This blog is written by Ailsa Naismith. Ailsa studies active volcanoes for a living in a Gothic tower at Bristol university. She thinks volcanoes are a single, vibrant thread in the amazing tapestry of Earth Science. Get in touch with her on Twitter (@AilsaNaismith) or Insta (@alias_in_Ink).
I come from a family of storytellers. My grandad is 93 and still very sprightly, although these days he repeats himself a lot. Every time I go around for tea, he will tell me about when he was a midshipman with the Navy and they were moored off the coast of Naples in Italy (this was in the late 1940s). One hazy afternoon off duty, he and his shipmates set out to climb the nearby Mount Vesuvius. He remembers the climb up, steep and sweaty through farms with rows and rows of vineyards like green washing lines, and the summit; small vents smoking gently with volcanic gas. On the way down, the men were invited into a farm to sample some wine from the grapes they had troubled to pass – a little further on, a second farmer welcomed then in, then another. Grandad finishes the story with a wry chuckle. “And do you know – “, he says, “I rather forget how we got back to the ship!”
It’s a good story, isn’t it? You can see why I always enjoy returning for tea. But what does it have to do with inspiring the study of the Earth (which is what this website is all about)? Two points. First, the story was set in the 1940s –before the theory of plate tectonics was widely accepted. Now we understand that natural events like earthquakes and volcanoes happen because the Earth is made up of tectonic plates, like patches on a football, that slide past each other, and clash, and move apart. Plate tectonics is such a young idea that although I pay my rent by studying its impacts, I have a living relative older than the theory! This shows that modern geology is an incredibly young science – and as with any new subject, there is still much more to learn.
The second thing I like about this story is that its two main elements, the volcano and the people that climb it, are strongly connected. The landscape makes an impression on the people who walk over it, who in turn leave their footprints on it.
Linking stories with science in Guatemala
I’ve always been intrigued about the earth beneath our feet. A trip to Tenerife in 2014 was the first time I really got interested in volcanoes, and since then I’ve become fascinated about the youngest features of our old planet, how they work and how we relate to them.
In 2016 I started working in Guatemala, Central America, to try to understand the eruptions of a volcano called Fuego. Mostly I studied satellite and camera photos to see what gas the volcano gives off and how often its hot explosions can be seen from space. But after a while I found that my research was missing something. The volcano was having a big eruption every month, and there seemed to be a pattern in explosions before the eruption that people could follow. But why were people around the volcano not leaving when they saw that this pattern was happening again, when they knew that they could be in danger?
It clicked for me when I started including local storytelling. I loved my first visits to Guatemala, when we sat around the fire at the observatory and I asked my local friends about their tales of the volcano. One told me about amazing things he’d seen in the natural environment, things like lightning, enormous hot avalanches, and volcanic mud flows like the heavy steaming tongue of a monster. Another told me about how the volcano affected the lives of friends and family, what it was like when ash fell on the washing you’d recently put out, or how when the mud flows came you couldn’t ride your truck across the riverbed to go to town.
At first I didn’t recognize the importance of what I was hearing. At some point though, I realized that these voices were the key. Learning about the volcano through camera and satellite photos was only one science of many; it was like only reading the left-hand pages of a textbook. To understand the whole story of Fuego, I would have to listen to these stories and collect them all into one narrative. I would then be able to share that narrative with people who might not have heard it before, so that they could learn about the volcano; perhaps the stories could help to protect local people.
I am now nearly at the end of my PhD, which is a three year long project. If I do it well, I get to be an official Doctor of Volcanoes! It’s quite unusual to do a PhD mixing stories from local people with data from satellites and cameras. But, just as plate tectonic theory came into vogue in the 1950s, I am happy to say that using many sciences at once to study the changing Earth is becoming more popular!
Why is it important to study humans and the Earth together?
We live on a very human Earth. We have influenced the landscape so much that some people think we should call the present age the “Anthropocene” (“anthropo-“ meaning “relating to human”). So why not combine physical and social science more often?
As the global population continues to grow, and Earth changes rapidly from the effects of human-caused climate change, we see more and more that every part of the physical world has a human impact. Working to study the natural together with the human element is going to become more important in the future – not only at volcanoes, but with other events like earthquakes, landslides, floods, and typhoons.
I’ve always found the idea of the natural world as a laboratory, with the scientist as a cool-headed, rational outsider, very strange. I am interested in geoscience because of my place as a resident of Earth. The story of how humans and nature interact in the 21st century is still largely unwritten, but I hope we can welcome many more authors in. We need a new generation of Earth Scientists inspired by their love of nature and of their fellow man to study the processes of our planet. Maybe then there will be as much progress as there was between my grandad and me!
Check out Ailsa’s website at www.reasoningwithvolcanoes.com