Sample text for Surviving Galeras / Stanley Williams and Fen Montaigne.
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Prologue
My colleagues came and went in the clouds. Banks of cumulus drifted
across the peaks of the Andes, enveloping us in a cool fog that made
it impossible to see anything but the gray rubble on which we stood.
Perched at 14,000 feet on a cone of volcanic debris in southwestern
Colombia, we were checking the vital signs of Galeras -- gases,
gravity, anything that would tell us whether the volcano might erupt.
As morning gave way to afternoon, the clouds occasionally
dispersed, offering a heartening glimpse of blue sky and revealing
Galeras"s barren, imposing landscape. At the center of the tableau
was the cone, 450 feet high, and its steaming crater. Surrounding the
cone on three sides were high walls of volcanic rock, known as
andesite. Forming an amphitheater 1.3 miles wide and open to the
west, these ramparts were a subtle palette of dun, battleship gray,
and beige. The top of the escarpment was composed of crumbling
columns of hardened lava, the bottom a steep incline of rock and
scree. All of it was the remnant of an earlier volcano that had
collapsed thousands of years ago, spilling its contents down the
mountain in a vast debris field. Occasionally I glimpsed in the west
a forested, razorback ridge sloping toward the equatorial lowlands
9,000 feet below. That was the flank of an ancient volcano, which
imploded 580,000 years ago after a massive eruption.
For miles around, the landscape was defined by these vestiges
of earlier Galerases in various stages of decay and erosion.
Around one in the afternoon, I stood with four other
geologists on the crater"s lip and gazed into the steaming pit. Like
the craters of most explosive volcanoes, this was not a cauldron of
lava. It was a moonscape. Some 900 feet wide and 200 feet deep, the
mouth of Galeras was a misshapen hole strewn with jagged boulders.
Much of that rubble came from a hardened magma cap, or dome, that had
been blown to pieces six months earlier in an eruption. At first
glance, the crater seemed a sterile place, its colors running a
dreary spectrum from dark gray to brown to beige. But on closer
inspection the mouth revealed pockets of color -- rust-hued swaths of
rock breaking down in the heat and gases of the crater and canary-
yellow patches of sulfur that had accumulated next to a gas vent,
known as a fumarole. These vents were small fissures where high-
pressure gases were released from the magma body beneath the volcano.
The gases, which assaulted the nostrils with a melange of sharp,
acrid odors right out of the chemistry lab, shot from the fumaroles
with a hiss, obscuring the landscape in a swirl of vapors.
Galeras"s fumaroles were relatively quiet that day, emitting
a whooshing sound much like that of a steam machine used to clean
buildings. When you step down into such a crater, the howl of the
wind at 14,000 or 16,000 feet is instantly replaced by the eerie
quiet of the earth"s interior. The exception is when volcanoes are
riven by high-pressure, high-temperature fumaroles. Then you feel as
if you are planted behind a jet engine as it prepares for takeoff.
Such fumaroles are not encircled by yellow sulfur crystals, which
form at lower temperatures, but rather by a bathtub ring of expelled
minerals in black, orange, blue, and white.
I divide volcanoes -- and their craters -- into two types,
hot and cold. Galeras falls into the cold category, which has its own
mix of discomforts. Chief among them are the thin air and the
frequent shifting between overheating and freezing as you sweat
during the ascent, then shiver when the sun disappears behind clouds
and you work at high elevations. With hot, lower-altitude volcanoes,
such as those in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, you sweat all the time,
your clothes stiffening from the salt when they dry. Nearly all
craters are awash with acidic gases so strong they can corrode the
metal eyelets on your boots and leave your skin feeling as if it has
been rubbed raw with Brillo pads.
