The Island That Keeps Everyone Out

Early on the morning of the fourteenth of November, nineteen sixty-three, a fishing boat called the Ísleifur the Second was out checking its nets. It was south of the Westman Islands, a small cluster off Iceland's southern coast. The cook spotted smoke over the water and called the captain. The captain assumed a boat was on fire and turned to help. There was no boat. What they found was a black column of ash pouring out of the sea. An island was being born.

The eruption lasted almost three and a half years, until the fifth of June, nineteen sixty-seven. By then a mountain of hardened lava and volcanic tuff stood in the ocean, about a hundred and fifty metres high. Icelanders named it Surtsey, after Surtr, a giant from their old sagas who is destined to burn the whole world with fire. It was hard not to feel the legend coming true, with land being made out of flame. But the scientists saw something else. This wasn't the end of the world. It was the chance to watch a world begin.

The rock was still steaming when biologists arrived from the mainland. Their question was simple. What shows up first, and in what order?

You might guess the wind. Seeds are light, after all. But the first arrivals came by sea. In nineteen sixty-four, while the volcano was only resting, botanists found seeds and plant fragments washed up on the shore, carried from other coasts. The pioneer was sea rocket, a plant that can float in salt water for months and still sprout. On the third of June, nineteen sixty-five, its seedlings were spotted in the fresh lava. It was the first plant on the island, and the island wasn't yet two years old.

Then came the birds. Guillemots and fulmars landed on the rocks to rest. They brought seeds from feeding grounds hundreds of kilometres away, tucked in feathers and in droppings. In the autumn of nineteen seventy, the first nests appeared: two belonging to black guillemots, one to a fulmar. And the researchers noticed a pattern early. Where birds nested and fertilised the ground, the plants grew thicker and more varied than where only the wind had sown them. Sixty years later, the numbers backed it up. Seventy-eight species of vascular plants, the kind with proper stems and roots, had taken hold on the island. Most of them, it turned out, were brought by birds. Not by currents, and not by wind, as everyone first assumed. Insects followed, flies, aphids and beetles, some on wings, some just hitching a ride in the plumage of visiting birds.

The island was declared a nature reserve in nineteen sixty-five, when the lava hadn't even finished cooling. Only a handful of scientists may set foot on it, and only with special permission. One stray seed on a boot sole could spoil an experiment that nature itself had set up. Which is why what happened in the summer of nineteen sixty-nine became a small scandal.

An Icelandic botanist named Ágúst Bjarnason was walking his usual plot when he saw something odd in the lava. A sturdy green shoot, about the height of his hand, that clearly didn't belong there. He moved aside two stones and found a soft heap beneath it, the plant's private supply of fertiliser. It was a tomato plant. The explanation was quick and a little embarrassing. A visitor had relieved themselves among the rocks, and a tomato seed had passed through undigested. Bjarnason carefully removed the whole plant, every last leaf, so no trace of that foreign seed stayed in the soil.

Think about it. One careless moment, and a vegetable garden almost took root on the most closely watched island on Earth. The research station made a strict rule after that. Visitors now do their business in the sea, from the boulders on the shore, and never on the land.

But Surtsey doesn't have forever. Fresh, loose lava is washed away by the ocean fastest in the early decades. Right after the eruption the island covered about two and a half square kilometres. By two thousand two, less than one and a half were left. The soft lava fields are vanishing much faster than the hard tuff core at the centre. By two thousand nineteen, almost half of the lava fields had been eroded, while the tuff cone had lost barely a sixth. Estimates of the island's lifespan differ, from a single century to several hundred years. All of them agree on one thing. Sooner or later the waves will grind down even the stone heart of it. Where black guillemots nest today, there will be only a reef under the water.

That might sound like a sad loss for science, a laboratory gone after more than sixty years of watching. The people who study Surtsey don't see it that way. To them, the birth of an island out of nothing, its settlement one patch at a time, and its slow surrender to the sea are three chapters of one story, not a broken experiment. Which fits. The island began the same way, with fire, water, and patient waiting to see who would arrive first.

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