This was called The Great Dying.

We came along much later. Three of our early human ancestors walked through wet volcanic ash 3.6 million years ago, and then the volcano erupted again, sealing their footprints in time to prove they had walked upright, as we do. Later, the ash of Mt. Vesuvius preserved entire bodies, hands raised against the debris of rocks that tumbled down to crush them. Pompeii left us effigies like papier–mâché, the flesh long gone but its shell of calcified ash sturdy enough to cast plaster.

The people who became those statues knew volcanoes could erupt, especially if the gods were angry. But Vesuvius had been asleep for nearly two millennia, its small tremors as benign as muscle twitches. Who would have guessed how much destructive power it still possessed? Pliny the Elder died trying to rescue his friend Rectina. Reconstructing his uncle’s wild last hours, Pliny the Younger wrote that he saw “broad sheets of fire”; a cloud of ash that rose ten miles into the sky before it descended; zags of electricity sending jagged light across the blackened sky.

Sudden, total wreckage is what makes all those volcano movies thrilling. I admit a visceral satisfaction in watching all that stuff crumble, even when I know the movie sets are Styrofoam. Is it the sheer force that thrills me, or the thought of toppling what took so much time and effort to build, as though to acknowledge how feeble all our efforts are?

Mountains seem so majestic, so permanent. Volcanoes remind us that nothing is.

Some volcanoes, in fact, explode so powerfully that they destroy themselves. Yet in the process, they can form lakes, craters, islands, even new mountains. Watching the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai explosion in January 2022, Wiens remembered seeing the island fifteen years ago, when it was “just a rock sticking out of the ocean.” Volcanoes build up and destroy landforms regularly, he says. “A new island will appear, and the king will go out there and plant the flag, and then it will go back under the ocean.” Over fifteen years, Tonga had grown, built up by a series of eruptions, and then it had exploded away much of that extra ground—at the same time giving birth to the newest landmass on the planet, a six-acre circle of ash, steam, and pumice too wobbly, yet, to walk on.

And volcanoes get far fancier with their creations. Krawczynski shows me a big hunk of rock, its sparkling green crystals thick-seamed with gray basalt. “It’s called a xenolith,” he says, “xeno for strange, because rocks like this are not normally seen at the surface. Eruptions bring them up at random.” Squeezed at high pressure deep in Earth’s mantle, old volcanic rocks produce gemstones (this one would polish into peridot) and bright, hard diamonds. Loosed from dull, dark stone, they are touched by sunlight for the first time, and they split it into a rainbow.

“Gold mines tend to be ancient volcanoes,” Krawczynski continues. Steaming hot water dissolves gold, platinum, and other precious metals from rocks that cooled underground. At South Africa’s Bushveld Igneous Complex, where most of the world’s platinum comes from, the magma deposit is five and a half miles thick in some places, yet all the platinum-group metals are packed into a single layer. “It’s like this thick,” Krawczynski adds, holding his arms not very far apart. Less than thirty-five inches of platinum, ribboned through five and a half miles of magma.

In The Lord of the Rings, Mount Doom erupts and burns the earth into the wastelands of Mordor. But in reality, volcanic eruptions create a landscape more like the verdant Shire, the soil rich with nitrogen and phosphorus from the ash.

Diamonds, charred bodies, species wiped out, ground made fertile—the contradictions are tough to reconcile.

Lava meets water. (Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

Earth unseals

its elemental fire

Outside in our bare winter garden, the ground spongy with snowmelt, I pick up a thin slab of rock and slide it under another flagstone, wedging it into the mud, which oozes up around it. I am trying to imagine plates in Earth’s crust colliding, one sliding beneath the other, jutting down into the superheated mantle. There, the seawater trapped in the rock will be sprung free, and it will move up into the overlying wedge, melting the mantle rock until it is molten and buoyant. This is one way to make a volcano erupt.

Next, I pull the flagstones apart and watch a mucky puddle—my tiny sea of magma—form between them. This is a rift volcano, created underwater when the plates beneath the sea drift apart and plumes of magma bubble up through the opening between them.

