Throughline - A Year Of Wonders

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

As extreme weather wreaks havoc around the globe we look at a natural disaster more than 200 hundred years ago that had far-reaching effects. This week, how the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki awed, terrified and disrupted millions around the world and changed the course of history.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Fire and ice exploding as they meet. The force of nature in full flow. It's like looking inside a giant geological cooking pot. This is as close as we dare go to this huge plume.

Back in 2010, a volcano in Iceland disrupted air travel for about six days and caught the attention of the world. And I'm not going to get this name right, but it's E-F-Y-R-K-U-L. E-F-Y-R-K-U-L. E-F-Y-R-K-U-L. E-F-Y-R-K-U-L. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Nearly.

It's E-F-Y-R-K-U-L. There you go. I'm not going to try that. He spent a long time practicing that. This is science journalist Alexandra Witsi and her husband, science writer Jeff Kneipp. And the book that we wrote, Alex and I, and we're still married. It's called Island on Fire. They began working on the book kind of by accident when Alex traveled to Iceland to study this volcano. This eruption in 2010 had shut down Europe's air flights with its ash for days on end.

I mean, Heathrow was shut down. In the UK, it's the first time ever a no-fly zone has been declared, leaving up to 600,000 travelers stranded with no idea if... And I was driving around the countryside with a graduate student from the university there in Reykjavik, and he just kind of waved over to the side and said, oh, back there, you know, that's where this other eruption was, this eruption you've probably never heard of called Lockheed, which was way worse than what we just went through. And I just said, stop, wait,

hold on. What is this thing? How come I've never heard of it? And I came back and started talking to Jeff about what an amazing story this other volcano was. She brought back the seed of this whole thing. It turns out this other volcano, Laki, is the greatest natural disaster Iceland's ever faced. It erupted for eight months in the 1700s, leading to crop failures and famine not only in Iceland, but as far away as France, Egypt, India, and maybe even Japan. So over the next few years, Alex and Jeff dug into the story of Lockheed with one big question in mind. How could one little volcano in one small, remote country cause such global havoc? We survived Y2K and we even survived 2012.

But could we survive a super volcano? These eruptions are enormous. The amount of material erupted from them, huge. The bad news is that the probability of a big one hasn't changed at all. The term the big one, you can only use it at such a big event, you change the nature of society. You said we're long overdue? Long overdue. We're playing Russian roulette with Mother Nature. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

Where we go back in time to understand the present. Hey, I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah. And on this episode, the volcano felt round the world. An American philosopher named Will Durant once said, civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

Wildfires break out, tornadoes appear, tsunamis strike, usually affecting people on a local level. Meanwhile, scientists devise models of the big ones, the different natural disasters that could have massive ramifications worldwide. The rest of us dream about these big ones in the countless disaster movies we go to. Or at least I do. Are you hurt? I don't think so. Have you seen this movie?

They all kind of sound the same. But I hear The Rock. I hear The Rock. It is the masterpiece classic San Andreas featuring The Rock, of course. Who, by the way, I would definitely trust with my life in this situation.

You know what I mean? He can fly a helicopter, lift up bills. Anyway. To each their own. Anyway, in this episode, we're going to step out of the realm of fantasy and show you how an actual big one took the world by surprise and changedone from Paducah, Kentucky, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. If you've watched Game of Thrones, then you probably have a sense of what Iceland looks like. It's an incredible place. So you've got mountains and scarps and rolling landscapes.

And every once in a while, you've got a little bit of grass or moss on top of things. Very Game of Thrones, right? So a lot of Game of Thrones was filmed there. Forbidding, desolate, and gorgeous all at the same time. It's barren, it's black, it's volcanic. I mean, this entire island has been built up by volcanic eruptions year after year for the last 20 to 25 million years. So the whole landscape, everything you're looking at, has been built by black rock that came out from the heart of the earth. Iceland sits in the North Atlantic,

right on top of the fault line on the ocean floor that divides the North American and Eurasian plates. And as the two plates drift in opposite directions, Iceland is in effect slowly being split apart, making the country a geothermal hotspot where earthquakes and volcanoes are just a fact of life. So Icelanders were really used to volcanoes going off. On average, there's an eruption on the island

about once every five years. You grow up with them, yes. And I did. By age 15, I had seen three volcanic eruptions. This is volcanologist Thor Thordarsson. I didn't even know that that profession existed when I saw these eruptions. Now, it might sound alarming that volcanoes are going off so frequently, but most of these eruptions aren't too big or destructive.

