All photos © Bernard Edmaier. Mount Merapi at dusk, Central Java, Indonesia.
“Every time a volcano erupts, we are violently reminded that we live on a fireball,” geologist Angelika Jung-Hüttl writes in the introduction to Bernard Edmaier’s new book, Earth on Fire: How Volcanoes Shape Our Planet, recently published by Phaidon. Texts by Jung-Hüttl that discuss how volcanic activity has altered the natural landscape in beautiful and fearsome ways accompany beautiful aerial photographs Edmaier took throughout the world. Photographers will appreciate Edmaier’s large-format images of volcanic eruptions, lava floes and other fiery activity in places like Mount Etna, Sicily, and his more abstract, artistic compositions depicting land formations and other geological phenomena, like the Painted Hills in Oregon’s John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which were formed as layer upon layer of volcanic ash settled in the area millions of years ago.
Exhalation structures, Dallol, Ethiopia. “These delicate bubbles are created by hot, corrosive gasses that emerge from the salty ground of the Dallol geothermal area in northern Ethiopia.”
Painted Hills, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Oregon, USA.
Mælifellsander, Iceland. “Bright green moss has colonized a hill in the middle of Mælifellsandur, a black desert of lava and volcanic ash in the south of Iceland.”
Shiprock, New Mexico, USA.
Nature proving yet again that no matter what we try to create in forms of beauty she will out do us every time, simply awe inspiring captures.
Eirwen