The third possible cause is a hotspot: a mushroom-shaped plume of solid, superheated rock that slowly pushes its way to the surface, moving at about the rate your fingernails grow. When the plume nears the surface, parts of the rock melt into magma, which blindly seeks cracks and craters where it can break through the crust and spill over. (Once magma comes above ground, we call it lava.)

The most active hotspots lie beneath Hawai’i, Iceland, Réunion, Galápagos, and Yellowstone National Park. That serene basin, softened by grasses and geothermal springs, was formed by many volcanic eruptions, including two huge ones 1.3 and 2.1 million years ago, and shaped by an immense explosion 640,000 years ago.

Back then, the big explosions were coming every 600,000 to 800,000 years. Will Yellowstone blow again anytime soon?

“We’re not ‘overdue’; statistics don’t work that way,” Wysession assures me. “It’s just random. Volcanoes have a complex relationship with a deep underground magma system. Often magma flows up into the chambers and then goes back down,” a giant’s chest rising and falling as he snoozes. “Yellowstone was going up, and many people said, ‘This is the next supervolcano!’ And then it stopped, and it’s been going down.”

This may be the first time I have thought seriously, as an adult, about what happens miles beneath my feet, where the earth is not solid at all, but cracked and shifting. Cool, rocky, and thin, Earth’s crust covers the mantle’s hot but hard top layer. Tightly sandwiched together, these two layers are about sixty miles thick. They form a dozen and a half major tectonic plates that are so rigid, we forget we are floating. The plates collide and pull apart like uncertain lovers, moving above a layer that is three times as thick and hot enough to turn parts of the rock fluid. This is the fascination of Earth: how layers as hard as granite manage, in deep time, to be malleable.

Go deeper, and the temperature just keeps rising. Finally, you reach the center of the planet, its outer core of liquid iron cushioning an inner core of solid iron. At parts of this core, the temperature soars above 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even iron would vaporize, were it not under such high pressure.

All that worry about hell, and it has bubbled beneath us all along.

Mt St. Helens Eruption, Gifford Pinchot National Forest. (Original public domain image from Flickr)

Lava IS the dragon.

            I clot the sky with gold.

For their Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne’s heroes descend into the crater of Snæfellsjökull. He should have chosen Thrihnukagigur. There, when magma rose up more than four thousand years ago, it sank back into a rift in the earth. Minerals dye the vast cavern’s walls ruby red, emerald green, sapphire blue, and topaz, creating a cathedral of brilliant color deep beneath the ice.

Lava’s fire mixes with ice at Alaska’s Great Sitkin volcano, blowing bubbles that cool instantly when they hit the frosty air. This forms delicate spheres of obsidian: thin shiny black glass baubles that soon shatter in the rough weather.

At the Kelimuto volcano in Indonesia has three crater lakes, each a different color. Tiwu Ata Bupu, the Lake of Old People, is most often a deep blue, and the other two lakes (which receive the souls of the young and the wicked) are red and green.

New Mexico’s Bandera volcano ice cave is vivid green because Arctic algae can thrive in its steady coolness, sucking in just enough sunlight from the narrow rays that shine down the lava tube.

The opposite climate—but a similar hope—takes hold in Ethiopia, where chemicals from the Dallol volcano turn its skirt of ponds and pools to neon green, milky white, and luminous orange. The air stinks of sulfur, rust, and chlorine, and the water can be extremely hot, salty, and acidic, making it more hostile to life than anywhere else on the planet. Yet fatty acids and bacteria cells have been found here. Habitats this extreme “are probably like those that first gave rise to life,” Robin George Andrews points out in Super Volcanoes.

“Volcanoes showcase the extreme resilience of life that is far from human,” he writes. “They sketch out the ways worlds can end, and the ways they can’t.”