No, no, no, no, absolutely not. Most eruptions are actually fairly small and sort of what we call tourist-friendly. All this volcanic activity has earned Iceland the nickname, the land of fire and ice. Thor has spent the last 36 years studying one volcano, Laki. It's taught in elementary school, you know, history classes as the greatest disaster that Iceland has faced. But it turns out there wasn't much actual scientific research on Laki. So Thor had a lot of work to do. And you can map these things out.

You can look at the architecture of these, like the lava flow. He collected ash and lava samples, analyzed their chemical makeup, reconstructed the route of the lava flow and how far the ash fell. It's a bit of a detective work. And he began his investigation at ground zero, the site of the eruption. The typical volcano you might have in mind is probably a towering, cone-shaped mountain with a big bowl full of bubbling lava in the middle, long, steep slopes on either side oozing with flowing molten rock. Imagine like you're baking soda and vinegar volcano in like middle school or whatever. But Lockheed doesn't look like that.

Absolutely not. Lockheed doesn't look anything like that. If you climb Mount Lockheed like we did and you look in both directions, you see these little volcanic vents going off to the horizon in both directions. Lockheed is really just... A 27-kilometer-long crack. A 16-mile crack in the ground might not seem that imposing, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's less powerful. In some ways, it actually might contain more power.

See, the reason for cone-shaped volcanoes is because you have magma coming up through one conduit over and over again. Lockheed, on the other hand, doesn't have just one conduit, one release point for the lava and ash. It has many. Over the 27 kilometers, we have about 145 cones which are just basically lined along this crack. All those vents run deep into the earth, connecting to a chamber of magma, molten rock, that, like a pressure cooker, is waiting to blow.

This is the hidden life force of Lockheed, which couldn't stay hidden forever. In the spring of 1783, the ground began to rumble near Laki. So there was earth shaking, but it wasn't really anything out of the ordinary for Iceland. They wouldn't see much, they would just feel the earthquakes. You would have just thought you were living with the normal geological unrest. So people more or less just carried on with their lives. If you can imagine what things would have been like in the 1780s in Iceland. So first, you're in a very remote country. It's pretty much known for fishing and that's about it.

It was ruled by Denmark at the time. So it's very isolated, very rural. But as the days went by, the earthquakes became more and more frequent. A priest in a nearby town named Jan Stengrumson liked to keep tabs on this seismic activity, documenting what he saw and heard. He was very devout, but he was also, had a scientific bent to him. Sunday services were always, you know, his favorite part of the week, obviously. And like clockwork, every Sunday Jan wouldon would ride his horse from home to church to deliver mass. Sunday, June 8th, 1783. He would have been getting ready for his sermon. And he stepped out of his little farmhouse to mount his horse to ride five kilometers or so to the church.

But he happened to look behind him toward the north, and when he did... You would have seen this cloud rising above the hills to the north. This enormous cloud, dark cloud bearing down on the village. It would have looked like maybe if a fire had gone off. You think about those big plumes of wildfire billowing up. It darkened the area, so basically it lost all sunlight. So it was completely dark. People, you know, caught outdoors, had to grope their way home in the blackness. There soon followed a blizzard of powdery fluff, which is ash,

settling thick on the ground, like coal ash. And he would have started talking to everybody in the village when they got together, like, what is going on? What is happening? It's not like this was the first time they'd seen an ash cloud or felt the tremors of an eruption. But something about this ash seemed different. There was so much acid in the ash cloud that it actually burned holes in the leaves of the trees. And the grass withered almost instantaneously.

It must have just been like night and day. He steps out of his house on Sunday morning. It's a beautiful day. He turns around and hell is bearing down on him as fast as possible. Jon wrote that he thought this might be the end of the world. Gek thou, Aumer, i askaltum.

O, hvilik, o, marahor. The earth trembled incessantly. How terrible it was to see such signs of an angry God. Now it was time to confess to the Lord. By the afternoon, the clouds seemed to lift, and a calm descended over the town. Jon held his church services under a clear sky. He thought the worst had passed. But that night, the earthquakes returned, and with them, the ash.

So a group of farmers decided to climb a nearby mountain. To see if they could see where the eruption was coming from. And when they arrived, they were met with a terrifying sight. First the ground swelled up with tremendous howling, then suddenly a cry shattered it into pieces and disposed the earth's gut like an animal tearing apart its prey. You can think about an enormous gash just opening up and starting to bleed molten rock out.

