Volcano Cowboys: The Rocky Evolution of a Dangerous Science

Volcanoes have destroyed and killed throughout history, but we have never known much about them. Now a group of brave scientists are working to understand the actual conditions that cause eruptions, how to predict them, and what we can do, if anything, to temper their destructiveness. Thompson, a Time magazine correspondent, takes us from the May 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington state through new concentrated efforts to construct a wider-reaching and more rigid discipline.

Thompson spent many hours with the relative handful of scientists whom he calls "volcano cowboys." They have loaned him their field notes and shared personal stories. That vivid material combined with Thompson's ability to bring a good story to life has resulted in a book that celebrates these "cowboys," their hazardous lives, and the often harrowing decisions they must make.

Vulcanology is not the sexiest of sciences, despite Hollywood movies in which clenched-jawed heroes tame ferocious floods of lava that are busily swallowing up some crowded metropolis or another, racing against the clock to save humankind from the elements. It turns out that those movies aren't really so far-fetched, though, and in the pages of Volcano Cowboys the world's small corps of magma hunters acquire well-deserved élan.

The study of volcanoes, Time magazine writer Dick Thompson notes, is largely an observational and not theoretical science; where the vital memory of a molecular biologist "generally drops off after a decade," a vulcanologist will carry reams of data about the behavior of the earth gleaned from reports stretching back to the time of Plato and Pliny the Elder, those amateur volcano-watchers of antiquity. They've had plenty more to do in recent years, though, than to quote the ancients. Thompson's vigorous narrative begins with the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, an event that U.S. Geological Survey scientists had been able to predict with some accuracy. They lacked, however, a coordinated means to effect an evacuation of the area, and 57 people died. Battling institutional inertia and struggling for funding, teams of these scientists, the "volcano cowboys" of Thompson's title, set about trying to develop methods to predict more accurately dangerous volcanic events and to trim the body count when such events took place. His story recounts their eventual victory when, in 1991, the Philippine volcano Pinatubo exploded--but, thanks to the work of these dedicated field scientists, "less than one quarter of one percent of those at risk had died during the eruption."

Tens of millions of people around the world live within the reach of volcanoes. Thompson's narrative reveals that the "volcano cowboys" have made their lives safer--and it's much better than the movies. --Gregory McNamee