Reading on, I succumb to his description of an undersea eruption in Samoa: “Huge bubbles of carbon dioxide wobble up from cracks of flame; to the right, what looks like a series of firecrackers is set ablaze before a rock seems to unzip…. Showers of fresh lava, quenching quickly, rain onto the seafloor as beads of glass.” I long to see that soft tumble of glass. Or the spectacle of volcanic lightning. Or the fire whirls scientists nicknamed lavandoes: corkscrews of blazing lava that look like you twisted a lion tamer’s rings of fire and spun them across the sky.

The more beautiful a landscape, geologists say, the more dynamic the processes that created it.

All verbs out-heaven death.

I move to move.

When Dr. Who lands in Pompeii the day before Vesuvius will blow, he is told of an earlier quake and stage-whispers to his assistant, “Why didn’t they move?”

My question, too. There are fifteen hundred potentially active volcanoes around the world, and more than half a million people live within the lava’s reach. I am not sure I could stay sane.

In Naples, people manage by gathering thrice a year in the cathedral to watch a sealed glass ampoule of their patron saint’s blood spontaneously liquefy—ostensible protection against eruptions of Vesuvius, Campi Flegri, and Ischia. Which beggars belief, but how else do you live surrounded by three volcanoes? Shrug it off, splash some Pompeii hot sauce on your wings, and order lava cake for dessert?

In The Coiled Serpent of Naples, Marius Kociejowski “reaches his own conclusions about how to live next to a volcano,” writes a reviewer, “via the right philosophy and a little prestidigitation.” Interviewing a sheepskin drummer, Kociejowski is saddened that the man’s drab apartment has only a single window. Then he realizes that the view is of Mt. Vesuvius, and “if it decides to erupt, all one need do is draw the curtain.”

Denial in its purest form.

“We are used to the volcano, it is like our neighbor,” says a woman who lives near Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Kagoshima City, people sweep the ash of Sakurojima from their cars and sidewalks every day, carry umbrellas to keep it out of their hair, and send kids to school in helmets to protect them from falling pumice.

People live where their families have lived for generations. Or where they can farm mineral-rich soil with huge harvests. Or where volcano tourism brings jobs. For some, the volcano is a spiritual presence; for others, a chance to mine gold, silver, diamonds, copper, or zinc, or to pull geothermal energy from below the ground.

“Human beings have always been attracted to living near resources,” Wysession remarks. “But resources are always near active geological areas. So we are always going to the areas that are most prone to being destroyed.”

Which seems so…us. Hungry, greedy, foolhardy. Nowadays, at least we can predict an eruption and evacuate. When Katy Didden lived in Seattle—in the shadow, as they say, of Mt. Rainier—she knew there would be enough warning to reach safety. Still, the volcano stayed in the back of her mind: all that raw potential energy, temporarily locked inside a serene, static mountain, could change the world in less than a day. The volcano became her memento mori, a reminder that humans live by their clocks, but the planet exists in deep time.

Mount Taranaki, a dormant stratovolcano in the Taranaki region on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. (Shutterstock)

Will you          lean on each other

when I             wreck the seasons?

Here I was, trying to avoid the Anthropocene, and I stumbled into a morally neutral phenomenon that has been changing the climate for eons. But when laypeople mutter that volcanoes do more to alter the climate than we do, the U.S. Geological Survey sets them straight. Volcanoes generate about two hundred million tons of carbon dioxide a year. We generate twenty-four billion tons.

Mount St. Helens vented ten million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in only nine hours. It takes us only two and a half hours to do the same—and we release it continuously, not once in a decade.

I hear this, tense, then shrug. One more news flash in the daily stream of losses, degradation, ominous shifts already taking place. It might be easier to live beneath a volcano, waiting for a singular eruption that might never come.

Or maybe, if it did come, it could save us, its ash and sulfate opening a giant parasol? A lovely thought; it would work in a musical. But in deep time’s calendar, the cooling is brief, swiftly countered by the warming effects of released carbon dioxide and water vapor. Not to mention all that we do to the atmosphere.

“There were times we had snowball Earth, with most of its surface covered in ice,” Wysession says, “and we got out of that because volcanoes were putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and warming it up. Now we have this manmade input outcompeting the volcanoes.”