So basically that magma had broken through the earth and you would have seen it starting to come up in these big billowing clouds of ash and these big curtains of fire. Fire fountains, they called them, spouting up into the air. If you'd been standing there, it would have been like seeing an entire curtain of flaming material just above your head and dribbling down around you. And as it fell onto the ground, you would have seen it sort of cool and become this

dark, gooey, flowing lava that would have started coursing down the hill. And out of that, it was just constantly pumping this black, fiery stuff. And it built up and built up on the landscape. When we come back, Lockheed's lava and ash spread across Iceland and beyond. This is Rob from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. You're listening to ThruLine from MTR. And I really enjoy the show. Keep up the great work

as a holiday because in a time when the further Fiat he made it all even now Jordan and from Isaiah this past week and the two prior to it, more poison fell from the sky than words can describe. Ash, volcanic hares, rain full of sulfur, all of it mixed with sand. As Lockheed continued to erupt, Jón Steengrimson continued to write down what he saw. Lava spewed and the ash fell, day after day. All water went tepid and light blue in color and gravel slides turned gray. More lava, more ash, week after week. All the earth's plants burned, withered and turned gray,

one after another as the fire increased and neared the settlements. There was so much lava coming out of this eruption that it was enough to bury all of Manhattan deeper than Trump Tower is tall. So that's a lot of lava. As the lava traveled across the countryside, it destroyed farms and villages in its path. So you can imagine if you're a farmer and your farm just happens to be downslope from where this enormous gash opened up in the landscape. Well, you're kind of screwed because all that lava is coming towards you. So the most immediate impact was the folks who lived right there, and they had to flee.

They had to pack up and take what they could and get out as fast as they could. Before long, the lava was at Yon's doorstep, approaching his village. So he had everybody assembled in the church, and he gave a sermon. It was just now called the Fire Mass, and I was praying for divine intervention.

Let us pray to God in correct piety, that he in his grace would not want to destroy us in haste. Each and every one pray without fear. Each and every one be ready to die if it pleases him. The lava came within about three kilometers of the church, which sounds, you know, like pretty far away, but then you don't know where that lava's going. And it stopped.

It stopped because mainly it was a confluence of a couple of tributaries that fed into the Skafta River. And it had rained, and this cooled the flowing lava, and the lava mounded up in kind of a dam. And you can still see that to this day. You can walk up to it. So the village was spared, and Steingrimson became somewhat of a famous person. People credited his fire mass. I think he knew exactly what he was doing. I've looked at the location where the church was and where the Lauer was coming.

He realized that that Lauer was not going any further. And that's why he called the sermon. He gets people in the church. Everyone goes and prays and they come out. The lava had stopped. He had actually, you know, given the people hope again. And I think that was very deliberate. But the lava wasn't actually the biggest threat

because what was causing more trouble were the poisonous gases spewing from Laki. This was a very sulfur and fluorine rich eruption. So they would have been smelling sulfur and they'd been tasting it, a rather bitter scent and taste to the air. And there was no escaping it. It polluted everything. The ground was salted in fluorine, which is a highly toxic substance. In many areas, the sheep actually got fluorine poisoning and died as a consequence of that later on. Some of them within three days, but for most of them it took a bit longer time.

Yon recounted how livestock were growing ill and dying. The snouts, nostrils, and feet of livestock grazing or walking on the grass turned bright yellow and raw. He was a superstitious man and all this struck him as

a bad sign of things to come. I read almost everything he's written and I feel like I, sometimes I feel like I'm channeling him. He subscribed to that there were spirits and hidden folk in the ground, which a lot of Icelanders to this day believe. And he believed in signs, importance, and that kind of thing. It appears that some people started dying from fluorine poisoning, likely from drinking water or eating food laced with fluorine.

Fluorine poisoning at that level is horrific. People would get mouth sores, their gums would swell and bleed, their teeth would fall out. Inside, there were gastric problems and their tongues sometimes would fall out. They were running out of options. Meat was off limits because it would poison them and crops were no longer growing in the poisoned grass. So they had to resort to extreme measures. It's called the mist hardships. There's stories of people, you know, boiling and trying to eat their shoe leather and just anything they can put in their mouths because they haven't been able to grow crops.

So there was mass starvation all across Iceland. And these villages were just burying person after person who had lived there. Icelanders were trapped in a desperate situation with nowhere to go. It's an island and it's isolated. It's the middle of the North Atlantic. You don't go anywhere. You might be able to relocate within the country, but then... But then there were no effective mechanisms to actually help refugees leaving areas that were damaged. So people just basically put down their feet and stayed put and just fought it out. The sun, shorn of his beams, appears through the haze like the full moon.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, people were beginning to see something strange. They wrote of a misty haze rolling in without explanation. A fog of a singular kind appeared here, such that had not been observed by any previous students of nature. We could look at the sun without getting blinded two hours before sunset, as it was then red, as if we were seeing it through smoked glass. The country people began to look with superstitious awe at the red, mooring aspect. The dark, bitter haze arrived in the late spring and stayed, an unwelcome visitor there from morning through the night,

night after night. A sulfurous odor very readily perceived by the senses, crawling through everything, even closed houses. It spread all across Europe, to the UK, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany. One English poet named William Cowper wrote, Some declare that the sun neither rises nor sets where he did, and assert with great confidence that the day of judgment is at hand.

