Fire Fountains

"One of the pleasures of researching my book on volcanoes was to discover new stories and writers. Constance Gordon Cumming was a writer and painter, who travelled independently across vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean in the 1870s. After visiting Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga and Tahiti, she eventually landed on Hawaii in October 1879. Fire Fountains is her account of her stay on the island, mostly in the form of letters home to her sister. For me, the highlights of the book are her accounts of the long hike up Kilauea volcano to see the fire fountains and lava lake in the summit crater. On her first ascent, her thirty-mile hike through forest and across a frozen ‘billowy ocean of lava waves’ was rewarded with a sight as gloomy as the view from a Scottish mountainside in fog. The lava had gone, and there was no fire to be seen. Undaunted, she returned a few weeks later, and was rewarded with glorious views of cascades of molten lava. Records of fleeting glimpses of activity at remote volcanoes, such as those by Cumming, are important elements when trying to piece together the past histories of volcanoes. Although volcanologists are naturally drawn to work on erupting volcanoes, most volcanoes spend most of their time not erupting. Of the 850 volcanoes that have had a confirmed eruption in the past 10,000 years, and are expected to erupt again, the majority have been quiet for at least 100 years. Many of the most well known eruptions of the past 30 years happened at volcanoes that had not erupted for centuries, including Pinatubo (Philippines, 1991), and the Icelandic eruption of 2010 (Eyjafjalljökull). Before the next eruption happens at a long-dormant volcano, we’d like to know two things: what is the geological evidence for what happened during past eruptions? And are there any accounts of past activity? Since the physical deposits of small eruptions may be hard to find or, more likely, lost through erosion and weathering, any accounts of how a volcano behaved in the past are of interest – since they may give us clues as to what to expect in the future."