Outcompeting, or teaming up with them. Wiens suspects that volcanoes beneath Antarctica are melting the ice from below while our emissions melt it from above. Climate is now ridiculously complicated, laced with variables that interact in unpredictable ways. Water vapor from Tonga could change the jet stream. Further warming will change how volcanic eruptions interact with the atmosphere, creating new feedback loops we have yet to fathom. Wildfires are changing the atmosphere, too….

And if global warming causes more volcanic activity?

“Times when Earth was unusually warm often correlate with times of intense volcanic activity,” Wysession informs me. Warming also increases heavy rainfall and glacial melt, and researchers now warn that this could lead to even more eruptions. Glaciers weigh down Earth’s crust, keeping magma below the surface. When the ice melts, that pressure vanishes, allowing the magma to bubble up. Meanwhile, heavy rains can destabilize slopes and lava domes, weaken rock to the point of collapse, and cause cracks for magma to spurt through.

Rainfall-triggered eruptions are often violently explosive. A NASA-funded study published in Nature suggests that extreme rainfall was what set Kīlauea off in 2018. That four-month eruption destroyed more than seven hundred homes, loosed tens of thousands of earthquakes at the summit, collapsed the caldera, created new shorelines, raised elevations, and added almost nine hundred acres of land to the island of Hawai’i.

“Nature,” says Wysession, looking pleased, “still has a few tricks.”

Inside time,

The future rises—

Mocking a utopian tract, Thoreau once wrote a little ad copy, promising that humans would “marshal the clouds and restrain the tempests…disembowel the volcano, and extract its poisons.” He was being sarcastic. But today, engineers are scheming ways to drill into a magma chamber and let off the pressure, and communities have tried using explosives, hoses, and physical barriers to divert the lava flow.

In other cultures, people would never dream of controlling a volcano. Indonesians remind one another that volcanoes do not spew without reason; they bring vengeance and justice to the world. The Maasai see Ol Doinyo Lengai as the giver of all good things. Hawai’ians watched red lava pour from a long slit in the earth and decided that Pele must be menstruating. How unnatural, then, to try to stop her or divert her flow.

Advanced economies have a hard time accepting that anything lies outside their control. Which may be why so many are nervous about a supervolcano erupting.

“There’s nothing we can do to prevent them or prepare for them,” Wysession says bluntly. “We have been extremely fortunate. Eventually, it’s going to happen. Will it destroy civilization? No. Will it kill off billions of people? Yes.”

In an essay about far more than “Fear of Mountain Lions,” Craig Childs writes, “You should be afraid of mountain lions, just not all the time.” Watch, he counsels, and stay vigilant. “It’s called being aware, and it can feel like fear”—but need not be. “Fear leans into aversion, anxiety, and dread. The trick with mountain lions is to lean the other way, more toward the awe.”

Awe comes easy with a volcano, its force majestic, its history unfolding in time so deep it dizzies you. Volcanoes hand us superlatives, and we compare obsessively, in part because measuring calms us. The eruption of Ontong-Java Plateau was the largest in the last 200 million years. Mount St. Helens triggered the biggest landslide ever recorded. Tambora was the deadliest eruption, Krakatoa the loudest, Yasur the longest, ongoing since at least 1774. Tonga caused the highest eruption column ever documented, and its 400,000 lightning events broke all records. Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest lake in the country, Mauna Loa the biggest active volcano in the world and the tallest mountain, measured from the seafloor to its peak.

This sort of terror is sublime, washed free of human guilt—and human ego.

A New York Times reporter asked the Potawatomi scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, “You write about nature as capable of showing us love. If that’s true, doesn’t it also have to be capable of showing us the opposite?”

She must have smiled to herself. “The answer that comes to mind,” she replied, “is that it’s not all about us.”

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.

Fragments of poetry at the section breaks are from Ore Choir by Katy Didden (A&S XX), with illustrations by Kevin Tseng (BA biology 1995, BFA 1996), published by Tupelo Press.