A lot of people thought this was the end of the world. In northern France, the people of one town forced their priest out of bed in the middle of the night so he could perform an exorcism on the fog. His parishioners were so freaked out about this nasty fog that was lingering day after day. It almost seemed like something cursed, and people didn't know what to make of it. At first, this was just an abstract fear. I mean, a lingering dark fog that overtakes everything is a pretty ominous thing. But soon, this fog began causing very real problems, as it had in Iceland.

People noticed that their cattle were becoming sick, their crops were no longer growing, and their loved ones were finding it harder to breathe. Many whom I've left in my parish well are dead, and many dying. This fever rages wherever I have been. Such multitudes are indisposed by fever in this country, that farmers have with difficulty gathered in their harvest, the laborers having been almost every day carried out of the field,

incapable of work, and many die. For the average person in Europe, this was a complete mystery. They had no idea a volcano had gone off on a small island thousands of miles away, and that what they were experiencing was a consequence of that. After all, communication between different countries was limited. But some people in the scientific community had their suspicions. Independently, there were a couple different scientists who came up with the idea that maybe this was from a volcano, maybe this weird, strange fog was from a volcano.

Most famously, at least among Western scientists, was Benjamin Franklin. The cause of this universal fog is not yet ascertained. He was living in Paris at the time because he was helping hammer out the treaty between the U.S. and Britain, sort of in the post-revolutionary war era, and he was seeing this strange fog. Being Benjamin Franklin, he was going to try and find out what was causing this interesting change in the weather. He was always interested in weather.

In one of these letters he wrote, he thought it might be Hekla. Hekla was another volcano in Iceland that had erupted nearly two decades earlier. Whether it was the vast quantity of smoke long continuing to issue during the summer from Hekla in Iceland, and that other volcano which arose out of the sea near that island, which smoke might be spread by various winds over the northern part of the world is yet uncertain. Though he didn't guess the exact volcano, he was onto something. Basically, as the magma from Lockheed boiled, it generated a lot of sulfur dioxide, or SO2, which is a toxic gas. Lockheed then propelled the gas and ash up into the sky, into the atmosphere,

and maybe even the stratosphere. And this ash cloud was pushed eastward on a jet stream. Away from the volcano and across lands further away. A long-term pollution event, that's what I call it. It just kept belching gas into the atmosphere. The combination of the amount of ash and the strength of the jet stream meant that the haze covered most of the northern hemisphere from about the Mediterranean all the way to the pole, and then you go all the way around. So Europe was just the first stop as the haze traveled east. And as the eruption continued, countries around the world began experiencing sudden weather changes.

When we come back, Lockheed disrupts life throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Hi, this is Shea Angelo Acevedo from Hollister, California, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. In the summer, the haze from Laki began to be seen far beyond Europe. And as it traveled further and further east, it altered the weather dramatically. So in Africa, famously, it essentially cooled things down enough to shut down the African monsoon. And the monsoon is the weather pattern that leads to the rains that everybody needs in northern Africa every year. So the Nile will fill and flood on its annual basis when it gets the rains from the monsoon. But Lockheed cooled the planet so much that the monsoon didn't happen,

the Nile didn't fill, the Nile didn't flood, they couldn't grow the crops. And something like one-sixth of the people in Egypt starved the following year because they couldn't grow the crops and there was nothing to eat. The change in monsoon pattern may have led to famine in parts of India,

which resulted in millions of deaths. And around the same time, Japan suffered from one of the worst famines in its history. The reason for that is because they had a stationary low-pressure system east of Japan the whole summer, which resulted in very cold and rainy summer. Which contributed to widespread crop failure and food shortages. And the impact of lack of atmosphere circulation may be the reason why that low pressure system was stationary east of Japan for the whole summer. About a million people died in that famine.

In Alaska, that year was known among the Inuit as the time that summer did not come. It was extremely cold. One of the serious winters on record in North America. There was ice in the Gulf of Mexico. Also along the East Coast, some of the founding fathers of America were writing to each other about how cold that winter was. And a number of scientists think that that was because of the cooling effect of Lockheed's particles. Though it's difficult to say with complete certainty

that all these weather changes were linked to Lockheed, scientists, including Thor, have been able to recreate many of these outcomes when modeling the eruption. Now the monsoon shifts are shown by the models, and that is actually fairly robust, and we can actually also verify that by historical records on flooding in the River Nile, etc. So we're pretty certain that that happened.

