A Year Of Wonders

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As extreme weather wreaks havoc around the globe we look at a natural disaster more than 200 hundred years ago that had far-reaching effects. This week, how the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki awed, terrified and disrupted millions around the world and changed the course of history.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Fire and ice exploding as they meet.
0:05.6	The force of nature in full flow is like looking inside a giant geological cooking
0:11.7	pot.
0:13.2	This is as close as we dare go to this huge plume.
0:16.4	Back in 2010, a volcano in Iceland disrupted air travel for about 6 days and caught the
0:22.4	attention of the world.
0:24.0	I'm not going to get this name right, but it's AF-YAR cool.
0:27.6	AF-FLY-YAR-KUR-BALL.
0:30.8	AF-FLY-YAR-KUR-BALL.
0:32.3	AF-FETLA-YAR-KUR-
0:34.0	Am I pronouncing that correctly?
0:35.5	I'm nearly.
0:36.5	It's AF-YAR-LAR-YOKUCH.
0:39.2	There you go.
0:40.0	I'm not going to try that.
0:42.6	He spent a long time practicing that.
0:45.5	This is science journalist Alexandra Witsi and her husband, science writer, Jeff Keneype.
0:51.0	And the book that we wrote, Alex and I, and we're still married.
0:56.2	It is called Island on Fire.
0:59.1	They began working on the book, kind of by accident, when Alex traveled to Iceland to study
1:04.2	this volcano.
1:06.1	This eruption in 2010 had shut down Europe's air flights with its ash for days on end.
	...

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