In an earlier show, we talked about how the oral histories of First Nations peoples have played a role in understanding the 1700 megaquake on the Cascadia fault line. Throughout the world, the most ancient stories – and even some of the more modern stories, if 1700 counts as modern – can be used to help us understand the history of our world. In Australia, there are asteroid impact stories associated with their largest crater. Flood myths permeate cultures on most continents and can be linked to various natural disasters. Even volcanoes have their stories told in ways geologists find useful.

A new review article in Eos by Nancy Averett highlights just how much scientists have come to rely on these traditional stories.

If you have ever been to a Hawaiian cultural event, you may even have heard some of these stories. To quote from Averett’s article: In Native Hawaiian Pelehonuamea chants, several verses describe a fight between Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes, and her youngest sister, Hi‘iaka: In a jealous rage, Pele burns the forest that Hi‘iaka loved, then kills her lover and throws him into the Kīlauea volcano. Jumping in, Hi‘iaka starts digging to find him—but carefully; if she digs too deep, water will bubble up and put out the fire of Pele.

This story matches with fifteenth-century eruptions, during which Kīlauea’s east rift zone buried a tropical rainforest, and the mixing of groundwater and magma caused a catastrophic steam explosion that formed the volcano’s modern caldera.

This kind of mixing of ancient stories and geologic data to uncover the past has long been used in Europe, where the volcanism in Greece and Italy has long shaped myths. Tales of the oracle of Delphi point to volcanic gases rising up through that hillside until a large earthquake apparently replumbed the gases’ routes through the rocks, and ends the oracle’s abilities to reach an altered state.

The application of oral and artistic traditions outside Eurasia, however, is relatively new. In a trio of papers, a collaboration between Katherine Cashman and Caroline Williams looked at how artwork from the 1773 Tungurahua volcano eruption to find evidence of how this Ecuadorian volcano reshaped the land and changed the flow of rivers. They also studied the stories of how the 1717 Fuego volcano’s eruption affected the Spanish settlements in Guatemala and was recorded in drawings of magma flows, the colonial government’s documentation of building damage, and eyewitness accounts.

While this wasn’t exactly science by insurance claim report, it was very much science made possible through the documentation of leaders who needed emergency aid from their rulers.

In New Zealand and amongst the Polynesian islands, in particular, the stories of the indigenous people trace the rise and fall of the land as tectonic forces shift and volcanoes build up new land. True fact – the land the Wellington airport now sits on is less than 300 years old. During a massive quake, that land and the land the nearby coastal highway sits on were raised up from the sea.

According to Maori tradition, as recorded by Elsdon Best in the 1900s, eighteen generations earlier, a great quake lifted up this land, creating a bridge from the mainland to what had previously been an island, and is now the present-day Miramar Peninsula. These stories are consistent with sedimentation and other geological data in the region.

I could keep going. I would, in fact, love to fall down this rabbit hole and spend an entire season researching and reporting on how the stories too often set aside as just wild myths actually record the history of our world, from volcanoes and earthquakes to asteroid impacts and supernovae sightings. This is fascinating stuff. Since I can’t actually spend a season on this topic, we will instead provide links on our website, DailySpace.org, so you can fall down this rabbit hole with me.

More Information

Studying Volcanoes through Myths, Legends, & Other Unconventional Data (Eos)

“The 1717 eruption of Volcán de Fuego, Guatemala: Cascading hazards and societal response,” A. A. Hutchison, K. V. Cashman, C. A. Williams, and A. C. Rust, 2016 February 11, Quaternary International

“The 1902 Plinian eruption of Santa María volcano, Guatemala: A new assessment of magnitude and impact using historical sources,” Hannah C. Berry, Katharine V. Cashman, and Caroline A. Williams, 2021 May 2, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research

“Observations of a stratospheric aerosol veil from a tropical volcanic eruption in December 1808: is this the Unknown ∼1809 eruption?“, A. Guevara-Murua et al., 2014 September 16, Climate of the Past