The situation with the low-pressure system east of Japan is not as certain, but some of the model runs actually do produce that. So it's an ongoing process. We haven't learned everything we can learn about the Lycaea eruption, and it's important for us to actually

try to fully understand what those impacts are, and the scope of those impacts are, both the direct ones and the indirect ones. It was called a year of wonders because there seemed to be miraculous, strange, unusual phenomenon happening. Thunderstorms here, extreme heat there, nasty toxic fog here, people dying in other places. And nobody knew why. I'm sure that majority of people probably thought it was some sort of a punishment from

higher authorities, you know, why it came. What did we do? Where did it come from? Why now? After eight long months, Lockheed finally stopped erupting. The lava stopped flowing and the ash stopped spewing. Following so many months of terrifying conditions, a sort of calm settled over Laki. It was a really difficult few years for Icelanders, including Jón Steinkrimsson. He became so depressed he

thought about suicide because he couldn't help the people anymore. They were just dying all around him. Among the dead was Jon's wife. Who he really loved. Thorin was her name. And many of his friends. They had to bury 76 people on the church grounds. Basically as a mass grave there still today, you can see it. So it was, you know, a horrific time.

Jón died a few years later from a kidney disease, a possible byproduct of sulfur dioxide exposure. In total, Laki killed about one-fifth of Iceland's population and 60% of the livestock. It came to be known as the Hayes Famine, the worst natural disaster in the country's history. In England, death rates spiked. And in France, historians speculate that Lockheed may have helped light the match for the French Revolution, which happened a few years later. I mean, there was a lot going on in France leading up to the revolution, but if you think about the fact that Lockheed's particles changed the climate and caused crop failures in the 1780s across France,

that certainly didn't help. If you've got the crops failing, that's like one more pressure in an already volatile situation. The extremely cold winter spurred on by Lockheed throughout the mid-1780s made an already frustrated population even more frustrated. The cold and the ash made it more difficult to grow crops, forcing people to rely on food and supplies imported from other places, even as the rivers froze over.

The main rivers like Rhine and Seine and Danube, all of those rivers, they froze over. Now, one might say, oh, so what? But you also realize these are actually the main supply avenues of goods to many big cities, including Paris. And when these rivers froze over, there was no way to get, like, firewood and things like that to the cities. So there was a short supply of those things in the cities,

and the peasants were getting really upset because of that. And the French monarchy did little to help them. So they were kind of frustrated that the authorities did not really help them in this crisis. In 1789, when the peasants were struggling yet again to find food, they were again met with apathy from the monarchy. Cue the famous line, let them eat cake, and they reach a breaking point. I think that just sort of filled the meter, if you like, and they revolted. Solaki might have been an unseen player in the revolution.

And across the world, Lockheed left its mark. You really don't know how many people died from this indirectly. Some say, you know, hundreds of thousands, which I think is a safe bet. Others say millions. Which is kind of amazing to think about, that you could have, you know, people starving and dying like thousands of miles away from where this one thing happened. Volcanic hazards of this nature, they don't care about borders. They go across borders and affect everyone equally. It doesn't matter whether you're poor or rich. It was everyone around the world trying to cope with a problem that none of them had caused. And that has incredible parallels, I think, to today. We all have to figure out how

to adapt in our own way to something that's changing the environment around us. Lockheed is a very extreme example of sudden climate shifts that people had to adapt to. All the way around the Northern Hemisphere, it happened to so many people in so many countries. It happened so quickly, they didn't have the tools to deal with it, and they had to figure it out. And that's what we're facing today, right, with climate change. Temperatures are going up, extreme weather is becoming more common. The type of what used to be unprecedented and unpredictable natural disasters that we saw with something like Lockheed

is going to happen more and more frequently these days, and we have to be ready for it. I guess what we try to do is to point out what the potential impacts are in hope that people will actually look at it as information that can help them to actually prepare better to deal with such an event when it happens in the future. Because it will happen in the future. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah.

I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Jamie York. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Lou Olkowski.

Nigeri Eaton. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Bockel. Thank you to... Steve Tyson. Candice Lim, John McGuire, Denise Marie Guerra, Julia Carney, Sering Bista, and Annabelle Edwards for their voiceover work. Thanks also to Anya Grunew. Our music was composed by Ramteen and his band, Drop Electric. If you'd like something you heard or you have an idea for an episode, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR.

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