Dan Snow's History Hit - Icelandic Volcanoes and Us

Episode Date: March 27, 2021

This explosive episode is all about the effects of Icelandic volcanoes on us all. In 1783 a massive eruption of Lakagígar volcano nearly forced the abandonment of Iceland as 15 cubic kilometres of lava was blown into the air. The greatest single amount ever recorded. The effects of this eruption caused enormous death and destruction in Iceland but also led to the failure of crops across northern Europe causing the deaths of 25,000 Britains and helping to cause the French revolution. Whilst this latest eruption seems rather tame by comparison it gave Dan the perfect excuse to speak to Páll Einarsson, who works at the Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland, about the history of Iceland's volcanoes and how their presence continues to be felt both in Iceland and around the world.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We got an Icelandic volcano erupting. Eventually, it'll be the big one. It'll be the big one that blocks out the sky, just as happened in 1783, when, we are told by eyewitnesses in Britain, there was a smoky fog that prevailed for many weeks. Tremendous thunderstorms, alarming meteors, we know what they're about, and even a great fireball that was seen across the skies of southern England. 25,000 Britons are thought to have died as a result of Laki, the Icelandic volcano that erupted in 1783, but let me tell you it's a lot worse than Iceland as you're about to hear. Great cliffs and slabs of rock were swept along, tumbling about like

large whales swimming, red hot and glowing. There were 15 cubic kilometres of lava blown into the air by this eruption. That is a lot, folks. In fact, it's the greatest single amount ever recorded. And as you'll hear, it led to enormous hardship and death in Iceland. It helped give us the French Revolution. This latest eruption seems a little tamer than that for the moment. But goodness knows, there always could be a big one on the horizon. As soon as it erupted, I got my good friend from Iceland on the phone, Partal Einarsson.

He works at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland. He does research in volcanology. I mean, I just, I don't know if I've said this before, but if I wasn't doing what I'm doing, I want to be a volcanologist. I mean, jeepers creepers. He also knows all about the effect that earthquakes, seismic context has had on Iceland's history. It was great talking to Partal. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you wish to listen to other podcasts in this series without the ads, I can see why you'd want to do that. Anyway, without the ads, please go and do so at historyhit.tv for a very small subscription. You get access to ad-free podcasts, mine and others, and you get to watch history documentaries. We've got it all going on on the channel this week folks we're releasing big new documentary series on the second world war in

eastern europe in poland filmed with alex ritchie and her team in poland so please go and check that out wonderful stuff that's available over at historyhit.tv but in the meantime let's hear a bit more about those icelandic volcanoes. Padil, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. First of all, what's going on over there? Are you near the volcano? Can you see it?

Yeah, we can see it in bright weather in the evening, especially. It's not too far away from us, about 30 kilometres or so from the capital area. But it's a very small eruption and it's contained within a narrow valley so it cannot really be seen directly but you can see the glow from it if the sky is right. Now the story of settlement on Iceland is one of continuous almost extinction events as a result of the seismic nature of the island that you live on. Talk to me about some of the bigger eruptions that have occurred through Icelandic history. Well, Iceland is like the most very active areas. It sits on a hotspot on the surface of the earth and the plate boundary in addition. So it is extremely active. And like any active area, it has both small events and big events. And small events are much more common than big events.

But we have our shares of really catastrophic events. But most events are really quite small and actually can be regarded more as a public entertainment rather than a disaster. And that is definitely the case for the present one. So we don't really have an excuse to start talking about all the big disasters of the past because of this event. It is really a small, really a beautiful event. And as you see, when the weather allows, there is a continuous stream of people hiking up to this area just to see it and experience it. of people hiking up to this area just to see it and experience it. But what are some of the big ones in the past? And how threatening have they been?

I mean, when I was in Iceland, I was told about one event that almost forced the abandonment of Iceland as a place where humans could live and thrive. Yeah, the most famous large event was in 1783, when the Laki eruption occurred. One of the volcanic systems of Iceland is the Grimmsvötn volcanic system and it can produce, and it's also the most frequently erupting one, and it can produce really big events like the Laki eruption. And it lasted maybe about two years, but mostly during the first few months it produced an enormous lava flow. And this lava flow then caused quite a bit of gas pollution. So there was a constant haze of

pollution over the country for a few months. And in fact, this pollution then drifted off to other countries and it caused a famine in large parts of the earth, especially in the northern hemisphere. So there were great consequences in continental Europe and also seemingly in East Asia as well. So the climate and this really poisonous gas was causing quite a lot of trouble. As a consequence of this in Iceland, the vegetation got poisoned and that killed half the livestock. And as a consequence of that, then about 20% of the population perished.

