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| The Caldera from the Winery |
The big bang...
It's the start of everything. Isn't
it? Cosmologists would have us believe that about 14 gazzillion
years ago, in one very loud instant, we went from nothing to...
well if not necessarily everything, at least quite a lot of it. And
who knows, they might even be right, but that's not the big bang I'm
on about. My big bang is on a rather more human scale – imaginable
because it happened within the span of human history. It happened
only three and a half thousand years ago – hell from a cosmological
perspective, we can still hear the echo!
The airport
The international airport at Santorini
is insane! Not in the same way as other airports are insane. Other
airports are Machiavellian masterpieces, designed to remove all sense
of place and time before flying you to another place and a different
time zone. While you await the chance to go through the gate you are
bombarded with the opportunity to buy all the things you may have
forgotten and lots of things you probably don't need. Once through
the gate, the onslaught on your holiday spending money intensifies
and the price of a cup of coffee trebles, but the price of Boss by
Hugo Boss becomes tax free. The money haemorrhages from your wallet.
And as the departure boards change with slumber inducing speeds, you
wonder, having gotten up at 4am this morning and being in dire danger
of nodding off, if you will have enough time to get to your gate once
it has been silently announced...
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| The caldera from the plane |
Santorini international airport is
insane because it has none of that! The couple of concourse shops
sell local trinkets, Coca Cola and Lays – How quaint. The waiting
room were we (about 250 of us) crowded for over an hour on the way
back had just about 20 seats – Genius! It is without doubt the
straightest stretch of tarmac on the island and can be clearly seen
as the plane banks around to approach past the mass of Profitas Ilias
– the highest point on the island and one of the few parts that is
not volcanic in origin. The plane bumps down and one has to wonder
if the pilot only does this as a hobby and his actual area of
expertise is dentistry or brick-laying. The runway shuttle bus
arrives and so begins the undignified scramble to (a.) get your
luggage from the overheads, (b.) get out of the plane, shouldering
aside any fellow passengers like a pro-footballer (the American
type), and (c.) get a seat on the shuttle bus for that 2 minute
journey... For those saddo's and losers who are not prepared to take
this affirmative action, there is the indignity of having to stand up
on the shuttle bus! Duh!
In the airport, the customs man barely
acknowledges my passport or even my presence, and then it's out of
the building, into the blazing sun and the chaos of finding our rep.
The reps allocate people to buses depending on their eventual
destination. It's like being in the middle of one of those epic
films with casts of thousands, all of whom are shouting at once –
Chaotic, but with a narrative all the same – where are we going to?
Perissa – on the inexpensive side of the island. The bus
traverses a switchback road through whitewashed villages to to crest
of the island with the mass of Profitas Ilias off to the left before
similar route down the other side. Whitewashed villages turn dusty
and seemingly half finished close up. Vines hunker down close to the
volcanic soil. And Venician windmills march across the horizon.
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| Profitas Ilias from Perissa |
Profitas Ilias is a crumpled piece of
the basement the oldest rocks on Santorini through which all the
volcanic bits burrowed to get to the surface. Looking at it from our
destination, Perissa, one can see the curves of tortured
meta-sediments and the slashes of the controlling faults. Close up
the rocks - marbles, phylites and greywakes speak of their
sedimentary origins – they were once seabed, now they are the
highest oldest point on the island.
Back to the big bang
So back to that big bang. Three and a
half thousand years ago, there was an Island – one of a group of
islands called the Cyclides, sited a couple of hundred kilometers
behind the Hellenic trench were the African plate descends below the
Aegean plate. Back then it had already been the site of several
violent episodes of volcanism, creating an island with an inland
waterway cutting it off from the volcano in the centre. This was a
thriving trading centre at the northern edge of influence of Crete's
famous Minoan civilization. All this started to unravel over about 3
weeks to a month in 1650BC when the island was hit by many
earthquakes and the volcano started to erupt violently. It sent
plumes of smoke, rock and ash into the stratosphere in a so-called
Plinian eruption. The ash settled out under gravity, blanketing the
island, every road, roof, field. One of the major killers in
eruptions is building collapse as ash blankets the roofs of buildings
that are not designed to support the extra weight. The final
cataclysmic eruption is that big bang I'm talking about. It's
arguably the biggest bang in recorded history, and it may have been
due to a caldera forming magma chamber collapse... It could have
been a Phraetomagmatic explosion due to magmatic interaction with sea
water...
The results can be seen all over the
island as a thick (up to 60m thick in some places) pale ash layer
(photo 4). The ash is mixed with rock fragments, pumice,
volcanic bombs and even (as I found) the occasional bit of
pottery. From a the water taxi, you can see how soft the ash
is were it has been wind eroded into weird castles at the shoreline and the nutrients provided by the volcanic ash produce good
wine producing soils. From the inside of the caldera, the successive
layers of ash, pumice and lava can be seen in their magnificence
telling a tale of eruptive activity going back over half a million
years – The biggest bang in recorded history may be the one that
gets talked about, but it was by no means the first.