That afternoon on Galeras, steam clouds often obscured my
friend Igor Menyailov, a highly regarded Russian volcanologist who
was sitting amid a jumble of rocks thrusting a glass tube into a
fumarole. From deep inside the earth, gases streamed out of the vent
at 440 degrees Fahrenheit and bubbled into solution in Igor"s double-
chambered collection bottle. Taken over time, these samples of sulfur
and chlorine might reveal the volcano"s secrets. Was the magma body
rising? Was an eruption imminent? It was Igor"s first time on
Galeras, his first time in South America, so he could tell little
about this particular mountain yet. But the fifty-six-year-old
Russian -- a short, handsome man who learned English by listening to
black market recordings of Elvis Presley -- looked content, smiling,
smoking a cigarette, swiveling his head away from the shifting gas
clouds as he talked with the Colombian scientist Nestor García.
Circling the rim of the crater, appearing and reappearing in
the fog like a phantom, was the English volcanologist Geoff Brown,
accompanied by the Colombian scientists Fernando Cuenca and Carlos
Trujillo. Brown, a rangy, affable man who also had never set foot on
Galeras till now, was taking the volcano"s pulse with a sophisticated
contraption called a gravimeter. One hundred million times more
sensitive than a grocer"s scale, the gravimeter gauges the forces of
gravity on a mountain as it heaves under the power of rising, molten
rock. Geoff was trying to map the innards of Galeras, hoping, like
Igor, to determine if magma was on the move or if an eruption was
likely. We all used different methods, but our goal was the same --
to understand what makes a volcano tick, to forecast eruptions, to
save lives. We all wanted to save lives.
I know now what a tricky and elusive thing memory can be,
particularly after a calamity such as Galeras. I sustained a grave
head wound, but was nevertheless able to piece together a picture of
the last minutes before the eruption. Over the years, as I underwent
sixteen operations, as Galeras greeted me every morning when I awoke,
as I slogged through a recovery that continues to this day, I came to
believe unshakably in my version of what had transpired on the crater
rim before Galeras blew. But I am less certain now. Three of my
colleagues, standing just feet from me, remember things differently.
Are they right? Can their stories really be true? Some of my memories
are vivid, others less so. But no matter. This is what I remember of
the moments before Galeras exploded. About the eruption itself --
well, we"re all more or less in agreement on that.
On January 14, 1993, around 1:40 P.M., I was on the lip of the crater
next to José Arlés Zapata, a young Colombian volcanologist. Three
tourists, who had hiked up to see what the scientists were doing on
the volcano, stood a few feet away. Near them, moving diagonally down
the volcano"s flank, were two geologists from the United States and
one from Ecuador. I was in charge of this foray onto Galeras and just
minutes before had asked these scientists to begin walking off the
volcano. As a rule, I like to wrap up work on Andean volcanoes by
early afternoon, since the heaviest clouds tend to obscure the peaks
later in the day.
Igor Menyailov and Nestor García were in the crater, resting
after taking their final samples. Geoff Brown, Fernando Cuenca, and
Carlos Trujillo were on the crater"s western rim, carrying out their
last gravity readings. Geoff was too far away to hear me, so I just
waved at him, indicating it was time to go.
A rock tumbled off the inside wall of the crater -- a common
occurrence that at first aroused no concern in me. But a second rock
clattered down the crater mouth, then a third, and soon a cascade of
stones and boulders rained onto the floor of the volcano. It was an
earthquake or an eruption. Either way, we needed to flee.
"Hurry up! Get out!" I shouted in English and Spanish.
The volcano began to shake, and I turned to run down the
scree-covered flank. I had made it only a few yards when the air was
rent by a sound like a thunderclap or a sonic boom. Immediately
afterward I heard a deafening craaack, the sound of the earth"s crust
snapping. Instinctively, I hunched my shoulders and hiked my backpack
over my neck and head. I did not get far.
My fascination with volcanoes, now a quarter century old, taps into
something universal and timeless. As they watched fountains of lava
spew from Mount Etna in Italy or Popocatépetl in Mexico, the ancients
believed they were witnessing a phenomenon linked to the origins of
the universe. The flames and magma gushing from a volcano came from a
place as mysterious as the heavens above. Small wonder that the
Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas tossed virgins into the mouth of this beast;
it was capable of destroying villages, towns, entire civilizations in
an instant. Human sacrifice, they believed, would placate the monster.
