fear of falling
We clamber up the unforgiving rock, the wind beats down on us. Just yards away, the ground, shaped over millennia, tumbles into a bottomless cavern. The rest of us wait quietly as they lower a small group of people into the opening. Soon it is my turn – I am harnessed in. The swing stage used to lower us seems basic but operationally sound. I am fascinated but fearful.The ground beneath me is replaced by darkness. It is not the thought of falling that concerns me so much as the fact that I am now descending into a magma chamber.
volcanoes | iceland by will craig
Entering a volcano in Iceland , one of the most active volcanic regions in the world, is something that should not appeal to an ill-equipped tourist such as myself. However, subterranean expeditions have long been a fascination for travellers of the imagination. As I look up at the chamber and the brilliant hues formed in this furnace through a thousand years of intense heat, I am reminded of Jules Verne’s 1864 novel, ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ 1 , featuring a descent into Iceland’s Snæfellsjökull volcano by Professor Lidenbrock and his companions – into the mysterious and treacherous bowels of the earth. This once-extreme form of tourism is now accessible through tourist brochures. Through a trial tour, operating with restricted access, I am able to glimpse the remarkable residues of geological activity within the Thrihnukagigur volcano. To allow more paying customers to view the site, a new tunnel is proposed to take visitors deep inside. Iceland itself is a remote island, with less than 320,000 inhabitants, mostly concentrated in the capital city, Reykjavik. It lies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, marking the border between the Eurasian and North American Plates. It is a geological hotspot with many active volcanoes; in March 2010 Eyjafjallajokull erupted for the first time in nearly 200 years. This eruption, which lasted several days, sent ash high into the atmosphere, cancelling over 100,000 flights and grounding 3.5 million passengers around the world. It also happened when Iceland was on its knees financially, its banking sector in ruins and ongoing negotiations for significant financial bailouts from the International Monetary Fund. 2 Initially, the Eyjafjallajokull eruption was detrimental to Iceland’s tourist and aviation industry due to reduced travel. Then things started to change. Global media coverage in the wake of the volcano came as a blessing, with widespread interest in the volcano. At first, some local companies started offering helicopter tours and ‘lobster on the lava’ dinners. 3 Then came a tourism centre with artefacts, exhibits, films and photographs of the volcano. Within a year, there was a 15.8% increase in international visitors, the largest visitor increases from China (69.1%) and North America (half from the USA, a third from Canada). 4 Exploding Eyjafjallajokull, captured in all its infamy by the global media, drew the attention of thrill seekers the world over. As blockbuster eruptions are events which recur relatively regularly, and although Iceland is financially rock-bottom and volcanoes have plagued its people for centuries, the land of fire and ice may now have been delivered a lifeline.
What the erupting volcano provided for many was an interruption to everyday life. Eyjafjallajokull was, for the vast majority of people, a thrilling story experienced through reproductions in the global media. The tourist frenzy which followed was sold upon widespread imagery of the eruption. Similarly, our experience of being inside a 4000 year-old magma chamber is enhanced through brochures, televised imagery as well as the informative tour itself. In the The Tourist , Dean MacCannell describes this process of authentication as ‘sight sacralisation’, whereby a tourist attempts to re-live an event through reproductions of it. 5 Through artefacts and imagery surrounding the event, rather than viewing the sight for the first time, we feel as though we are rediscovering it, as if we are on an archaeological expedition. Standing inside an extinct volcano, we become aware of the quite terrifying significance of our location. The importance of places which have become markers of events are explained by John Urry as a way of directing the tourist’s gaze. 6 Although we have no actual memory of the events, we are compelled, like Indiana Jones or characters from a novel, to re-trace them as if they were our own memories. As we descend beneath the earth’s scorched surface, we simultaneously conjure an adventure from our own delusions. We imagine a time and a place unseen by humans, lurking for centuries below the earth’s surface. The territory of this past event is untouchable, yet somehow we find a way to remember it. This is a theme of Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil : “We do not remember; we rewrite memory, much as history is rewritten”. 7 The film begins with a scene of three children on an Icelandic road in 1965. The narrator of the film appears to be reading letters written by an imaginary, foreign source. There is a heavy use of cinematic montage, the collaging of different images, spanning across continents, discarding traditional concepts of time and place. Marker makes the point that images or representations of events are fleeting and cannot be substitutes for real or felt memory. The significance of the first scene and the difficulty Marker has in truly representing the event become evident when the film finally returns to Iceland, to the town of Heimaey, an island off the south coast of Iceland, which literally means ‘home’. In 1973, when this final scene was filmed, a lava flow engulfed the island and buried half of the town. Returning to the original scene of the three Icelandic children, Marker reminisces, “I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year ‘65 had just been covered with ashes”.
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