Erupting into life
Birth of Mexican volcano inspires scientists 80 years later
SAN JUAN PARANGARICUTIRO, Mexico — The ground is still hot atop the crater of Paricutin — the first volcano of its kind to have its full life cycle documented by modern science when it erupted 80 years ago.
The surrounding vista in western Mexico encompasses pine-clad peaks of older volcanoes, green avocado orchards and a church tower just peeking above where lava buried it decades ago.
Volcanoes are still being born around the globe, and scientists believe another will form in the volcanic field spanning across this region. They just don’t know when.
That’s why about a hundred geologists, volcanologists and seismologists visited Paricutin recently to mark the anniversary, share experiences and talk about how to prevent disaster.
Paricutin’s birth and nine-year eruption were a cornerstone in the study of the relatively small kind of volcano that erupts only once, said Stavros Meletlidis, a Greek researcher at Spain’s National Geographic Institute.
The world’s most famous volcanoes already were thousands of years old when they threw up their catastrophic eruptions: Mount Vesuvius in Italy, which buried Pompeii in 79 A.D., and Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which killed tens of thousands in 1815.
To witness the origin of a new one is rare. It can start with a peculiar noise.
A deep sound is what Meletlidis remembers hearing in September 2021 before seeing the column of gas signaling the emergence of a volcano on Spain’s La Palma island. That was the most recent new volcano to form in a populated area. He and his team had been monitoring it for four years. The eruption was the “last breath” of a process that had begun 10,000 years earlier in the center of the Earth, he said.
Guadalupe Ruiz, 92, remembers hearing such a noise on Feb. 20, 1943, after weeks of small tremors in the western part of Mexico’s Michoacan state.
Then, it felt “like water rising underground,” and, finally in the following days, it was “like a thunderclap or a kick from a horse” as Paricutin’s cone began to form and rocks fell all around, she said.
Ruiz was then a 12-year-old girl in San Juan Parangaricutiro, where she and her neighbors thought it was the end of the world. A farmer came running with his hat covered in ash saying that his corn field had opened up.
“They told us it was hell,” said Ruiz, her long grey hair in braids.
A team of geologists from the U.S. Department of the Interior and Mexican scientists visited the site 20 times between 1943 and 1945 and summarized the eruption in a report more than a decade later. On that initial day, there was a mild explosion followed by “a small eruptive column carrying dust, and some hot stones arose from this new vent,” the report said.