A New Island Rose up From the Sea — Now, Scientists Find Nature Colonizing It Without Human Interruption
A typical morning in Surtsey likely looks like this. A black-backed gull patrolling the shorelines swoops for a fish flopping in and out of the water. Meanwhile, other birds like fulmars, puffins, and kittiwakes are still hovering above the mats of lyme grasses, lady’s bedstraws, and rock cresses, hoping to see an animal washing dead on the shore. A grey seal pops out, looking at everything. It seems unfathomable, almost mysterious, that an island born from fire could possibly hold so much life within it, as geographer Olga Kolbrún Vilmundardóttir reflected in a conversation with The Guardian.
Sitting at the southernmost tip of Iceland, Surtsey sings a bygone tale of a time when Earth beneath the ocean floor ripped in fury and gave birth to a whole new island. Today, as scientists reflect upon the past episode, it reminds them how nature can sustain itself without the least human interference. Nearly six decades ago, a fiery force arrived in the south, carrying withering flames, and within the next few years, it shuddered the Earth, materializing Surtsey, a name Iceland’s people gave to the island, based on the name Surtr, a fire giant in Norse mythology.
The island exploded between 1963 and 1967, looming from the agitated waters rolling in one of the stormiest parts of the Atlantic Ocean. A crew of men aboard a fishing trawler who were crossing the ocean palpitated as they noticed strange swirls of smoke billowing from the water. At first, they dismissed it, thinking that it was just another boat that had caught fire. The eruption cloud suddenly took up arms and leaped to a towering height of 10,000 feet, spitting smoke. Only later, when scientists ambled off to the spot to investigate the mystery, they realized that the eruption was caused by a crack opening up in the ocean floor.
As the crack burst open, the hot molten magmatic material scurrying in the mantle oozed out and started spilling into the cold seawater. The intrusion of this cold material into the hot material caused the resulting material to rise. This material could have easily collapsed or been swept by the winds. But over the years, as lava continued to flow, it blanketed the solidifying material. The island emerged. “The first scientists who stepped on Surtsey in 1964 could see that seeds and plant residues had been washed ashore. Birds were even coming to the island to see what was going on. The eruption was still going on when they spotted the first plant – it was very quick,” Vilmundardóttir, who works for the Natural Science Institute of Iceland, shared with The Guardian.
When scientists first arrived on the island to explore its mystery, they assumed that the newly formed landmass would be carpeted by moss and algae. But if nature isn’t unpredictable, what is? On this fire-born piece of Earth, nature entirely skipped the initial evolutionary stage of moss. Instead, the land directly became a playground where glassy volcanic rocks laid out their intricate, un-patterned art. Initially, even the bird cover was scarce. But then, as the island became more colorful, the critters arrived. Black-backed gulls were the first of them, as Pawel Wasowicz, director of botany at the Natural Science Institute, shared.
Some researchers from Berkeley Lab published a study in Geoscience World, analyzing the volcanic glass of the island. “Surtsey is a window into the oceanic crust,” said Marie Jackson, a research professor at the University of Utah who led the study. In 1965, Surtsey was placed under formal protection by the government, and in 2008, it was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. No sheep are allowed to graze on the island. Humans, neither.
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