Lava’s in the air

How a new documentary pays a quirky homage to two pioneering French volcanologists.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Maurice and Katia Krafft’s marriage was always on shaky ground. Sometimes not so much shaky, as wobbly, red hot and liquid. The French field volcanologists became stars at home and abroad during the 1970s and 1980s for their filmed exploits as they captured racing lava flows or massive dancing-fountain eruptions or peered over crater rims.

They were geology’s answer to Jacques Cousteau, becoming international volcano chasers, packing their silver heat suits and flying off to observe volcanic activity and sample its chemistry wherever it was happening – including at least one New Zealand expedition in the mid-1980s.

When they weren’t dodging flaming rocks or getting scalded underfoot, they wrote books, did lecture tours, appeared on television and – according to the new documentary Fire of Love – did much existential thinking about their place on this fiery planet of ours, given their repeated exposure to its geo-power.

Theirs, says the film, was a happy adventurous life together. One in which both embraced the risks of their chosen occupation philosophically and one which was duly cut short.

They died in southern Japan in 1991, while observing an eruption on Mt Unzen on the island of Kyushu. A pyroclastic flow of ash, gas and rocks swept down the mountain killing 41 other people as well, all within an evacuation zone. When the bodies were recovered, the Kraffts had been the closest to the collapsed lava dome.