In general, bad air, mostly just lack of food and just unhealthy air to breathe. So this was probably the biggest catastrophe. There were several of these very large events, especially in the early part of the history of Iceland. Just as Iceland was being populated in the 9th century, there was one of these big events just finished. We call it Landnamslag or Landnamseruption. That means the eruption of the settlement. It probably occurred just a year before the first settlers came. So the whole country was covered by ash and pumice. And so that is what the Norse settlers met with in the beginning. And then shortly after that, in 930, there was another one of these,

of the Katla volcanic system in South Iceland. Also a very large eruption, and without any doubt it caused quite a lot of damage and famine and all the things that follow. We don't really have very much written documents about that, but the geological record speaks for itself. It was a very large event. Another one in the 15th century, 1580 or something like that, there was another one of these big events in South Iceland again,

with difficulties. And then comes this 1783 event of Laki. So these are really the big disastrous events that we've had to face here. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about Icelandic volcanoes, obviously. You'll find out what's going on more after this. Okay, Tristan, you've got 50 seconds go

right so dan's given me a few seconds to sell the ancients podcast what is the ancients i hear you say well it's like dan's show except just ancient history we've got the groundbreaking new archaeological discoveries this seems to be the oldest known dated depiction of the animal world as far as we can tell anywhere in the world. We've got the big names. It's one of those great things Pompeii, it's kind of forever rising from the dead and from destruction. We've got the big topics. The man destroys seven legions in a day, no one in history has done that.

Subscribe to the Ancients from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts from. Oh and Russell Crowe, if you're listening, we would love to have you on The Ancients. Spread the word, people. Spread the word. How has Icelandic politics and society and culture coped with these just monumental explosions in the heart of your homeland? Does it mean that, for example, people look to the sea or fishing rather than crops as a sustainable way of making a living? I mean, how has that affected your worldview? Well, these previous events, they just hit the population and there was quite a bit of death of people. And so the size of the population was cut down quite drastically by these events,

together with all the pandemics, of course, that harassed all the rest of the population of Europe as well. But this is a special problem we have to face here in Iceland. People just, well, they didn't really cope with it. They just died. And these were real disasters. They didn't really cope with it. They just died.

And these were real disasters. We haven't really had any comparable event happening since 1783. We have had some large eruptions. The last eruption prior to the present one happened in 2014 and 15. It lasted half a year. In central Iceland, in a very good location. It was a big event. It produced a lava flow of one and a half cubic kilometers of volume, which is really a very big eruption.

But it hardly caused any damage because there was nothing to damage up in central Iceland. Nobody lives there. And actually, it turned out to be quite beneficial, if anything, up there because it stopped the source area of some of the sandstorms up there. Sand that was blowing years before is now covered with lava. So it is not blowing anywhere. So this works both ways. And in fact, Iceland is, of course, they take their volcanoes seriously, but they don't really hate their volcanoes.

And they're not particularly afraid of them. Well, let's look at it another way. I mean, if we didn't have the volcanoes, there would be no Iceland, because that's what makes Iceland, it's the volcanoes. Otherwise, if this was not the hotspot, Iceland would be just another piece of the ocean bottom. We would be at two or three kilometres depth in the Atlantic Ocean and not above sea level.

And you would still be living happily in Norway and Scotland and Ireland. You would never have to leave. Well, that was all politics, you see. And we still have problems with politics, of course. So what I find fascinating about volcanoes is tsunamis, we're still vulnerable, but we've built gigantic sea defences that in the case of the Maldives, for example, in the Indian Ocean tsunami worked quite effectively. Earthquakes, Tokyo has been built to withstand extraordinary earthquakes underneath the city itself. And yet volcanoes, there is nothing.

