The Gods Were Right

In Iceland, where I live, we have an eruption now. For the first time in my memory, we here in Reykjavík can see the glow of a volcano from our windows, like a sunrise just across the bay. We are witness to Earth’s most powerful forces at work: the birth of a mountain. But to observe a volcanic eruption is not to see something far greater than ourselves. To visit a volcano is to look in a mirror and consider the force humans have become—the greatest eruption on Earth.

Iceland sits on a crack between tectonic plates, so we have a moderate eruption on average and a massive event at least once a century. The Askja eruption of 1875 was partly responsible for causing almost 20 percent of Icelanders to emigrate to Canada and the United States. The Lakagígar eruption of 1783 was one of the largest in human history; it brought cold summers and crop failure to the Northern Hemisphere, and possibly triggered the. The toxic ash that followed killed about of the Icelandic population during the “” For some time, the Danish monarchy, which ruled Iceland until 1918, wondered if the island was habitable at all. Volcanoes shape our landscape and our history. The lack of vegetation in Iceland makes thousands of years of eruptions visible everywhere you travel throughout the country. I had not seen a volcanic eruption with my bare eyes until 2010, when the famous Eyjafjallajökull erupted. Seeing it was a childhood dream come true.