Air Date: Week of February 14, 2025

The colorful ceiling of the lava tube with its “basalt fractured into uneven hexagons” arching overhead. (Photo: © Mark Seth Lender)

Escaping the noise of the world can be hard these days, but not impossible. Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence Mark Seth Lender has stumbled upon silent sanctuaries in Iceland and beyond.

Transcript

DOERING: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Jenni Doering

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

Escaping the noise of the world can be hard these days but not impossible. Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence Mark Seth Lender has stumbled upon silent sanctuaries in Iceland and beyond.

The Silence
Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland
*
Marshfield Vermont
© 2024 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

Through the place where I now stand, lava roared. Twenty, thirty kilometers an hour, viscous, four meters thick, the lava tube full completely. Unstoppable. Then, slowly, it drained out. Ripples of molten stone awash as the level fell leaving a crease along the wall and below that another. And another. Like tide marks, every pulse of eruption and subsidence recorded in a coarse surface of lines. Their colors, astonishing. Blue gray, purple black, red cadmium and orange. Basalt fractured into uneven hexagons arches overhead. The only natural illumination, the dim reflection from a white cone made of snow below a small skylight where the roof caved in. All along the floor stalagmites of ice reach up to meet the slow drip, drip, drip of water from above. My headlamp makes the ice glow, like candles, in a place of worship, hidden inside the earth; Memorial to heat long ago returned to the Source.

Now silence rules here.

The silence of the stone deaf:

Tiny bubbles left in the walls of the lava tube swallow sound. Turn off the headlamp, you tumble into it, like freefalling in the blackness of outer space. Even the sibilance of my breathing, vanishes.

I am here. And not here.

Only once have I heard a silence like this. We were coming down Spruce Mountain in the pitch dark. There was no wind, the trees did not move, the tread of our Vibram soled boots muffled by the pine needles. Suddenly I felt the quiet. I put up both my hands. Listen! Listen! In an instant everyone understood. The hiss of our carbide headlamps, even this was too much and we took them down the trail away from us. We sat on the boulders by the side of the trail. We sat, for a long time. Sixty years ago on a mountain in Vermont. Kit Chisolm, Maisey Smith, and me. I am the only one left. But now, there is you. Now you also have that Silence.

DOERING: That’s Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender.

[MUSIC: Blue Dot Sessions “Dolly and Pad”]

DOERING: Hey, Paloma – I think we have time for a quick fun fact… did you know there are lava tubes on the Moon, too?

BELTRAN: Wait… does that mean there are volcanoes on the Moon as well?

DOERING: Yeah, exactly, and they’re also actually shield volcanoes a lot like the one that Mark explored in Iceland, and Medicine Lake Volcano in Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, for that matter. But the really cool part about these lunar lava tubes is that they’re way bigger than the ones on Earth. Like, ten times bigger!

BELTRAN: Whaat? That’s huge! How??

DOERING: I know, right?! Well, so there’s a lot less gravity on the Moon, right? So heavy things like a lava flow are, well, a lot less heavy. So they can just grow bigger. And these lunar lava tubes aren’t just cool – they might even give astronauts some shelter from the harsh lunar radiation, temperature swings and micrometeorites during future missions. But that’s another story, for another day.

BELTRAN: Wow Jenni, fascinating! Thanks for sharing!

DOERING: Hey, thanks for letting me nerd out!

 

Links

More of Mark Seth Lender’s photography can be seen here

Read the Field Note for this essay

Mark’s travel in Iceland was facilitated by Destination: Wildlife