Is this technically a Travel Library? As far as I’m concerned, it is. It’s all about volcanoes – volcanoes around the planet and around the solar system and as there are no volcanoes in the vicinity of my house, and as I associate volcanoes with going to Iceland, this fits the bill.
I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on this book in paperback – it’s called Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond* by Dr Robin George Andrews and I discovered it because I follow him on Twitter. He knows volcanoes. He knows geology. He’s a doctor of volcanology who realised he’d rather spend his career raving to other people about volcanoes as a science journalist than doing academic research, so whenever there’s volcanic activity, he’s straight on Twitter educating people about what’s really going on. I enjoy what he has to say and I had faith that he could write a readable science non-fiction book about volcanoes. I mean, someone whose Twitter name is @squigglyvolcano probably isn’t going to be dry and tedious, are they?
*affiliate link to bookshop.org
It’s only when I started to write this post that I realised it’s called “Super Volcanoes”, not “Supervolcanoes”. He spends a chunk of the second chapter explaining that, really, the term “supervolcano” is mostly a bit of media scaremongering meant to make us feel like we’re sitting on a cataclysmic time bomb and all it means is that a volcano has ever produced an eruption that measures 8 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. He feels that volcanoes are treated like the bad guys, like megalomaniac Bond villains just waiting and chuckling evilly before trying to blow up the world and that they’re actually really interesting and really tied to life on Earth and the development of civilisation and that most of them mind their own business. We only hear about them when they either do something particularly spectacular or they do something spectacular close to humans. The point of the title is that volcanoes are super, not that we should be terrified of an apocalyptic world-ending eruption.
There are eight chapters. The first three are on specific volcanoes, the fourth is about underwater volcanoes and then, to my surprise, the last four chapters take us off into the solar system, which I guess is the “and the world beyond” part of the subtitle. So, chapter five is the Moon, six is Mars, seven is Venus and it only takes the vaguest interest in space volcanoes to correctly guess that the last chapter will be about Io, Jupiter’s third-largest moon. I flew through several chapters – Hawaii introduced the concept of volcanoes and all the things you’ll need to know as you work through the book. Yellowstone is about supervolcanoes and why we shouldn’t be trembling in our shoes at the thought of them – in short, just because Yellowstone has had VEI8 eruptions before, the highest on our current Volcano Explosivity Index scale, there’s no real reason why it should ever have another. I flew through Ol Doinyo Lengai as well – it’s a volcano in Tanzania that erupts “cold” lava, the only known one in the entire universe. I say “cold” because 600°C is by no means cold but it’s cold compared to traditional basalt-based lava, which is somewhere between 1200° and 2000°. I have a lovely coffee table book full of volcano photos and those ones are interesting, because the eruption photos aren’t in shades of reds, oranges and yellows. Its lava is made up of sodium and carbonate minerals. It’s very thin and runny and it’s black and silver by day – not hot enough to reach the reds, oranges, yellow and whites of silicate lavas – and a faint weird reddish glow by night.
Chapter four is submarine volcanoes, which got me to put down the book and grab my phone to find the video he talks about of an underwater eruption. Underwater volcanoes erupt all the time but because there are so many of them and they’re all over the planet, we rarely seem to have a camera hovering nearby to catch them in the act, so when Andrews mentioned that there’s video of one, I had to go and find it. Here, let me save you looking for it:
Isn’t that great? That’s fire and smoke deep under the ocean!
In the case of the Moon and Mars chapters, it’s more about looking at the evidence of a volcanic past, the forming of the planetary body and the potential future of Earth. I really enjoyed the Mars chapters. I knew Mars had volcanoes, I knew of Olympus Mons and I knew it’s the biggest volcano in the solar system. I didn’t know it has three neighbouring volcanoes that dwarf anything we had on Earth and I definitely didn’t know that Mars has such a huge volcanic region that’s produced so much lava it’s overbalanced the entire planet. And speaking of Olympus Mons, although it’s the tallest volcano in the solar system, it’s a shield volcano and its slopes are so shallow and the volcano is so big that 1) you’d hardly notice you were walking uphill if you climbed it 2) you wouldn’t know you were at the top because you wouldn’t be able to see the view because the volcano fills the entire horizon 3) it’s so big that there’s nowhere you’d be able to stand on Mars where you’d actually be able to see it – does that make sense?
