Scientists Watch Life Take Shape on Newest Place on Earth--Surtsey : Life sciences: Forbidding volcanic island is kept isolated as a laboratory to monitor how primordial life might have been.
In the early morning darkness on Nov. 14, 1963, a sudden turbulence rocked a fishing vessel 20 miles south of Iceland.
When day broke, the thick smell of sulfur hung over the deck, and a towering column of smoke rose nearby. The crew of the Isleifur II watched as a fiery undersea eruption gave birth to a glowing volcanic island.
That island, now called Surtsey, is the newest place on Earth.
Before the lava cooled, Icelandic scientists decided that Surtsey should be preserved as a natural laboratory.
“I foresaw this was a golden opportunity to see how life would settle on the island,” said Sturla Fridriksson, a biologist at Iceland’s Agricultural Research Institute in Reykjavik.
“I went out there in the first phases of the eruption and saw that birds were already using that dry place. The sea gulls were apparently the first living things to set foot on the island.”
For nearly 30 years now, Surtsey has given scientists a glimpse of what might have happened when life appeared on the primordial Earth billions of years ago.
The latest studies reveal the appearance of the first true plant communities on the island, said Fridriksson, who has studied Surtsey almost from the beginning.
Geologists, too, have an opportunity for unique research.
“This is a chance for people to observe the formation of oceanic crust, except that it’s above the water,” said Kathleen Crane of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., who has spent time on Surtsey. “We know there must be thousands of Surtseys, maybe millions, on the ocean floor, but we can’t see them.”
Surtsey--named after Surtur, a giant in Old Norse mythology who came from the south bearing fire--has been visited by fewer than 100 people.
Access is strictly controlled by a committee of Icelandic scientists. Before stepping foot on the island, visitors are instructed to empty their pockets, shoes and trouser cuffs to prevent accidental importation of seeds.
The island is about 90 minutes by boat from Iceland’s Westmann Islands, a volcanic archipelago off Iceland’s southern coast. Boats can’t dock on the island, so visitors transfer to a small rubber dinghy to get to a black-sand beach littered by driftwood from as far away as Siberia.
“You may even get coconuts here,” said Jon Olafsson, a chemist at Iceland’s Marine Research Institute.
Further inland, the black sand beach gives way to a colorful patchwork of red, yellow, orange and blue soils. Steam curls from gaping vents, or fumaroles. In some spots, volcanic ash has hardened into tuff, a natural concrete. In other places, molten lava has cooled into hazardous fields of jagged black rock, razor-sharp but soft enough to break off in the hand.
Arni Johnsen, now an editor at Iceland’s largest newspaper and a sometime member of Parliament, was recruited to move to the island as caretaker a few months after the eruption began.
His job was to keep intruders away and monitor scientific experiments in between researchers’ visits.
“Sometimes I woke up in the night falling from my bed with the earthquakes,” said Johnsen, who was then 20 years old. “But you get used to it. The island was moving all the time--like a heart.”
Once he was trapped in a lava flow, and had no choice but to make a dash across the molten rock. His shoes burned completely away. “I was in socks when I came off the lava--Icelandic thick wool socks,” he said. “I only burned my feet a little.”
A day after the crew of the Isleifur II spotted the smoke from the eruption, the lava had broken the ocean’s surface, rising 425 feet from the ocean floor in only two days.
Lightning and thunder accompanied the glowing craters, fissures and boiling water.
“The atmosphere was primeval,” said Fridriksson.
The eruption continued for four years. Two other smaller islands also were formed, but quickly disappeared under the pounding of the waves and the wind.
“The wind erosion is important,” said Sveinn Jakobsson, head of the geology department at the Icelandic Museum of Natural History. “This is a very stormy place.”
The assault of the elements is wearing Surtsey down too. When it was formed, it covered 270 hectares, or about one square mile. Now it has shrunk to about three-fourths of that. It also has slumped from a height of 575 feet to about 490 feet.
“It started to diminish very quickly,” said Jakobsson. “Then the rate of erosion went down. During the past five years, it’s something like one hectare per year.”
The erosion also is changing Surtsey’s composition. Geologists observed that certain elements, including sodium, potassium, calcium, aluminum and silica, were leached out of the ash. Iron and titanium weren’t.
The process is just now resulting in the first bits of true soil on the island, Jakobsson said.
Despite the erosion, the island is not likely to disappear as quickly as its two former neighbors, he said.
“What’s going to save Surtsey is the tuff,” he said. “We are pretty certain this island will last for a long time--probably several hundred years, possibly several thousand years.”
Fridriksson made his first discovery a few months after the eruption began.
“I went out there in the spring to see if I could find forms of life,” he said, “and I found seeds of sea rocket and lyme grass.” When he brought them back to his laboratory, they sprouted.
“That was proof they could survive the transport,” he said. He determined that seeds were arriving by way of ocean currents, in the wind and through more unorthodox means.
Some, for example, arrived clinging to “mermaids’ purses,” cast-off egg cases of the flat fish called skates. Snow buntings brought seeds from Scotland in their gizzards.
Fridriksson found the first plant on Surtsey, a lone sea rocket, during the first summer. That was a second milestone.
“It’s one thing to get dispersed to an island, and altogether another thing to be a successful colonist,” he said.
The next milestone Fridriksson searched for was the appearance of permanent colonists. “There are many that have established themselves as single examples and have not been able to multiply,” he said.
Sea sandwort appeared on the island for three or four years before it began producing seeds and became a permanent resident, he said.
Another milestone is just now occurring: The isolated patches of sea sandwort are developing into plant communities.
“Gradually sand drifts into this mat, and it forms a sand dune,” Fridriksson explained. Seeds of lyme grass germinate in the sand, sheltered by the sandwort.
The black-backed sea gull uses the patch for nesting. “It brings in food for the young, and the excrement from the young and the adult bird fertilize the plant,” he said.
Interactions like that are the culmination of nearly 30 years of the development of life on Surtsey, Fridriksson said.
And he expects the island to continue to develop in wondrous, unpredictable ways.
“Whenever you come to Surtsey, you always find something new, something surprising which you haven’t expected,” he said. “It’s a revelation. And it directs one’s thoughts to the origin of life on Earth--and to the fate of life.”
For life on Surtsey eventually will disappear.
“Surtsey will become steeper and smaller,” Fridriksson said. “Finally, it will become just a rock that will be broken up by the waves. . . .
“And that will be the end. Those who study that will be able to tell how a society is built up--and how it’s destroyed.”
