[Rockhounds] The Volcanologist’s Paradox

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

On March 16, 2017, Mount Etna
<https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2021/02/photos-recent-eruptions-mount-etna/618113/>
almost
killed Boris Behncke. He was on the volcano’s snow-covered flanks,
accompanying a film crew from the BBC. Serpents of lava
<https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/03/mount-etna-europes-most-active-volcano/519681/>
were
slithering out of a southeastern crater, but Behncke
<https://twitter.com/etnaboris>, a volcanologist at Italy’s National
Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, felt no need to take his hard hat
out of his bag. They were more than a mile away from the crater, seemingly
far from harm’s reach.

Suddenly, flashes of steam erupted from the ice—lava had snuck into the
snowbank and was violently vaporizing it, launching red-hot debris into the
air. Everyone bolted downslope; some were knocked off their feet by the
blasts, others pelted by a Hadean hail
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39293086> of volcanic rock. A
small, scorching-hot chunk of matter shot at Behncke, careening through his
backpack like a bullet through Jell-O. That he had not whipped out his hard
hat proved oddly fortunate: If he had put it on his head, that volcanic
shard would have sliced through his abdomen.

That day, Behncke thinks, “haunted all of us for a while,” he told me. But
the same evening, he watched the eruption unfold on TV and said to himself:
“This is beautiful. It’s spectacular!”

This is the volcanologist’s emotional paradox. Eruptions “are very
spectacular. I do admire them,” Behncke, who lives on Etna’s slopes, 13
miles from the summit, told me. “But we are things in their way.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/volcanos-awe-beauty-terror/620416/