3 - A clean slate?

Summary

Volcanic effects on living communities

In this part of the book I attempt to review what is known about the destructive and constructive processes involved in the interaction between volcanoes and living communities, on an ecological rather than an evolutionary timescale. I will pay special attention to those cases on which I have worked, or of which I have been an avid student. I have been greatly assisted by discussions with John Edwards, who kindly sent me the manuscript of his own excellent review on a very similar topic, focusing particularly on his own study area, Mount St Helens (Edwards et al. 1986, Edwards 1988, 1996), Eldon Ball, who encouraged me to try to further his own highly significant work on Motmot and Diamond's classic studies on Long Island off New Guinea, and Sturla Fridriksson, who introduced me to Surtsey and has kept me up to date with his team's fundamentally important precise and intensive long-term studies there. In treating the colonization of Surtsey I have drawn freely from Fridriksson's masterly 1975 and 1994 books and other papers detailing the work of his group, largely published in the Reports of the Surtsey Research Society.

Obviously, volcanic activity can damage and may even destroy natural living communities. But anyone who has visited an extinct volcano will have seen that sooner or later life returns to devastated areas.