Volcanoes

Have you ever been so distracted thinking about Volcanoes that you aren’t able to work?

I have. Yesterday I was trying to edit book 3: The Treasure of Biscayne Bay, but I kept thinking about Volcanos. I wasn’t worried about them. I wasn’t considering a blog debunking all of the ‘YELLOWSTONE IS ABOUT TO BLOW!!!’ videos I’ve seen over the years. I wasn’t, closely, following the events in Iceland, where a 2.5 mile fissure opened up spewing lava 100s of feet into the air.

I was just, in general, thinking about volcanos. I’m a writer by current trade and a teacher most frequently, but I’m a geologist by schooling. (Just a B.S.) Even so, I don’t think about volcanoes a lot. Yesterday, it was simply distracting. I was trying to edit the Biscayne Book, but I was thinking about Volcanoes. This may come as a surprise, but there is not a lot of volcanic activity in southern Florida. (Where Biscayne National Park is Located. In fact, I’m confident in stating that, in the last 2,000 years, there have been exactly 0 volcanoes in all of Florida.

We can probably go back millions of years, and keep the same basic statement. Why?

Because, Florida isn’t located near any of the tectonic activity which produces volcanoes. We need plates, not the type you eat with- the type the Earth’s crust is made up of. Oceanic or continental, it doesn’t matter. But we need to be near the edge of 2 or more plates, and they have to be doing something. Separating, which is what’s happening in Iceland, and the African Rift Valley. <— it’s in the name for the second one. Sliding against each other - like the entire Ring of Fire in the Pacific (I know that region is more complicated but this blog isn’t about this.) Or one plate sliding under another, like the Pacific Plate beneath the North American, which causes the volcanoes around the Washington and Oregon Coast. But Florida isn’t on a plate boundary, and it hasn’t been for a very, geologically, long time. Modern Florida is sitting in the middle of a plate, and made of sediments which have collected in the low points.

Dig down deep enough, and you can find remnants of periods when the area now known as Florida was volcanically active, but you would have to dig hundreds, if not thousands, of meters. (I could research, but I’m not going to.) The only hope for a Florida volcano these days is a Hot Spot. Dig down deep enough anywhere, and you eventually get magma. This is why we get volcanoes on boundaries. That magma likes to slip up through the cracks and seams. (or through weakened crust.) But sometimes down way deeper than that, random magma bubbles pop to the surface in the radomest of places. Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific Plate, but it has volcanoes. Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, and Arkansas all have their own random volcanoes too.

So a volcano in Florida isn’t impossible, right?

Well, geologic events move on a geologic timescale. A hotspot might bubble up under Florida at some point, but we’d have years, decades, centuries or more of forewarning about that.

Blah! This isn’t my volcano blog! I’m too lazy to illustrate that today. I’ll save it for when I’m writing a book about volcanic parks.

All of that was to explain one simple fact. Florida doesn’t have volcanoes, it hasn’t had volcanoes for millions of years, and it wont have any volcanoes anytime soon.

Except…

When you are distracted, thinking about volcanoes, and randomly google Volcanos in Florida instead of editing, you come across a story. A Wikipedia article with links and everything, and a name.

The Wakulla Volcano.

An impossibility. I just wasted a whole lot of paragraphs describing something I plan to describe better later, with illustrations, all to tell you that volcanos in Florida are impossible, and yet, a volcano in Florida appears! . . . online.

I’m linking to the wikipedia article here. And I would also recommend checking out the third external link provided: Lurking in the Swamps, because they have done a lot of legwork. They have quotes, have traced documents, and will give a much more in depth version of the story than I will. I, am going to be purposefully lazy so that anyone intrigued will have to check them out.

However,

Here is my brief narrative of the story.

There are no volcanoes in Florida. The geology isn’t right, at all. And yet, out of the swamps of Wakulla county, in the mid-late 1800s, stories arose of smoke, fog, and occasional flares of light coming from the midst of an impenetrable tract of forest and swamp. Seminole people were the first to tell stories about it. White settlers attributed the smoke to an indigenous camp, or to pirates. They all avoided it, purposefully, or simply because the land surrounding the smoke was harsh terrain and the risk/challenge of crossing it was not worth the satiation of anyone’s curiousity. (I wouldn’t want to slog through miles of alligator and mosquito infested swamp just to stumble into a pirate camp.)

The smoke continued to billow out of the ground, growing and shrinking, occasionally punctuated by flares of light into the Civil War. It could be seen from as much as twenty miles away. And there are accounts that Union Blockade ships shelled the position, thinking it a rebel camp. Stories coming out as late as the 1890s discuss the smoke, and offer a plausible, for the time, explanation: a previously undiscovered volcano sitting in the middle of Florida. Finally, an expedition was mounted, to push through the swamp, to hack, slash and slog their way to the epicenter of the action.

A group of men set out, and began to cut into the swamp. They were prepared for everything but a Florida swamp. Exhausting themselves cutting through vegetation, steaming themselves in the sweltering heat, and exposing themselves to who knows how many mosquitos, they gave up. Only the expedition’s leader, and one more slogged on. And they reached the beginning of a mile wide rise. High land marking impassible territory. Giving up themselves.

Later accounts of the incident describe an encounter with an ““inverted cone of rock hundreds of feet high”” - we’re like 2 quote levels deep here, read about this encounter in Lurking in the Swamp. They witnessed ash, scoria, pumice, and other volcanically inclined terminology. They had found it… The Florida Volcano!

*Artistic Rendering

They had found it. . .!

Only, they hadn’t. The actual leader of the expedition gave up. The rest of the expedition had bled out long before, so who could have seen this volcano?

No one.

A later expedition reached the source, or close enough to it to identify the cause of the smoke. That man writes of holes in the ground hollowed out by fire, the smell of dead fish, and sulfur, and lots of vegetative mass. He also describes a few fires erupting, lots of smoke and other things you’ll have to read about elsewhere.

And this is where we get our best impression of what the Florida Volcano is actually. Or was, the reports of smoke dwindled out at the turn of the 20th century. It had never been a volcano. Instead it was a fire, a long running peat fire, which continued burning through the marshy ‘vegetative mass’ within the swamp until it burned itself out.

There was never a Florida volcano, only a smoldering swamp, with occasional bouts of flame. Still though, it makes for an interesting distraction, and quite the fun tale.

And that’s what I will leave you with for the holidays. 1 volcano, that isn’t really a volcano at all, but lived for a while in the hearts of early American press as one.

Now. I have to get back to editing!

Hope you are doing well! Take care!

The only picture of a real volcano I could fine on my phone in short notice. Sunset Crater, in Wupatki.