The Illustrated History of Natural Disasters

  • Jan Kozák &
  • Vladimir Čermák
Springer: 2010. 231 pp. $89.95, £49.99 9789048133246 | ISBN: 978-9-0481-3324-6

Catastrophist ideas have seen a resurgence since the 1980s, when geologist Walter Alvarez associated the dinosaurs' disappearance with an asteroid impact. The sense that cataclysmic events shape the planet has been reinforced by a string of recent natural disasters — the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Even minor geophysical events can disrupt populations, as the current Icelandic volcanic ash cloud demonstrates.

The Illustrated History of Natural Disasters, by geophysicists Jan Kozák and Vladimir Čermák, is a timely collection of pictorial records of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis from antiquity to modern times. It shows how such events — and the way they were illustrated — influenced the development of geoscience. Accompanied by explanatory text, the images include copper engravings, woodcuts and oil paintings, produced for purposes ranging from scientific observation to newspaper reporting. The result is a hybrid book that intertwines the history of science and art.

The authors focus on Italian volcanoes, which were particularly influential. Mount Vesuvius, which buried in ash the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii in 79 AD, became a natural laboratory for geologists when it resumed activity in the mid-seventeenth century. William Hamilton, the British ambassador who lived in Naples from 1764, devoted himself to studies of Vesuvius, including monitoring the increasing frequency of eruptions during the second half of that century. He worked with artists such as Pietro Fabris to accurately depict the volcano and its surrounding area of edifices and craters. This region, known as the Phlegraean Fields, was then considered one of the wonders of southern Italy.

The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 also brought Earth sciences to the attention of the elites of Europe. This event is well documented in the book, which includes stories such as how Joseph I of Portugal was stricken with claustrophobia after he escaped from the disaster, and how the Marquis of Pombal rebuilt the city.

Observations of volcanoes and earthquakes fed into theories about the origin and evolution of Earth during the eighteenth century. Enlightenment scholars' scientific explanations of biblical catastrophes such as the Great Flood fostered the divergence of science and religion. Disciplines such as mineralogy, palaeontology and glaciology began, and Scottish geologist James Hutton proposed the concept of geological deep time. Artistic interest in geology led to detailed depictions of minerals and rocks, such as those by Fabris and the French artist Jean-Pierre Houël, while the Swiss painter Caspar Wolf, among others, chose to focus on glaciers.

Chimborazo, an inactive volcano in the Cordillera Andes, Ecuador, was thought to be the highest mountain in the world until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and became a source of artistic inspiration after German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt climbed it in 1802. It was painted in 1864 by US artist Frederic Edwin Church, a famous exponent of the Hudson River School art movement, bearing witness to his fascination with geology and von Humboldt.

Vesuvius erupting in 1794. Credit: F. J. BERTUCH

The book's coverage of natural disasters falters when it reaches the twentieth century. Only Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift is mentioned through a coloured map of tectonic plates, perhaps reflecting the opening of a gap between science and art. In Hamilton's day, the two were interlinked — observation was key to both endeavours. Yet today, with the exception of a few individuals such as the Danish–Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, who applies a modern eye to the structures of glaciers, the gulf between the disciplines is deep. The rise of photography might be partly responsible, having distanced painters from their role of recording landscapes and geological forms.

The Illustrated History of Natural Disasters helps us to understand that catastrophes are part of the history of humanity, while reminding us of the vulnerability of the human species in the face of nature's wrath.