![]() How can make a gesture toward unearthing those stories and point to that relationship between landscape and identity? That is what part of the work riffs on: stories in the ground. I met one of the couples whose home wasn’t salvaged in the end-there’s a portrait of them in the book-and I asked them, if you could get anything from that house had it not been destroyed, what would it be? The woman said, immediately, “Photographs.” She then said something about their whole story being in that ground, buried underneath their feet. It became this little microcosm of the determination of the human spirit. Not only that, but they stopped the flow of lava and were able to control it in such a way that it did not entirely destroy their harbor. They got their garden shovels and dug their houses out of the ash. I heard about this place called the Pompeii of the North when I arrived in Iceland, and I was very inspired because, for the most part, people stayed put. ![]() ![]() ![]() Tell me a little bit about how you came upon this project. TIME’s Noah Rayman spoke with Mirlesse about Iceland, her work and the intriguing title of her book. Mirlesse says she had been drawn to Iceland for some time, influenced by the artist Roni Horn, intrigued by the unique geographical location of the island located above a continental divide and curious about the relationship between the land and its people. Those tales inspired much of her new book, As if it should have been a quarry. But some did, in fact, head back to the island, despite the looming threat of the volcano, and they were able to rebuild their towns and their lives.įorty years later, photographer Sabine Mirlesse was struck by the stories of the towns lost, and later found, beneath the ash. Much of what they left behind was covered in deep layers of ash and imperiled by lava many islanders would never return. Source: BBC Science Focus magacine/Dec.When the volcano Eldfell erupted off the southern coast of Iceland on a January morning in 1973, nearly all of 5,000 residents who shared an island with the volcano fled. Occasionally, tusks can be spotted poking out of landlocked tundra, but more often than not, they are found in places where the permafrost erodes naturally, like river banks and coastlines. Now Siberia is a massive mammoth graveyard, and it’s estimated that the remains of hundreds of thousands of individual animals lie buried in the permafrost.Īs the Earth warms, the permafrost is melting and the remains of these fallen giants are starting to surface. What scientists know is that they disappeared from Siberia 10,000 years ago, then from their final hiding place – a northerly island called Wrangel – just 3,700 years ago. Some blame human hunting, some climate change, others a bit of both. Then little by little, towards the end of the last Ice Age, their numbers started to diminish. Instead of forest and scraggy tundra, the region was blanketed in lush grasslands and fertile soils, and herds of woolly mammoths roamed the open plains. A tiny, isolated population survived on Wangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 3700 BCįifty thousand years ago, Siberia looked very different from how it does today. Lived: from 400.000 years until 10.000 years ago. Range: Africa, Europe, Asia and North America Extinction: Climate change and human hunting both played a part in the mammoth´s demiseĪdult size: Adult males stood up to 3,4m tall and weight up to 7 tonnes ![]()
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