Here I am again, the gold bull in Jesse Sisken’s book, “Cavanila’s Choices”. I’ve still got lots to tell you about the story and its intriguing characters as you could tell from the back cover of the book, if you have one. But before I go on, I want to brag about the picture of me that’s on the front cover. I think I look pretty neat there with that sparkle in my red eyes. Maybe it was just a reflection or, who knows, maybe it was all that juicy stuff I got to witness that made them light up.
Anyhow, the story involves the 17th century BCE eruption of the volcano at Santorini (Greeks and others call it Thera), but how violent it was or its local and global effects, I’m not going to say, at least not yet. Instead, I’ll show you some pictures Jesse took on Thera that will give you a clue to what must have happened. The first was taken at a roadside cut where you can see a wall of ash and pumice. Think of it as an incredibly deep snowbank that was once hot and will never melt. And within it, you can see layers of roundish, black rocks of various sizes. Most of those are actually hardened bits of lava shot out from the volcano about three miles away. Imagine a heavy, continuous fall of ash and pumice punctuated by intermittent explosions that sent globs of hot lava into the air that rounded up and hardened enough to not go SPLATT when they landed. Some of those globs were pretty good size. Larger rocks, some quite huge, that had been part of the internally collapsing wall of the volcano were also shot out but that’s a different story.
And you can see in the next picture, modern-day farmers in that area had to remove them from their fields in order to grow their crops. (The picture also shows some grape vines.) They made fences out of the black, melon-size roundish rocks of hardened lava. Some will recognize it’s a lot like what farmers in New England did with the rocks left behind by glaciers to be able to plow their fields. They, too, made fences out of them.
Now think of the hell those bombs, as they are sometimes called, could raise if they were to rain down on a town. Oops!! I’m giving away part Jesse’s story!