There was a time when photographing lava rivers was not as easy as we are seeing in recent weeks in the eruption of Cumbre Vieja, La Palma. State-of-the-art drones and equipment are giving us amazing images that were impossible barely half a century ago. In this article we talk about two pioneers in volcanological photography who died doing their work: the French couple formed by Katia and Maurice Krafft.
Katia and her husband Maurice met at the University of Strasbourg. Almost with one hand in front and the other behind they saved up to go to study the Stromboli volcano, located on the Italian island of the same name, very close to Sicily. They quickly saw that people were interested in their graphic documentation, so they became a vulcanological outreach front that is still alive, like all those images that have remained for the memory. One of his many books showed how volcanologists approached the lava of Stromboli. “The volcanoes and their secrets”, a 1984 book in which fiberglass helmets were already used to protect the head and neck from the volcanic bombs of this volcano that has been alive since 1932. They were experts in security measures, even though they both died in a volcano eruption.
Volcanic bombs are fired at such a speed that they can reach kilometers and often even arrive solidified. It was a matter very studied by the marriage. This type of object can take different forms depending on various factors. Bread crust bombs, for example, are the ones that solidify during flight and develop cracks on the surface. But others do not fully solidify and are still plastic. The latter are known by a rather unpleasant name: cow dung or cow dung bombs. The Kraffts were able to get close enough and expose the film to capture the trajectories of those potentially killer bombs. And they captured the image in such a way that perfect parabolic trajectories can be seen in their photographs from the 1980s. But this goes beyond entertainment for physicists, as this type of visual document is used to calculate the safety zone that volcanologists must respect. Although it seems reckless: you are safer under the curve than in remote areas, which is where the bombs fall.
It is not common for a French woman born in 1942 to decide at the age of six to become a volcanologist. She was an extremely curious and misfit girl for her time. For example, she liked to play soccer with the boys. The mother thought at all times that she would be a teacher, like her because “it is a suitable female profession.” At the age of thirteen, he went with his family on a trip to the Massif Central (France) and it was his first visual contact with extinct volcanoes. The following year she informed her parents of her aspirations for the future: she wanted to be a volcanologist. It was 1956 and her parents did not take her seriously. So she studied to become a high school math and science teacher for three years. In 1960 he traveled to Sicily with the family and there he met Etna and the ruins of Pompeii, destroyed by Vesuvius. Shortly before, he had seen the documentary film Les Rendez-vous du diable, where geologist Haroun Tazieff filmed active volcanoes in Europe, Indonesia, Japan, Central America, South America, and the Great Lakes of Africa. So with this cocktail of adrenaline through the volcanoes, he finally enrolled in Strasbourg, where he met Maurice. It was in 1966, through a mutual friend named Roland Haas, at the café de la Victoire, in Strasbourg.
The couple visited dozens of volcanoes in the 70s and 80s, putting their lives in danger on multiple occasions, being known to be the first to reach many eruptions and the last to leave the place. When they spent fifteen days taking measurements in the Virunga volcano chain in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he came to describe his emotional state with the following words: “It is as if you were in the bowels of the Earth. I am nothing. It is a very pleasant sensation: you are nothing when you are near a volcano ”. And so it was, everything went wrong in 1991.
In June of that year he went to document the eruptions on Mount Unzen (Japan), together with his colleague Harry Glicken. They were about to leave, because the weather conditions and government impediments did not allow them to do their work. Just when they were about to go to the Philippines to attend the Pinatubo eruption, they decided to try again an approach to Unzen. At around 4:00 PM, half of the dome collapsed, with about 500,000 cubic meters of rock. The pyroclastic current reached the location of the Kraffts before they had time to reach safety. Forty-three people died, including taxi drivers, firefighters and journalists. It was the end for Katia Krafft, Maurice Krafft and Harry Glicken. The truth is that despite the security measures, they lost their fear of death, if they ever had it. When Maurice was once asked how he felt about eruptions, he replied: “the same as you feel about an erection.” And he made it very clear, possibly speaking for both of us:
“With all the risks we take, it would be a real shame to die in our beds.”
