I recently came across a local newspaper article describing a new volcanic island, rising from its own ashes above the sea floor, off the coast of Tonga.  The subtlety of memory returned me to 1963, and an announcement over our morning radio, of the birth… of a volcanic island off the coast of Iceland. Images, arriving a couple of days later (this was 1963 after all), gave witness to a natural brutality I had not seen before; the sea in boiling turmoil, torn by erupting columns of rock and steam. Beautiful, in an awe-filled way.

It has been fifty years since the cessation of volcanic activity. Surtsey has become home to plants and birds, a laboratory for the adaptable, the dispersible, and the colonial.  The only sounds that resonate now are noisy gulls and pounding North Atlantic waves. Continue reading →