A Visit to the Forgotten Volcano That Once Turned Europe Dark

By Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe
01.22.15 |

One of the craters of Iceland's Laki volcano, which had a huge eruption in 1783 that darkened Europe and had global consequences. Alexandra Witze and Jaff Kanipe

The following is excerpted from Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World, by Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe (Pegasus Books, 2015).

Laki Today: Life in the mountain's shadow

Read a Q&A with the authors on WIRED's Eruptions blog.

If you want to visit the craters of Laki, the first thing you need is a proper vehicle. F206, the overland path that leads from the heavily travelled ring road north toward Laki, is one of Iceland's infamous 'F roads' — unpaved dirt tracks that sometimes vanish altogether over lava highlands or under roaring rivers. For this kind of terrain, a rental car just won't do. You need someone like Trausti Ísleifsson and his jacked-up four-wheel-drive van. Trausti and his brother Gudmann run an adventure company in [the nearby town of] Klaustur, and they unhesitatingly agree to take us to the Laki craters even though we are visiting at a time — mid-June — when the F206 track is often still buried by the winter snows. Fortunately, the spring of 2012 is warm enough to clear a path to the craters. So right after breakfast on a Wednesday morning, Trausti rolls his white van on its massive knobbly tires up to the front door of our hotel. He is the quintessential Icelandic tour guide: tall, blond, with flawless English, and kitted out in rugged and expensive-looking outdoor gear. We are his only passengers.

Laki is just thirty-five kilometers from Klaustur as the crow flies, but getting there and back is a lengthy affair. On a drizzly cloudy morning we start by driving about six kilometers west from town, through an eerie hummocky wasteland. What look like soft pillowy forms are actually hard black rocks carpeted by pale green and gray arctic moss. They are the cooled remains of lava from the eruption of 1783–84. The strange lumps stretch on both sides of the ring road, for nearly as far as the eye can see. Forever useless to farmers, this land is now home only to birds.

As we turn off the ring road onto F206, Trausti pulls over the van to let air out of the monster tires. As we start rolling again, we immediately see the wisdom of this move. The road is unpaved and boulder-strewn, beset with axle-breaking potholes, and the lower tire pressure allows us to navigate the obstacles better. This early in the season, hardly anyone is on the road except us and one unfortunate-looking Subaru sedan that creeps along, scraping its underside on the rough track. We pass it, wondering what it will do when it encounters the swiftly flowing rivers. Trausti, of course, barrels through fearlessly with just enough clearance under his van. He even halts halfway into the river to dip his water bottle into the icy, clear meltwater. "You won't taste anything better," he tells us.

The authors' guide, Trausti Ísleifsson, lets some air out of his tires to prepare his vehicle for a treacherous approach to Laki volcano. Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe

The landscape is classic Iceland: rolling fields of black lava misted with the green of low-growing tundra plants. Pockets of lingering snow nestle into the sides of hills and ridges, and from time to time we spot the massive bank of ice that is the Vatnajökull ice cap glowering in the distance. Out here, the only sign of civilization is a single blue sign marking the entrance to Vatnajökull National Park, one of the country's three national parks and the biggest in all of Europe.

A ceiling of gloomy clouds extends from horizon to horizon, but even those can't dampen our mood as, an hour and a half after turning onto the track, we finally approach Mount Laki itself. As if on cue, two whooper swans, startled by the van's sudden appearance, take wing. Nothing except them and the clouds seems to be moving out here.

Then Trausti points ahead. After all the anticipation, our first glimpse of Mount Laki is a little less than impressive. It's just another black ridge of rock among other black rocks. Like many of Iceland's mountains, it formed in a subglacial eruption in the distant past when magma erupted under ice, cooling quickly and turning to rock. Today Mount Laki is a craggy, weathered mound with an elevation of 818 metres, comparable to other peaks in the region. But we're here because the mountain sits smack in the middle of the volcanic fissures we came to explore. If you want to see the crater row, this is where you begin.

Trausti brings the van to a halt in a small black sand clearing beneath yet another lava ridge. He waves us out and lights up a cigarette. A bored-looking park ranger cautions us not to stray off the path or pick tundra flowers. Then we are off to climb Mount Laki by ourselves.

The hike is straightforward but steep, so we keep our heads down as we clamber and scramble along the lava trail. An occasional glance over our shoulders at the receding parking area, more scrabbling, a brief rest, a final push, and then we are at the top.

The view is stunning in all directions — lakes, mountains, glaciers — but what we've come to see lies on either side of the windswept summit. A single file of volcanic craters stretches all the way to the horizon, their moss-covered flanks and swales dappled, here and there, with patches of snow.

The craters of Laki volcano. Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe

From a vertiginous shelf, we look off to the southwest: these are the older craters, the ones that opened up on June 8, 1783, and in the following weeks spewed the thousand-meter-high fire columns that [Reverend] Jón Steingrímsson and others saw above the hills behind Klaustur. Lava from these craters surged down the Skaftá gorge and spread out upon the lowlands, destroying farms and threatening Klaustur itself on the Sunday of Jón's Fire Mass.

We turn the opposite way and gaze towards the northeast. Yet more craters stretch off into the distance and disappear below a low cloud bank that hovers above icy Vatnajökull, brilliant white in full sunlight. These craters were the later ones to erupt, beginning the last week of July 1783. They sent lava flowing down the eastern path towards Klaustur and its weary and dying villagers.

This perspective is the only way to really visualize the fearsome power that once ripped this landscape wide open. Laki is but a name, an abstraction, until we see this mighty gash in the earth. Its beauty belies the devastation it once unleashed. How could a land so tranquil and green have once been a terrifying inferno? We take our photos, pile a few stones on a summit cairn, gaze on the crater row one last time, and head back down.

Later that afternoon Trausti takes us to walk through several of the Laki craters. We drive slowly south and west, marveling at the color and variety of forms lava can take, from blue-black pillow-like lobes to reddish sharp-edged rocks. Many are shot through with vesicles, the holes left by gas bubbles as the lava cooled and hardened to rock. Some flow features in the lava resemble brown toffee that has yet to harden.

We come across deep green mirror lakes, gentle burbling watercourses and, here and there, clumps of ground-hugging wildflowers — golden root, purple moss campion, white rock-cress and yellow meadow buttercups. Everywhere sprawls a carpet of that grey-green Icelandic moss, giving the otherwise coarse landscape a soft, impressionistic appearance. As sunlight alternates with a gentle mist that occasionally turns to snow, we almost forget we're walking through what was once a death trap.

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/island-on-fire-excerpt-laki-volcano-iceland/