To the Greeks, volcanoes were a direct conduit to Hades. The
Romans believed the entrance to hell was in the Phlegraean Fields,
next to Vesuvius, where gases poured out of hundreds of fumaroles.
Vulcan -- the Roman god of fire -- lived deep inside a mountain on
Vulcano, in the Aeolian Islands. There, at his underground forge, he
rocked the earth and unleashed eruptions as he made weapons for
Apollo, Hercules, and the other gods. The Icelanders, living on an
island that was but a mound of volcanoes, believed hell"s gateway was
the crater of the massive fire mountain Hekla.
Like any grand and destructive spectacle, volcanoes have
alternately attracted and terrified humanity through the ages. The
difference between ordinary people and volcanologists is that, with
us, the appeal far outweighs the terror. Ours is a counterintuitive
endeavor. Most people flee from erupting volcanoes. We head straight
for them.
From the moment I first set foot on a volcano -- at Pacaya,
Guatemala, in 1978, where I stared into a crater with dozens of
hissing fumaroles -- I have found it an exhilarating experience. The
spectacle, especially at lava-spewing volcanoes, is impressive. On
later visits to Pacaya, I watched as the volcano -- with a big
KAVOOM! -- repeatedly launched blobs of magma as big as trucks 200
yards into the air, whereupon the projectiles disintegrated and fell
back to earth in hundreds of glowing, baseball-size pieces. At that
same volcano, a group of students and I witnessed a lava flow, 9 feet
thick and a half mile long, slowly ooze out of Pacaya"s flank. We
tossed banana peels into the flow and watched them turn to ash with a
hiss. Rocks tumbled out of the black stream, revealing the
incandescent, orange-yellow core of the lava tongue. We clocked the
flow"s speed, about 15 feet per hour, and took its temperature, 1,970
degrees F. You could only insert the temperature probe when the wind
was blowing away from your body; otherwise you started to cook.
Lava is pretty to look at but rarely dangerous. Eruptions are
driven by the explosive power of pent-up gases. (Think of the cork
blasting off a bottle of champagne.) But the lava that pours out of
Kilauea and other picturesque Hawaiian volcanoes tends to be
relatively fluid and depleted of its gases, hence not explosive. The
volcanoes with thick, pasty magma -- from which gases cannot readily
escape -- pose the greatest danger of eruption. On these mountains
there often isn"t a river of lava in sight.
The subtler, extraterrestrial beauty of these explosive
volcanoes is, to me, no less stirring. Gases roar out of fumaroles.
Hunks of basalt the size of small cars litter the landscape, vestiges
of earlier eruptions. I always sense that, despite the barren
surroundings, I am perched on a conduit to the most basic energy of
the universe, a pipeline to the beginnings of the planet. No other
place leaves me as keenly aware of man"s powerlessness in the face of
nature and the inconsequence of a single life.
I also take pleasure being in a place where, with good
reason, few people ever set foot. The splendid loneliness of our work
was brought home to me recently when I looked at a series of
photographs of a colleague, David Johnston of the U.S. Geological
Survey, sampling gases on the summit of Mount St. Helens on May 17,
1980, the day before it erupted. The volcano"s northern flank was
bulging out as much as 12 feet a day from the increasing pressure of
rising magma. The governor had ordered the evacuation of nearly
everyone within 8 miles of the volcano. Yet Johnston and another
young volcanologist, Harry Glicken, rode a helicopter to the top of
the volcano, landed on its swelling hide, and took gas samples.
The first picture, an aerial, shows the gray northern face of
Mount St. Helens, with an arrow pointing to the area where Johnston
was working. The second and third photographs, taken by Glicken with
a telephoto lens, show a speck of a man, dressed in blue jeans,
bending over a fumarole. That was Johnston. I can imagine the fear
and excitement that stirred inside him as he hurried to collect his
samples and get off the volcano, whose ever-distending flank promised
that it would soon blow. He was alone on top of the mountain, riding
the back of a monster.
