In Defence of Volcanic Pedantry
Every day, on the island of Java, masked men risk their lungs for sulphur. At least it’s colourful work. On the hazy summit of Indonesia’s Kawah Ijen volcano, a crater lake blazes – tinted green by the noxious air. The deep gases seep from a nearby vent, burning blue after dark. It's the warmer hues, though, which lure people here.
The air, saturated with magmatic fumes, literally leaks molten sulphur. At first bright red, it solidifies to the familiar yellow of “elemental” sulphur before being lugged down the mountain in blocks by hand. To the miners it's money. But to pedantic volcanologists with smaller worries, their cash flow raises a different question: can you call liquid sulphur lava or not?!
To most people if it's red, runny and comes from a volcano, there’s only one word for it. I thought so too. But when I mentioned “sulphuric lava” on a popular microblog – I got called out.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists lava as "a stream of molten rock issuing from the crater of a volcano or from fissures in the earth". So where's the rub? The Kawah Ijen sulphur is certainly molten. It came from a volcano. But according to one commentator, it still wasn’t lava – because elemental sulphur, they said, wasn’t a rock. If it was, wouldn't other single-element material also inherit this (let's face it) slightly underwhelming title? A rock of gold? Platinum pebbles?
Either way, volcanoes like Kawah Ijen are so rare that it hardly matters beyond semantics. This example though, highlights a more pervasive problem with the L-word.
When a volcano erupts, a mild mania descends on journalists. Most symptoms are harmless – recycling stock phrases where things are invariably “shot” or “spewed” or “spat” "[x] miles into the air". But on closer inspection there’s another, more furtive presence.
For example, here’s how major news outlets chose to describe a recent large eruption (of Mount Sinabung, in Indonesia):
"[Mount Sinabung] started spitting ... lava up to 7,000 meters in the air"
– The Associated Press, 31 Dec 2013. (Repeated by WKYC, an NBC-affiliated TV station)
"[Sinabung] shot lava into the air nine times overnight"
– Agence France-Presse, 31 Dec 2013. (Repeated by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Straits Times)
“[Sinabung] was still spitting … lava as high as 4,000 meters"
– The Daily Telegraph (UK), 05 Feb 2014
I found these in five minutes. They’re cherry-picked; but they’re certainly not rare. So what's the problem? Well, Sinabung did erupt lava. But it did not spit it 7km into the air. No lava has ever been spat 7km into the air. That was the ash.
More than that, what lava there was probably never made it airborne at all. Volcanoes like Sinabung emit extremely dense lava – geologically speaking, Andesite or Dacite – very different from the free-flowing basalt most people associate with eruptions. This kind tends to tumble or, at best, flow at a crawl.
But no eruption worth over-hyping can do without those four letters. The word slips in unnoticed; it’s part of the woodwork. And that’s what makes its misuse so easy to miss. It was ash which reached those fantastic heights above Sumatra – and it was astonishing. It was awe-inspiring. But it wasn't lava. In these cases and more, the urge to force in this keyword has compromised factual accuracy in important news stories.
That alone would justify this post. But it’s about more than poor journalism. These words – more than most – have weight. Just days ago, Sinabung claimed 16 lives. These people were killed by a pyroclastic flow. They could have sidestepped lava. Sadly, volcanoes don't need hyping.