Venus has a fun Easter egg – there’s a lot of talk about how hot Venus is, and why it’s hot and what could have led it to become hot; how its evolution differs from Earth’s, even though they’re kind of twin planets, and theorises about it still being volcanically active – but we need to look more closely at it, which is why Venus nerds are excited that NASA is sending two Venus missions in the next two years. That triggered a little memory in the corner of my brain. Haven’t we found evidence of active, current, volcanicity somewhere in the solar system fairly recently? Like, since this book has been published? So off I went to Dr Robin’s Twitter, because if anyone will have talked about it, he will. I scrolled back through his media, searching for the pictures I vaguely remembered. Two months ago? Three months ago? I scrolled back a whole year without spying it. Surely it wasn’t that long ago?
Nope. It was three weeks ago. It’s his pinned tweet.
NEW: Since Soviet probes revealed Venus as a volcanic world, scientists have hoped to see one erupt—and confirm it’s more Earth-like than it seems.
Future missions were set to find one. A long-dead NASA spacecraft just beat them to it.🤯
Me, for @NatGeo https://t.co/KyBFvDdyvt
— Dr Robin George Andrews 🌋☄️ (@SquigglyVolcano) March 15, 2023
Yes, we found new lava flow in some Magellan photos taken in 1991. In fact, they were found by a scientist bored in Zoom meetings who killed time flicking through old photos and noticed a “spot the difference” in two of them. By volcanic standards, an eruption captured 30 years ago is yesterday and it proves, almost definitively, that Venus is currently volcanically active, rather than “currently” meaning “in the last however many tens/hundreds of thousands/millions of years”. There’s a number in this book somewhere for how long ago something is still considered active, but I can’t find it. It’s just such a shame that was found a couple of months after this book was published!
The other gem in the Venus chapter is the possibility of microbial life living in the clouds. Not too high where it’s too cold, or too low where it’s too hot but in a mid-air Goldilocks zone. There are signs of gaseous chemicals that humanity currently can’t blame on anything but biology. So if you’re betting on the first discovery of life living anywhere but Earth, Venus isn’t a bad place to put your money.
And then onwards to Io. I knew Io was very volcanic; I didn’t realise it’s so freezing. Based on volcanoes that can erupt right out into space, I assumed it was a world of fire. It’s not! And speaking of freezing, the concept of cryovolcanoes on Ceres and Pluto came up in this chapter too; volcanoes that erupt ice! This was a bit more confusing because it kept conflating magma chambers with underground lakes or deposits of something vaguely liquidy, and ice lava, when what’s actually happening, I think, is that those liquids are being kept either liquid or frozen underground under pressure and then sometimes, for whatever reason, the vacuum of space of space sometimes causes them to get sucked up and explode out really quickly, like a cork coming out of a bottle of fizzy wine. To be fair, I’m pretty sure Dr Robin uses that exact analogy. So it’s not “ice lava” or “a volcano of ice”, it’s just ordinary ice of whatever flavour getting yanked out by loss of the pressure containing it. It’s still very cool, in every sense of the word, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be quibbling over it if I watched a massive ice eruption explode over Pluto. More relevantly, where there’s ice there’s maybe water. Some of the ice might actually be solid method or ammonia rather than water but we, as a species, shall take what we can get. Ice. Underground lakes on other planetary bodies. And of course, where there’s water, there’s a possibility of life. I’m still keeping my money on Venus right now.
I’m not a big fan of non-fiction and science non-fiction definitely isn’t my thing. But I really enjoyed this! I like volcanoes, I like Dr Robin’s style of writing and his enthusiasm and not only did I eat up most of it, I was also very excited by a lot of it. It’s also a good-looking book. The best I was able to say of last month’s book was that I liked the textured paper cover and this book has the same texture, although it’s not quite so cute in normal traditional UK size. It’s got a very pretty colourful cross-section of the earth’s crust on the cover, with a magma tube running up to the volcano on the surface, and purple is a very prominent colour, which makes it unusual among volcano books, which obviously tend towards the red, black and orange end of the spectrum – I’ve put a red and black cover on the second draft of my own volcano book – but this is both very pretty, very volcanic and very different from most of them.
I like having it in paperback so I’m not entirely sorry I waited for that but on the other hand, I could have read this months ago! I could have revelled in volcanoes on Earth, under the sea and out in space months ago! I suspect that actual scientists and actual volcanologists will enjoy this but it’s also very readable for those of us who have a totally non-scientific interest in volcanoes, like me. Volcanoes are fun – let’s say the target audience for this is the kind of tourist who trekked 14km across Iceland last summer to see Meradalir. People who aren’t scientists but are just interested. I’m glad I found it and if you’re interested in volcanoes, maybe you should read it too.