Sunshine Recorder

Fire, Water, Acid, and Stone

Bernhard Edmaier, a geologist and photographer, has gone places that would make your blood run hot—like directly above an erupting volcano. In his spectacular new book from Phaidon Press, Edmaier skims along the world’s fault lines, camera in hand, and captures the eruption of a 90-year-old lava lake in the Rift Valley, the snow-covered ripples of Mount St. Helen’s lava flow, and a coursing river of fire through a skylight in the Kilauea volcano. But, as geologist Angelika Jung-Huttl reveals in the opening essay, the iconic explosion of fiery lava is only a brief moment in a volcano’s life. Volcanic processes feed agriculture in Africa’s Rift Valley, create lakes of aquamarine acid in Costa Rica, nourish colorful colonies of moss in Iceland, and form stern grey mountains the world over. Even in the absence of eruptions, the markers of Earth’s physical history are everywhere, reminders that this geological era is fleeting and the world is constantly remaking itself.