Control of Nature, The by John McPhee

Author:John McPhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

LIKE AN ICEBERG that had calved off a glacier, the great bulk of the north side of the volcano remained afloat in a molten sea. It was a mountain in itself, and, moreover, it moved. It was landscape on the loose, an incongruous itinerant alp, its summit high above the lava plain, its heading north by northwest. The mobile mountain had a nine-acre base and a sharp peak. It weighed two million tons. People looking up from almost any street in town could see its silhouette filling the sky—today in one place, tomorrow in another. Someone named it Flakkarinn. And no one ever called it anything else. Flakkarinn the Wanderer.

The pressure wave that was created when Flakkarinn came off the volcano moved through the lava for a number of days and squeezed from the periphery new freshets of red rock. Some of this was in the lobe that stopped at the harbor wall. Flakkarinn, sliding downhill, also made bow waves in the molten lava through which it plowed. And as it went along it dug a kind of trough. Lava filled in behind it. Where Flakkarinn broke the crust of the earlier flow, fresh streams of molten material poured forth. People climbed up and rode on Flakkarinn. It shook as it travelled. In its first two weeks, it went half a mile.

If all of this had happened on a different vector, it might have been merely entertaining. But Flakkarinn was headed for the harbor. If one of its advance waves had nearly overtopped the harbor wall, what might be expected when Flakkarinn itself arrived at the same place? When the Wanderer reached the harbor, the harbor would become a hill.

A plan was developed to stop Flakkarinn. The dramatics at the harbor wall had amply demonstrated that pumped seawater could affect both the motion and the final position of the right kind of lava. As Thorbjorn explained, “all this was possible only because the lava was thick, viscous, and moving slowly.” (In what is now the United States’ Pacific Northwest, an eruption once buried in three or four days an area the size of Iceland. As they say in Olympia, try watering that. ) To mount an attempt to obstruct Flakkarinn, all available pumps were requested from the Americans in Keflavik, from the Civil Defense in Reykjavik—and transports arrived full of pumps. The strategy was straightforward: Select an area of the lava lying in Flakkarinn’s path, and pump enough water onto it to get below the surface rind and increase in size and number the columnar cracks that characterize basalt as it cools. Then more seawater, saturating the cracks, would reach all the way to the impermeable molten center of the flow, solidifying an over-all mass sufficient to block Flakkarinn.

When Thorbjorn was reviewing these events with me, he said, “This ship Sandey, it had some steel pipes over half a metre in diameter that were very heavy and difficult to handle. After we got the bulldozers up on the lava and put the pipes there, the lava moved, and the pipes, of course, broke.

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