Surviving the Volcano - Softcover

Williams, Stanley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 034911367X ISBN 13: 9780349113678

Publisher: Abacus, 2002

Synopsis

The true-life adventure story of one of the world's leading volcano experts. In 1993, Stanley Williams was investigating Galeras, what he thought was a dormant volcano in Colombia. But it blew, killing nine members of his expedition; against all odds Williams survived. This book is both the scientific story of how human beings have tried to tame these pipelines to the centre of the earth and the terrifying tale of what it is like to be caught up in a volcanic explosion.

About this title

Review:

On January 14, 1993, Stanley Williams led a party of fellow geologists up Galeras, a Colombian volcano that, though historically active, had been lying quiet long enough that they suspected it was due for an episode--and thus an opportunity for the volcanologists to practice their predicting skills. As they reached the lip of its great crater, Galeras obliged them with a vengeance: it erupted in a burst of fire and toxic gas, killing several members of the party and leaving Williams scorched and broken, "sprawled on my side, caked in ash and blood, wet from the rain, bones protruding from my burned clothes, my jaw hanging slackly."

Rescued by two colleagues, Marta Velasco and Patty Mothes, Williams faced several challenges in the years to come--not only healing his body and exorcising the ghosts of Galeras, but also contending with other colleagues' whispered charges that he should have known the mountain was about to blow. But death, Williams and collaborator Fen Montaigne (Reeling in Russia) write, comes with the territory. Whenever a volcano has erupted in recent years, it seems, a volcanologist is among its victims, for, Williams notes, "the best way to understand a volcano is still, in my opinion, to climb it," and to climb it in all of its moods. And those moods, Williams and Montaigne add, are not easy to forecast, even if earth scientists have developed ever more accurate ways to predict events such as earthquakes and tsunamis.

At once a study in mountains, the history of geology, and the will to endure, Surviving Galeras is often terrifying, and altogether memorable. --Gregory McNamee

From the Back Cover:

"I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent book -- a Baedeker to the landscape of the Inferno. Through its pages, Stanley Williams wanders the world's fifteen hundred active volcanoes - going not only to them, but also on them and in them. He portrays his colleagues (of both sexes) as members of a rare breed: mostly scientist, part explorer and part thrill-seeker. Loving their dangerous work, they brave natural hellfire and brimstone, bent on a humanitarian mission to save lives by perfecting methods for predicting when magma-filled mountains will explode. Williams' own near-death experience on Galeras, in the Colombian Andes, where he lost six colleagues to a surprise eruption, is the leitmotif that drives this riveting story and shanghais the reader." -- Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Gallileo's Daughter

"Williams and Montaigne capture a nightmare too real for Dante to have imagined. Surviving Galeras artfully blends science writing and history with pure, heart-pounding action. I couldn't stop reading this thrilling account of science on the edge." --MARK BOWDEN, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 034911367X
• ISBN 13: 9780349113678
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288