By the next morning Johnston was dead. Studying the volcano
from an observation post 5.7 miles from the summit, he was
incinerated and buried in a blast as powerful as five hundred of the
atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. Glicken was not killed at Mount
St. Helens. He died eleven years later in an eruption in Japan.
My colleagues and I don"t harbor a death wish. But despite
the progress we"ve made in taking a mountain"s measure using
seismometers and other remote sensing devices, the best way to
understand a volcano is still, in my opinion, to climb it. I study
volcanic gases, which indicate how much magma is rising inside a
volcano and how explosive it is likely to be. The most accurate way
to sample gases is to descend into a volcano"s crater and insert
pipes into the fumaroles expelling steam, carbon dioxide, sulfur
dioxide, and other compounds. This is dangerous work, as I know from
personal experience and the loss of a dozen friends and colleagues.
But the goal, which has driven me throughout my career and has taken
me to more than a hundred volcanoes in two dozen countries, is a
worthy one: to improve our ability to forecast eruptions.
All the volcanologists I admire, whether they"ve died in
eruptions or lived to old age, share a passion for working on
volcanoes. Most geologists are like pathologists, scrutinizing dead
systems for clues of cataclysm and violent demise. Volcanologists are
emergency room doctors. We work in the here-and-now, plunging into
crises as the earth"s fifteen hundred active volcanoes take turns
popping off. We clamber on volcanoes because it is the best way to
understand their behavior. But we"re also hooked on the thrill of
climbing into the crater, of confronting so monumental a force. No
place on earth leaves me feeling as alive as a volcano does.
In the quarter century since I began studying geology, our knowledge
of volcanoes has grown dramatically, testimony to how young the
discipline is. Only in the last few decades has the cornerstone
theory of plate tectonics become fully understood and accepted. I
have witnessed and played a small role in these recent advances in
our knowledge, yet a quarter century of work has not diminished my
awe of the power of volcanoes and their role in creating our planet.
Our atmosphere and our oceans appeared roughly 4.4 billion years ago,
when the new planet -- an accretion of star dust -- began to vent
gases and water through primitive volcanoes in the form of steam.
Over the past 2.5 billion years, the earth"s plates have collided,
separated, collided again, and thrust under one another to create our
landscape. Drive down the spine of the Appalachians and you are
cruising over the remains of ancient volcanoes that ceased spitting
magma more than 200 million years ago. Visit Yellowstone Park and you
are in the midst of three gigantic calderas, circular depressions
formed when a volcano ejects its contents and then collapses in on
itself. The three eruptions in the Yellowstone Basin, which occurred
from 2 million to 600,000 years ago, blasted out several thousand
times more pumice, rock, and ash than the 1980 eruption at Mount St.
Helens. One Yellowstone eruption alone created a caldera about 30
miles long and 50 miles wide.
West of Yellowstone, in eastern Oregon and Washington, sit
the vast basalt canyonlands of the Columbia River. In this basin,
about 16 million years ago, fissures in the crust opened up and, over
the course of 1 million to 2 million years, oceans of magma poured
out onto the surface from a source hundreds of miles inside the
earth. Piling up in pancake-like layers, the basalt reached a depth
of nearly 10,000 feet in some places. The accompanying ash and gas
would have blocked some of the sun"s rays, drastically lowering
temperatures worldwide. But the Columbia River "flood basalts" were
dwarfed by two earlier basalt outpourings in India and Siberia. Those
events, one occurring 248 million years ago and the other 65 million
years ago, radically altered the earth"s climate and may have played
a role -- possibly along with meteorite impacts -- in the mass
extinctions of dinosaurs and other animals.
