The Governor of Washington promised me a tour of his state’s LIGO facility. I’m definitely going to hold him to that.
So – I’m a scientist. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time featured Death Mountain, a completely unrealistic volcano, but a volcano nonetheless. Combine that with parents that did all they could to encourage me/stop me melting things inside their house and get outside instead, an amazing pair of teachers at school, and a strong penchant for mischief, and boom, you’ve got yourself a volcanologist. Well, eventually. It took an MSci in geology (I hate rocks, but I love lava) and a PhD to get there, but I did it – and it was worth it just to be the strangest doctor of them all.
Yes, Doctor Who is incredible. Yes, I want a TARDIS more than anything.
I went into a bit of self-imposed exile in New Zealand, a beautiful country at the (proverbial and literal) end of the world. I managed to simulate a mysterious eruption hundreds of years old, which was neat. There were artificial volcanoes built in New York; weird machines in Germany; puppies in an Arizona desert; helicopters in Japan. An old friend and I made it to the top of Mount Fuji, at the height of the Perseids meteor shower, moments before the Sun rose and (hypothetically) saved our frigid souls from (not quite) death. It was glorious, confusing and full of all those things you call “emotions.” An experience, it all was.
These days, I’m a freelance science journalist: I tend to crop up in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Quanta Magazine, Nature, Earther, Gizmodo, Forbes, Scientific American, Atlas Obscura, The Verge, WIRED and more. Don't get me wrong: research was fun – and terrifying, and weird, and wonderful and utterly exhausting – but after realizing that volcanoes and geoscience alone wasn’t the only science I was enthralled by, I jumped into science writing. Leave sensationalism, fearmongering and pseudoscientific bullshit at the door: the unvarnished, poetic beauty of science and those behind the discoveries stand perfectly well on their own in a world smothered by fake news and clickbait headlines.
I’m always available for freelancing, as long as you can promise me the science is nothing less than delicious. Same for science consultancy, which I do for Outrageous Acts of Science, and for lecturing on science communication, which Imperial College – my old academic stomping ground – and UCL graciously let me do from time to time. NatGeo seem to let me represent them on American TV, too, which is very flattering and totally surreal.
Sometimes, I appear at festivals (like Cheltenham’s annual foray, or Ratio in Sofia), in schools and on stages in an attempt to make science funny. I often pop up on the BBC, Al Jazeera and US/Canadian news channels and stations to explain how volcanoes and earthquakes work. It’s like free therapy, in public. I’d recommend it.
As of April 2020, I’m also writing a book! Night Fires: What Strange Volcanoes Reveal About Earth And The Worlds Beyond will be published by W.W. Norton & Company at some point in the future. And yes, it will mention Death Mountain.
Thanks to Hollywood disaster movies, the fact that volcanoes receive widespread media attention only when they cause a disaster, and fearmongering tabloids, people tend to see volcanoes as nature’s weapons of mass destruction, sinister cones of doom waiting to maim and melt. But for the most part, volcanoes don’t kill and annihilate us. They are, in fact, capable of remarkable acts of pyrotechnical prowess verging on magic: from making black lava more fluid than water to creating tornadoes of lava, from tearing up continents and making new oceans to tipping entire planets over.
This book, an anthology of magmatic mountains and fiery fountains, revels in the incomparable power of volcanoes and their eruptions. But it does more than marvel at their preternatural abilities. It also explores how their idiosyncratic, incredible displays of incandescence, past and present, reveal secrets about both themselves and the worlds to which they belong: from the forces that sculpt the sea, land and sky to the machinery that makes or breaks the existence of life. All volcanoes play their part on these dramatic planetary stages, but those in this book – those on Earth, above and below water, to those on the Moon, on Venus, on Mars and on worlds beyond – showcase this phenomenal force of nature better than any others.
This is a time-travelling tale of how volcanic fire forged entire worlds, a saga 4.5 billion years in the making. Buckle up: it’s one hell of a ride.
