Best of Times, Worst of Times

Interview by Danny Danziger
Sunday Times

I was filming a documentary film to try and explain how events at the centre of the Earth are intimately linked with life at the surface. It now seems that dynamic processes thousands of miles below the Earth’s crust not only create and move the continents, but also give rise to catastrophic massive volcanic eruptions that drive thousands of species to extinction. Extinctions create new niches, new opportunities for new life. I wanted to explain how geology plays a vital role in driving evolution and the creation of life.

One of the locations we were filming in was Hawaii, on what's called the Big Island, which is where the active volcanoes are. There are dozens of volcanoes surrounding the edge of the Pacific, along the edges where the Pacific plate rubs against the Asian plate to the west and the America plate to the east. However, Hawaii is slap bang in the middle of the Pacific plate. So plate rubbing cannot explain Hawaiian volcanoes. They are caused by a different process altogether.

The Earth’s core needs to lose heat, and it does this by convecting; in other words, hot rock rises up through the planet over the course of millions of years, forming vertical columns stretching all the way to the Earth’s crust. When a new column bursts through the crust, the result can be global devastation. Fortunately, this is a rare event. The volcanoes at Hawaii are merely consequences of an old, weakened convection column, but the result is spectacular nevertheless. It’s like having a giant blowtorch under the island.

We wanted to film up at the most active crater to explain how these blowtorches work. So we took a helicopter; our pilot was a Hawaiian native and the first thing he did was make an offering to the volcano’s god; he bought a lei with him, performed a brief ritual, and then tossed it into the volcano’s crater. Hopefully, this would protect us from harm.

We landed maybe half a mile from the crater’s edge and then trekked up to the rim. The smell is of choking sulphur which really hits you at the back of the throat. We were already at a very high altitude, and we were still climbing, so we were beginning to become tired. At the same time I was scared as well because I was in an alien environment. As the land fell away below us, we eventually saw the billowing fumes emerging from the crater.

The volcano crater was not erupting, but it contained a bubbling lava pond, several hundred feet across. The lava level was fluctuating wildly and it was simply a matter of time before it surged over the top of the rim. Hopefully it would be a matter of days rather than hours. In the meantime, the pond was feeding subterranean rivers of lava that ran just a few yards below our feet down the slopes of the volcano’s cone and eventually into the sea. As the lava rivers hit the coast, there were these giant plumes of steam going hundreds of feet up into the air.

It’s extraordinary, seeing the power of the earth. Molten rock pouring out of a volcano, and this virgin rock, beginning its transition into soil, which then gives a home to plants, which then provides food for animals. The land surrounding the volcano is just a matter of weeks old; lichens are just beginning to attach to it and break it down and turn it into soil. It is very moving here. You actually see the seeding of life, you see the most basic and primitive forms of life beginning to live on the most basic and primitive forms of rock.

It was also quite scary, because we were often walking on the rocky crust immediately above the rivers of lava and there's always a risk of it cracking and falling into the lava. Sometimes I would stand on a thin crust and fall through. Fortunately there was always a thicker layer underneath that held me up, but I continuously thought I was falling into the lava. Once we started filming we got into a routine; we had to ignore the fear, get used to it.

There was maybe a hundred-foot drop between the top of the lip of the crater to where the actual lava pond was. The lava varied in colour from a deep bright orange, just like red-hot iron pouring out of a furnace, to a darker red. Above it sat a thick cloud of vapours.

I remember a point at the end of one day. The helicopter could only fit two people and a batch of equipment at any one time, so it shuttled to and fro between the volcano and civilisation. On this particular day everybody else had been shuttled back to base, and for some time I was just left at the crater on my own.

I remember sitting on a seat we'd taken out from the helicopter, quite exhausted after filming. I waited, surveying this volcanic landscape. It's the ultimate wilderness, it's a completely barren, rocky terrain. There are no birds because there's no plant life. There's no noise because there are no animals or rustling trees. It’s like a lunar landscape, indeed this is where NASA used to send its moon vehicles to test them out before they went to land on the moon. This is what the entire earth looked like billions of years ago, before life took over.

The science that I had done up to that point, the science I had been interested in most, was sub-atomic physics. It's connected with things like the Big Bang, the creation of the universe, fundamental theories of how the universe operates. It’s very far removed from every day life.

By understanding these laws of physics you understand how the universe came to be the way it is. If the forces between particles had been slightly stronger or slightly weaker, then our rich variety of chemistry might not have developed. Furthermore, matter might not have clumped into stars and galaxies, and we might have had a homogeneous soup universe, rather than one which has structure and detail. If the laws of physics had been different, then the whole universe could have coughed and spluttered rather than starting with a Big Bang.

But at that moment I was beginning to understand science at the next level, not the creation of the universe, rather the creation of the Earth and the creation of life. It's one of those things that I never really appreciated – the remarkable nature of life.

If the Earth had been significantly bigger, then it’s gravitational forces would have been too great to have allowed life to exist. It would also have attracted many more asteroids that would have pummelled any emerging life forms. On the other hand, if the Earth had been smaller, then it wouldn’t have been able to retain an atmosphere, and again life wouldn't have been able to evolve. Furthermore, a small Earth would have cooled down quickly and turned into a cold, sterile rock, rather than hot dynamic system.

Being confronted with the forces that create the Earth, that drive the Earth, and seeing the processes of life beginning, made me wonder at the extraordinary set of circumstances you require in order to create life on Earth. We just take it for granted, we often don't realise how astonishing the creation of life is. We live on a planet which is warm and friendly and which has seasons and which has a magnetic field, and all of these things help promote life.

And maybe that was the moment when for the first time I began to acknowledge the wonder of life.