You guys have got nothing. If a big lava flow comes down the valley, you can't divert it, you can't drain it, you can't cool it down. It is still an elemental catastrophic force. We can predict them, I guess. We can slightly predict them, can we? Yes, we have been quite successful in that.

The present activity, for example, has been anticipated now for several months, and especially during the last month. It had a very pronounced prelude to it, so the whole nation was really following how this magma was gradually intruded into the crust from below and finally broke the surface. the crust from below and finally broke the surface. So it was by no means unexpected. Well, our biggest catastrophe in the last century or so was probably the eruption in Hemae in 1973. Hemae is an island off the south coast and it's produced by volcanic activity, but then an eruption broke out on the island itself in 73 within the town. It's a town of 5,000 people that was there. And the volcano actually came up near one of the houses in the town. And the whole population was evacuated to the mainland because the fishing fleet was in harbor. And so people just simply went down to the harbor and sailed to the mainland.

And then the lava was diverted, actually. It's one of the best and most successful operations in that respect. There is. And so by spraying water on the lava flow and diverting it that way, the harbour could be saved. So people moved back to the town when the eruption finished and the town is prosperous as it was before. So there are ways and means to counteract these forces if conditions are right, which they are near the coast, you have plenty of water to spray and so on. But then again, most of our eruptions are really quite harmless. And that includes definitely the one that is now in progress.

It is extremely peaceful. It's a small eruption. And it's a lava eruption. There are no explosions, no ash in the air. And considering that it's close to the capital, it's really in a very remote area. And it's in an enclosed valley. Lava cannot flow anywhere. It will take a few months

of activity to overflow the valley so that the lava will go anywhere where it could do any damage. So it's really just a beautiful show of the forces of nature. And people are utilizing that. It's really a big entertainment

now. Well, let's hope it stays like that. Can I finish up by just talking about Laki in 1783 again? The ash, the volcanic debris went into the jet stream. It got deposited all over Europe. It's seen as contributing greatly to the collapse of the French state in 1789, the French Revolution. Is that something that Icelandic people, a country so in many ways isolated, and yet what happens on Iceland has impacted in the most important stories of the last 200 years of history? We are certainly aware of it, and people follow this historical research quite thoroughly and contribute to it, in fact. So we are fully aware of the impact that it can have. And this was, of course, emphasized in 2010.

There was another eruption in one of our laziest volcanoes, Eyjafjallajökull. But for some strange reasons, it produced an enormous amount of ash up in the atmosphere. And this atmosphere, by strange coincidence again, was most of it brought to continental Europe. It was not a powerful eruption, but it lasted five weeks, and almost every grain of this ash was carried into the European airspace. So it grounded all the airplanes in Europe for quite a while

and caused quite a bit of damage because of that. So everybody talks about the Eiffel-Joghurt eruption as really the most damaging eruption, but it wasn't really a big eruption. It was really just a bad combination of conditions that made it so damaging. We've since then had two much bigger eruptions and nobody hardly noticed.

What are the seismographs or whatever they're called? What are the meters telling us? Are we due another big volcanic eruption soon? In Iceland, you are always prepared for a big eruption soon. And we have on the average an eruption every two or three years. every two or three years. So actually the quiet period before the present eruption was seven years and that's unusually long. And people were getting anxious to have the next eruption. So that is very much the attitude. This attitude really surprises many of our visitors. Usually the biggest problem with these eruptions is to control the traffic towards the eruption site. It's not people moving away from the eruption site.

It's the people moving towards the eruption site to watch it and to have fun. So that is really what is bothering people mostly now. It's just to control the hikers. Yesterday was particularly bad in the eruption area because the weather was not really all that friendly and it's a couple of hours hike to get there and people were not all prepared for the worsening weather so saving people from their own curiosity is really the biggest problem at the moment well it must be in bad weather because when I'm in Iceland, everyone you look at is wearing a woolly jumper,

a wool jumper the size of a sheep on their torso. It's impossible to get cold in that wonderful country of yours. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking us through all this. Okay, yeah, but this is a story in progress, you know. We are really in the middle of it right now. Well, I'll talk to you again soon in that case. Thank you. Okay.

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep

so I'm talking to your snoring forms. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars. And then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much.

Now sleep well.