Introduction

Volcanoes can hold a deep fascination. Images of erupting volcanoes grab our attention as we marvel at the sight of the Earth in violent movement, and tourists flock to view steaming craters to sense the enormous energy lying dormant beneath their feet. Volcanoes are often striking features in landscapes of great beauty, and people have been drawn over the centuries to live on their flanks with the promise of verdant agricultural land. But many communities have learned that years of peace can be brutally interrupted by the return of volcanic activity, and in some parts of the world such as Hawaii and Indonesia, volcanoes have even been granted the status of gods.

In most active volcanic areas, however, burgeoning populations have no memory of past eruptions when they recur with intervals of hundreds or thousands of years, and no feeling for the disaster that can lie ahead when the sleeping giant awakes. The destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 has the same hold on the popular imagination as the sinking of the Titanic by an iceberg, with the spectacle of normal living being abruptly halted by catastrophe and the evidence of extinguished life locked deep beneath the ground or sea. The collapse of the Minoan culture after the eruption of Santorini some 3600 years ago is perhaps the stuff of legend, but a huge eruption did occur which buried or swept away the settlements on the island and had impacts on other islands of the Aegean, such as Crete.