“Long before there were people to witness them, before oceans
washed across the face of our planet Earth, before life took hold
here, there were volcanoes. They brought glowing energy and
materials from deep within the earth, enriching the environment and
sculpting the landscape. Much of the air we breathe today comes
from the atmospheric building blocks of these early eruptions…”
— Chapter I, “Alien Volcanoes.”
Littleton space artist Michael Carroll says he has always loved
science, but hated math. Solution? He got a degree in graphic arts
from CSU and has studied astronomy, science, NASA and other
photographs that show the surfaces of planets and moons and much
more. He was first introduced to volcanoes at age 11 during a trip
to Hawaii with his parents, he writes.
He is internationally recognized for his skill in depicting
places that are far, far away, enabling those of us who are
earthbound to imagine how it might look out there. One of his
paintings flew on the Russian Mir and another is at the bottom of
the ocean in Russia’s ill-fated Mars 96 spacecraft.
Carroll and his wife Caroline have written and illustrated a
dozen science books for children.
On May 5, he spoke to a thoroughly engaged audience of adults
and kids about his latest project and related book, “Alien
Volcanoes,” at Bemis Library. He conducted the audience on a time
trip starting from the 79 AD. eruption of Vesuvius, as reported by
Pliny the Younger who described the smoke funnel as shaped like a
Mediterranean pine-an umbrella-like form, to a view of the earth’s
newest volcano, Mt. Redoubt in Alaska. “Ever since that (Vesuvius),
we have been trying to figure out what to do about volcanoes,”
Carroll says.
“We live in an exciting time… There are new images every day
from the two Mars Rovers.”
Carroll illustrated his talk with a combination of images, which
are included in the book: his paintings, some earlier art by
others, photos of today’s sites such as Vesuvius, Mt. St. Helen's
and Pele, plus others showing the surfaces of moons and planets,
some filled with volcanoes and lava flows.
A better understanding of the planetary surfaces comes from
visits to the far corners of our planet earth with its varied
landscapes, he says.
His co-author is Dr. Rosaly M. C. Lopez, a Brazilian who is lead
scientist for geophysics and planetary geosciences at NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and investigation scientist for the Titan
Radar Mapper on the Cassini Spacecraft. She has visited many of the
earth’s active volcanoes and studied those on planets and moons in
our solar system, including work on NASA’s Galileo mission to study
Jupiter’s moon Io. Lopez is author of ”The Volcano Adventure
Guide,” the first travel guidebook to volcanoes.
Regarding a photo of a big red spot on Jupiter, thought to be a
volcano, he says that planet is a big ball of gas, with no solid
surface to house a volcano. There are shield volcanoes, which are
“relaxed, subdued, shallow and fairly predictable. Then there are
strato volcanoes, such as Mt. St. Helen’s, which blew its top
violently in 1980.
Carroll showed an 1874 painting of Mt. St. Helen’s with smoke
coming from the side, which people should have noted since that is
how it blew more than 100 years later. Perhaps lives and property
might have been saved.
Other images included dark rivers of lava on our moon; Mercury,
which has a landscape resembling the moon; Soviet landing images of
Venus; Olympus Mons on Mars, which is as large as most of the state
of New Mexico; Gallileo’s telescope which revealed the four moons
of Jupiter to him (he got in serious political trouble for saying
so); icy Europa; undersea volcanoes; Cassini/Huygens images from
Saturn; Neptune’s moon Triton and more…
The artist gets his colors from images when possible, begins
each work with an acrylic painting, which he scans into the
computer for additional refinement with Photoshop.
The colorful results combine with readable text in “Alien
Volcanoes,” published at $30 by Johns Hopkins University Press— or
probably at your neighborhood library.
