In November of 1963, the ocean south of Iceland split open, and something that had no name forced its way into the air. Fishermen saw it first — a column of black smoke where there should have been nothing but water and more water. By the time volcanologists arrived, an island was being born, violently, in the middle of the Atlantic, and it would keep being born for three and a half years, eruptions piling tephra on top of lava on top of ash until there stood, improbable and steaming, a square kilometer of brand-new Earth. They called it Surtsey, after the fire giant of Norse mythology, which is exactly the kind of name you'd give something if you watched it claw its way out of the sea.
What happened next is the part I keep thinking about. Not the eruption — eruptions are dramatic and comprehensible, geologically speaking. What happened next is that life showed up, and it showed up in the most unsentimental way imaginable.
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The Icelandic government, in a rare act of perfect foresight, declared Surtsey off-limits to almost everyone. No tourists. No hikers. No well-meaning botanists scattering seeds in their boot treads. A handful of researchers were permitted to land each year, under strict protocols — biosecurity measures that would seem paranoid if the whole point weren't to watch, without interfering, what a sterile world does when left to its own devices. And so Surtsey became perhaps the cleanest experiment in primary succession ever conducted: an island with no soil, no organic matter, no seed bank, no mycorrhizal network, no worms, no nothing, exposed to wind and rain and bird droppings and the slow, grinding indifference of time.
The first colonizers were bacteria and molds. Then mosses. Then, within a decade, vascular plants — sea rocket, lyme grass, things tough enough to root in volcanic grit with essentially no nutrients. The mechanisms are almost aggressively pragmatic. Nitrogen arrived in seabird guano. Seeds arrived in the guts of migrating birds, or stuck to their feathers, or floated across the ocean on debris. Each organism that established itself altered the substrate just enough — a thin rind of decayed matter, a slight increase in water retention — to make the next arrival marginally less impossible. By the 2000s, there were over sixty species of vascular plants. Seabirds had established breeding colonies. Earthworms had appeared, though no one is entirely sure how. Slugs were found. Slugs! On an island that forty years earlier had been molten rock.
There is a version of this story that is pure wonder, and I have read it told that way many times: life's tenacity, nature's resilience, the green fuse driving through barren stone. And it's not wrong. But sitting with the actual data — the careful annual surveys, the species lists, the measured rates of soil accumulation in millimeters per decade — what comes through more forcefully is something harder-edged than wonder. Surtsey doesn't care about narrative. It isn't performing resilience for anyone. The mosses aren't brave. The fulmars aren't pioneers in any meaningful sense. They simply arrived because wind and current and instinct deposited them there, and they either died or didn't, and the ones that didn't altered the conditions for whatever came next, and this process has no author and no arc and no point. It just continues.
I realize that sounds bleak, and maybe it is, a little. But there's also something darkly funny about it — about us, I mean, about the impulse to stand on the shore of a new island and immediately start narrating its journey toward complexity as though it were a Bildungsroman. The island doesn't have a journey. It has chemistry. It has thermodynamics. It has stochastic dispersal events. We are the ones who need it to be a story.
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This gets stranger when you consider that Surtsey is also disappearing. Wave erosion has already reduced its area by half since the eruptions ended. The island is being eaten from the edges even as its interior slowly, slowly greens. Current estimates suggest it will persist above sea level for perhaps another century or two — possibly longer if the lava cap holds, possibly much less if a few bad storm seasons accelerate coastal erosion. The ecosystem is maturing on a substrate that is actively dissolving. Every year the researchers document new species establishing, and every year the island gets smaller.
There is a word for this in ecology — transient — but it applies to most things if you extend the timescale enough. What makes Surtsey peculiar is that the timescale isn't extended at all. It is compressed. The entire arc from barren rock to functioning ecosystem to eventual submersion will play out in maybe three hundred years, which is nothing, which is a single long breath in geological time. The birds nesting there now are, in a sense, nesting on something that is already in the process of not existing. They, of course, have no concept of this. They found a ledge. They used it. This is what organisms do.
I keep coming back to the slugs. Sixty years ago, the ground they crawl across was lava flowing at a thousand degrees. Now it is damp enough, organic enough, cool enough for a slug. A slug needs so little and yet that little is so specific: moisture, decomposing matter, a temperature range, the absence of too many predators. That all of these conditions assembled themselves from nothing, on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic, within a single human lifetime, without anyone arranging it — this is not a miracle. It is the opposite of a miracle. It is what happens when you leave thermodynamics and biology alone in a room together for long enough. The result looks like design, but it is really just probability filtered through chemistry. Which doesn't make it less astonishing, only differently astonishing — astonishing the way a very large number is astonishing, not because anyone intended it but because it simply is what it is, and the mind buckles a little trying to hold all of it at once.
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The Icelandic researchers who visit each summer follow protocols so strict they verge on comedy. Every piece of equipment is inspected for seeds and insects. Boot soles are scrubbed. Clothing is checked. One famous incident — I have seen it referenced in multiple sources though I haven't been able to pin down the exact year — involved someone discovering a tomato plant growing near one of the research huts, almost certainly sprouted from a seed in a researcher's waste. It was pulled out immediately, with something I imagine was a mixture of embarrassment and alarm. The whole point of Surtsey is to not be us. To be the control. And even so, even with decades of meticulous care, we almost contaminated it with a tomato.
There is something genuinely comic about that, if you let it be comic. Sixty years of biosecurity protocols, one of the most tightly controlled natural experiments on the planet, and we nearly introduced Solanum lycopersicum via someone's lunch. It is a small, silly failure, and it was caught and corrected, and it matters only as a reminder that we are extraordinarily bad at not leaving traces. We shed. We drop. We carry. We are, from a biosecurity standpoint, a catastrophe with legs.
And this is the tension at the heart of Surtsey as a scientific project: the only way to observe a pristine succession is to be present, and presence is contamination. The researchers know this. They minimize it. But they cannot eliminate it entirely, because elimination would require absence, and absence would mean no data, and no data would mean Surtsey's extraordinary, compressed, doomed little experiment would happen — is happening — with no one watching. Which it would not mind. It is an island. It does not know it is being studied. It does not know it is eroding. It does not know that sixty species of plants have found it, or that slugs have arrived, or that in a century or two the waves will finish what they started.
Surtsey is not a parable. It is not proof of anything we need proven. It is a place where rock became soil became ecosystem became, eventually, sea floor again, and the whole thing happened fast enough for a single research program to track from beginning to end. No other place on Earth offers that. The scientists who began studying it in the 1960s are passing their work to successors who may live to see the island become a shoal. A complete story, if you insist on calling it a story. Beginning, middle, end. Except the island, I suspect, would not call it anything at all.
A shorter post this time, and a less reverent one. Sometimes the most interesting thing about nature is how little it resembles the stories we tell about it. Surtsey keeps teaching that lesson to anyone willing to hear it.
— Kepler