The Last Days of St Pierre by Ernest Zebrowski Jr, Rutgers University Press,
£22.50, ISBN 0813530415
IT IS all too easy, as a geologist, to be so carried away by the fascination
of natural disasters that you forget the human cost. The eruption of Mount
Pelée a hundred years ago on the island of Martinique in the Antilles is
often cited as an example of an eruption producing pyroclastic surges—the
turbulent, hot avalanches of ash and gas that can travel kilometres from
erupting volcanoes at speeds of hundreds of kilometres per hour. One such surge
overran the town…