Such calamities are almost beyond comprehension. Easier to
grasp are the great eruptions of recent times, minuscule by
comparison but still awesome in their destructive power. In the past
225 years alone, volcanic eruptions have killed at least 220,000
people. Only a handful died in lava flows; the rest perished in ways
that do not readily come to mind. In 1783, in Iceland, the earth was
split by a 17-mile volcanic fissure, which gushed ash, lava, and
gases for several months. Nobody died in the actual eruption, but the
poisonous fluorine gas that rushed out of the vents blanketed the
countryside and killed half of the nation"s cattle and three quarters
of its sheep. In the ensuing famine 9,300 people died, one fifth of
Iceland"s population.
In 1815, in what was probably the largest eruption of the
last 10,000 years, Tambora exploded on the island of Sumbawa in
Indonesia. About 12,000 people died immediately, either incinerated
by speeding clouds of gas and ash, known as pyroclastic flows, or
drowning in huge volcano-induced waves, known as tsunamis. Later, at
least 44,000 people -- some say as many as 100,000 -- perished of
famine and disease on neighboring islands when thick layers of ash
ruined crops and killed livestock. Volcanic aerosols and dust in the
stratosphere made temperatures drop around the world, causing "the
Year Without a Summer" in New England and creating the vivid red
sunsets painted by the English artist J.M.W. Turner.
In 1883, also in Indonesia, Krakatau erupted, its blast heard
as far as Rodrigues Island in the Indian Ocean, 2,900 miles away. An
estimated 36,000 people died, most of them in towering tsunamis that
swept the island of Sumatra.
Nineteen years later, in 1902, Mont Pelée erupted on the
island of Martinique, unleashing a pyroclastic flow that sped down
the mountain at 100 miles an hour and, in minutes, killed 27,000
people in the city of St. Pierre.
In 1985 a small eruption at Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia
melted glaciers at the volcano"s summit and created a mudflow that
swept through the town of Armero, killing 23,000 people in several
hours. Two days later I was on the scene, measuring the gases
streaming out of Ruiz and flying over the entombed town. Scientists
from both Colombia and the United States had warned of such a
disaster but were ignored by local civil defense officials.
I left Armero keenly aware that if we don"t improve our
ability to forecast eruptions and educate local officials, another
eruption will kill tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands,
of people someday. Burgeoning populations, particularly in Third
World countries, have pushed many people even closer to active
volcanoes. Today, roughly 500 million people live within reach of an
eruption. The famed eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 killed several
thousand people at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Dr. Peter Baxter, a good
friend and the world"s leading expert on how volcanoes kill, says
that if a similar eruption occurred without warning today, and if the
evacuation of Naples and its suburbs moved slowly, more than 100,000
people might perish in a few minutes.
Six years after the eruption at Galeras I stood again at the crater"s
rim, scarcely recognizing the blasted, gray pit spread out before me.
The ledge on which Igor Menyailov and Nestor García knelt and sampled
gases had disappeared. The western rim, where Geoff Brown, Fernando
Cuenca, and Carlos Trujillo stood, had been partially blown away by
the eruption. Portions of the crater"s southwestern lip had
collapsed. Even the outer flank of the crater, where I had run for my
life, had changed, its lower reaches littered with boulders -- some
as big as washing machines -- thrown from the volcano. The truth is
that few places on earth are as mutable as a volcano"s peak, where
high-pressure gases force open new fumaroles and eruptions scour the
crater"s bottom and sides.
Gazing into the crater, I was struck by how tiny, in a
geological sense, the eruption had been. As the steam from fumaroles
drifted past me and wafted down Galeras"s western flank, I reminded
myself that the deadly eruption was a mere hiccup, a blast so small
that geologists decades hence will find no sign of it. Yet the power
of the eruption, to those of us who lived through it, was staggering.
It wiped five of my colleagues from the face of the earth. It killed
nine men, injured six others, and continues to ripple through the
lives of dozens of people. It nearly killed me.
The volcano runs like a fault line through my days, dividing
my existence into life before Galeras and life after.
Copyright © 2001 by Stanley Williams and Fen Montaigne
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Williams, Stanley, 1952-Galeras Volcano (Colombia) Eruption, 1993, Volcanologists United States Biography