Brown Andy - Why hell stinks of sulfur: mythology and geology of the underworld

WHY HELL STINKS OF SULFUR

Mythology and Geology
of the Underworld

SALOMON KROONENBERG

Translated by Andy Brown

REAKTION BOOKS

For my grandchildren

Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

Waarom de hel naar zwavel stinkt 2011 by Salomon Kroonenberg
Originally published by Uitgeverij Atlas, Amsterdam
English-language translation Reaktion Books 2013
Translated by Andy Brown

This publication has been made possible with financial support
from the Dutch Foundation for Literature

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China
by C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Kroonenberg, Salomon Bernard.
Why hell stinks of sulfur: mythology and geology of the underworld.
1. Earth Internal structure Popular works.
2. Earth Mythology.
3. Hell in literature.
I. Title
551.11-dc23

eISBN: 9781780230542

CONTENTS

ONE

So dark and deep and nebulous it was, try as I might to force my sight below I could not see the shape of anything...

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, IV:1012

W hy did astronomers get to study heaven, and we geologists hell? They can look into space for billions of light years, while we cant even see the moles that destroy the lawns beneath our feet. They go to Mars, but we dont go to the centre of the Earth. Governments spend millions on manned space flight but astronauts have to pay for their own burials. Lovers look up at the Moon, while convicts stare down at the ground. In Paradise we find eternal happiness and in hell the most miserable of deaths. Why do we geologists always come off worst?

I know why: because heaven is transparent and the Earth is not. Evolution has not given us eyes that allow us to see through rock. And in the darkness, people get scared. Thats why hell is underground. If the Earth were transparent, like a giant glass marble, they would spend all day lying flat on their stomachs and looking down at all the activity below them. They would see how moles row laboriously through the soil with their little pink hands. They would see the seeds fighting to be the first to stick their heads above ground in the spring: lungwort, ground ivy and wood anemones. And they would hold a competition to see who could peer the furthest into the depths. People would find the Earth so beautiful that they would want to be cremated rather than buried, so that the soil would remain clean. And they would want to travel to the Earths core.

But the Earth is not transparent. Most of the worlds cultures believe that beneath the surface lies the Underworld, the kingdom of the dead. And yet that underground world contains so much that is beautiful: sparkling ores and metals, magnificent yellow sulfur crusts, blue sapphires, red cinnabar, green malachite, razor-sharp, metres-long gypsum crystals, dripstone caves, subterranean rivers, fragile shells from the dawn of evolution, and the giant bones of extinct monsters.

A one-inch gobstopper, whole and in cross-section.

For geologists, the interior of the Earth is like the inside of a gobstopper, one of those old-fashioned, hard sweets that you can hardly fit into your mouth. On the outside they are white with coloured speckles, but if you suck on one for a while, when you take it out of your mouth, it will be a different colour: blue, green or pink. Each time you suck on it (dont bite it!), you discover a new layer. I bought a few gobstoppers and asked the technician in our lab to cut one through the middle, just as he does with rocks when preparing them for the microscope. Its a perfect representation of the concentric structure of our globe.

It took a long time to discover that the Earth is just like a giant gobstopper. It was not that people had never given any thought to what it looked like under the ground, but myth and science, legend and observation, fear and curiosity are all mixed up together in a fascinating way. None of the heroes I learned about at secondary school who had been to the Underworld and returned ever recounted anything about what it was like. Odysseus, Theseus, Orpheus, Heracles, Aeneas, Dante and many others went down there, usually because of a woman or sometimes just to seek advice or out of curiosity, but they came back without saying anything about all the wonderful things they had seen or what they had learned. They told of seeing sinners splashing around in rivers of pitch, but did not say where the pitch came from. They saw Lucifer stuck in the ice, but did not explain why it was so cold. Gustave Dor (18321883) drew the most fantastic landscapes of Dantes Inferno, but how were those landscapes created? Was it limestone down there, or basalt? And why does hell stink of sulfur?

The Earth as a gobstopper as modern geologists see it.

It is time someone took a look at hell from a geological perspective. So Im going down there to do fieldwork, armed with a hammer and compass, in the footsteps of my heroes. Once Ive found the entrance, Ill descend into hell, a little deeper in each chapter, roughly following the circles of Dantes hell. And Ill give you a detailed report of my journey as long as I succeed in getting out again not because of a macabre sort of oltretomba tourism, but to show how fear and imagination have triumphed over science, and how much imagination we need even now to picture what it must look like down there.

After all, the subsurface remains the most unknown part of our planet, despite the fact that the centre of the Earth is no further away than London is from Chicago. It is also high time to take a closer look at the world beneath our feet, which we drill so many holes in, its a wonder theres any ground left at all. We suck the Earth dry and hollow it out, and fill the gaps with everything and anything we want to hide from the light of day. We store radioactive waste in the ground, while the Earth itself has produced natural nuclear reactors. We pump our last remaining carbon dioxide into empty gas fields, while life itself has deposited 90 per cent of all the original CO2 in the Earths crust in the form of limestone.