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| Ash deposits from the 1645BC eruption |
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| Pumice |
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| Volcanic Bomb |
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| Minoan Pottery (maybe) found buried in the ash deposits |
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| Wind sculpted ash castles |
Ghost towns
There are two ghost towns in Santorini.
Akrotiri was the ancient Minoan settlement buried Pompeii style by
the ash from the 1645BC eruption. It was a bustling trade centre,
frozen in place for over 30 centuries. Unlike Pompeii, there are no
bodies, no remains at all. It seems that the the seismic events
preceding the eruptive phase was enough to make the population of a
thriving town abandon it. Today it is under a climate controlled
roof, viewed from carefully placed walkways and viewing points so
that the complexity of Minoan culture and the enormity of the
disaster which overran it can be appreciated.
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| The village shop at Akrotiri |
The second ghost town is from 30
centuries later. Mesa Gonia (the Corner) suffered a similar set of
earth tremors that caused the inhabitants to abandon it completely.
Now residents are moving back, renovating and rebuilding, but they
are cheek and jowl with houses long abandoned and falling into
disrepair, the only people viewing them, the bus loads of tourists.
Some of the houses here are actually built into the soft deposits of
ash from the 1645BC eruption. The irony is as thick as the ash
deposits.
Craters and Lava domes
Nea Kameni – the current volcanic
centre on Santorini is thought to be much smaller that the volcanic
peak responsible for the 1645BC eruption. It has appeared on phases
and stages since 197BC, with it variously poking it's head above the
water in different places at different times before submerging again.
The growth of the current shield volcano really took off after 1866 when the
Georgios lavas spread out over a wide area. The last eruption was in
1950, but don't be fooled, Nea Kameni is only slumbering. The main crater can be
accessed and viewed with ease, lying just south west of the Niki Lava
dome. A tourist path circumnavigates the rim of the crater, and holding ones hand over unassuming holes in the ground near
a small cluster of seismic equipment on the south eastern crater rim betrays the
heat that is not that far below. This is the breath of the beast below... and it's only slumbering...
Lava flows seem
to be blocky affairs – the lava was very sticky dacitic, and it
emerged like tooth paste, the occasional bomb being blasted pout by
the pressures created. This has created a blasted landscape of
black, brown and red rock, some coated in dust, others almost glassy
smooth, some clearly very dense, others strangely light weight. It's
a growing island on which barely anything grows. It's a land of
contradictions.
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| The Main Crater, Nea Kameni |
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| The Niki Lava Dome , Nea Kameni |
Sunsets
Santorini is pretty boastful about its
sunsets. It is as much about the location as about the actual
setting of out nearest star. I have experienced more spectacular
combinations of setting sun and appropriately placed clouds and
pollution induced colouration in the UK. Try the Isle of Harris off
the west coast of Scotland sometime. If you see it from the top of
Clisham – Harris' highest peak, it takes some beating. That said,
the three sunsets I experiences whilst I was there were not bad
efforts. I one I was sat in a cliff top restaurant in the capitol of
the island – Fira – with an enormous ice cream and a view out
into the caldera before me. A strong gusty wind was whipping the sea
surface into little mini tornados amid the surface chop. The view
from romantic Oia (pronounced ear) lacks land reference points unless
you position yourself very carefully. By about 2 hours before
sunset, all the best spots have been taken and in the last half hour
or so, there is a frantic scramble, seemingly by every person in town
to that end of town. There must be a measurable isostatic adjustment
of Santorini every sunset as large portions of the transient
population all gather at one end. Does that end go down and the
other go up? There's a PHD project there I think. Finally, sunset
from a sail boat has everything but land, but who needs land on a
sailboat. The company, the food, the Santorini wine (which is rather
good by the way), that feel of continuous automatic adjustment of
your stance – your sea-legs.
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| Sunset from Fira |
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| Sunset from Oia |
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| Sunset from the sail boat |
Agates
Red Beach is on the shallow side of the
island. No caldera view. Just down the hill from the ruins at
Akrotiri. The iron rich red rocks of the Therasia Shield outcrop as
high loose cliffs above a narrow shingle and sand beach and
aquamarine waters. Sun worshipers arrive from the carpark at the
Akrotiri end, or from the sea via the frequent water taxis. The
water is clear and just the right temperature to cool off in. The
general tempo of the place is relax... soak up the sun... have a
cool drink... So I wander off in search of treasure! Millenia ago,
silica rich fluids seeped through the red rocks, depositing silica in
its most common form - quatrz, but with a twist -layer on microscopic
layer with slightly different chemical contaminants, forming
beautiful, intricate patterns, each one individual, each completely
unique – like little tiny faberge eggs - agate. The patient
obsessive, can sit in the cool of the water at the surf line and pick
slivers and chips of these agates from the shingle – no two of them
the same, yet all equally beautiful. I'm one such obsessive.
