Lifting the Fog of Ignorance:Europe and the Icelandic Laki Fissure Eruption of 1783
In 1783 contemporaries in Europe gazed at the sky and witnessed a veil of dust that lasted for two months.In addition to the dry fog, 1783 saw extraordinary natural phenomena: heat,sulfuric odor, numerous thunderstorms, a newly emerging island, and earthquakes.The hot summer was followed by three severely cold winters.In the spirit of the Enlightenment contemporaries speculated about the cause of the haze and tried to explain the unusual natural phenomena of their time with reason.In its eight months of activity the 27 km long Laki fissure ejected the largest amount of lava of any volcano in the last millennium.The contemporaries outside of Iceland were unaware a volcano in the Icelandic highlands produced the dry fog and that the jet stream carried the ejecta towards Europe: It took months for the news of an Icelandic volcanic eruption to reach mainland Europe, another decade until the fissure was discovered, and more than one hundred years for the dots between the haze and the eruption to be connected.The Laki fissure eruption serves as a fascinating opportunity to trace knowledge production of a meteorological and geological event that originated in a remote and sparsely populated country in the North Atlantic from the late eighteenth century to the present.The term and the discipline of geology were only established in the mid-eighteenth century.Not only did geological knowledge have to compete against other spheres of knowledge, but the field was also characterized by disagreement: In the 178os so-called Neptunists and Plutonists fiercely debated how the Earth was formed.On the basis of contemporary newspapers, scientific publications, historical and geological maps, this paper will reconstruct and analyze how and by whom knowledge about this event was produced, and thus explore the evolution and distribution of environmental knowledge from 1783 to the present.
Katrin Kleemann
Doctoral Candidate at the Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich, Germany
国际会议
北京
英文
136-173
2017-05-25（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）