Twenty-One Balloons

"This is a children’s book and is fanciful nonsense but so charming. It’s about a balloonist who lands in the Pacific on Krakatoa, which is nonsense because Krakatoa is not in the Pacific. The island is all built of diamonds because there are diamonds in the volcano’s core, but, anyway, it erupts and they all have to escape. So the Professor, who was shipwrecked, makes 21 new balloons and they all fly away to safety. It’s a short, silly and utterly charming book which a generation of children, particularly American children, have enjoyed. Yes. It sounds a bit pompous but I’ve written probably the definitive book on Krakatoa and at the moment I’m ash man of the week. Actually the ash clouds of Krakatoa changed the colour of the sunsets for years afterwards and prompted a huge explosion of art. It’s funny really – this eruption in Iceland has prompted a huge explosion of travel chaos but after Krakatoa painters all over the world were inspired to pick up their brushes. Edvard Munch painted ‘The Scream’ ten years after he’d seen the skies over Oslo after the eruption in 1883 – those swirls of orange stayed with him. Everyone’s forgotten the eruption of Laki in Iceland in 1783 – it sent a gigantic cloud over Europe that killed cattle and scarred people’s skins. Oh yes. There is never any damage in Iceland. Laki stands no more than ten miles away from Eyjafjallajökull, which is erupting now, and there’s Hekla as well. If Iceland decides to misbehave itself… Well, I’m fascinated by this and the geological community is trying to prove the connections. For example, the Denali fault in Alaska shifts and every time it shifts the geysers in Yellowstone National Park erupt more rapidly for three or four days. These are geysers like Old Faithful which erupts with very precise periodicity, every 56 minutes. But when the fault shifts, suddenly the geysers four thousand miles away erupt more rapidly and then they calm down. The earth is like a great big brass bell and if you hit it hard it’ll vibrate for a long time and where there are cracks it will split. So, if you have an almighty earthquake, like the one in Haiti, it may well vibrate around the world. Have you heard of James Lovelock? The Gaia theory is that everything is connected and the earth is self-regulating. We all accept that the earth is heating up, so it opens the spigots a bit, lets out a lot of gas and cools itself down. In 1816 after Tambora erupted in what is now Indonesia, there was snow in Washington DC in July. It blanketed the earth with cloud and Byron was so miserable in Lake Geneva in the sheeting rain that he wrote the miserable poem ‘Darkness’ and then Mary Shelley went to visit him and was so depressed she wrote Frankenstein. So, you see, volcanoes can have lots of strange effects. Well, if the others go off and flood the world with a huge outpouring of basalt and it goes on for four years it could have significant cooling effects. Yes."