My heart is a subglacial volcano
Mental health at the end of an ice age
When we think about the impacts of climate change, we typically think about alterations in surface processes. Desertification. Wildfires. Ocean acidification. More intense, more frequent hurricanes. Raging ice storms far to the south caused by a warming Arctic pushing cold air fronts towards the equator. Heatwaves. The collapse of ocean circulation. Coral bleaching.
Increasing rates of volcanic eruptions, however, don’t usually play into the images we envision. After all, what impact does a warming atmosphere have on the subterranean storage and eruption of magma?
Possibly, quite a lot.
See, glaciers are heavy. So heavy, in fact, that places like Wisconsin are actually increasing in elevation because the Earth’s crust is still rebounding after the retreat of the great Pleistocene ice sheets 10,000 years ago. You can imagine the Earth’s crust like a trampoline—if you put a big block of ice on said trampoline, it will cause the surface of the trampoline to depress. Remove the block of ice, and the surface of the trampoline will pop back up again. Similarly, the melting of the Ice Age continental glaciers removed a staggering amount of mass from the affected areas of Earth’s crust, areas that are still undergoing uplift today. (This process is called isostatic rebound if you’re nasty.)
But that pressure release doesn’t just lead to crustal uplift. Numerous studies have illustrated that in locations where ice sheets covered volcanoes, the retreat of those ice sheets actually led to increased eruptive activity. For instance, following the deglaciation of Iceland around 12,000 years ago, the rate of volcanic activity increased by a factor of 30 to 50 times for the next 1,500 years (Tuffen, 2010). Some complex geophysical and geochemical processes mediate this process, but for the sake of simplicity, suffice it to say that the rapid depressurization of subglacial volcanoes makes them go boom.
While subglacial volcanoes aren’t crazy common, they also aren’t crazy unusual. Antarctica is home to at least 91 subglacial volcanoes. Iceland’s remnant ice sheets cover eight volcanoes; historical eruptions of these volcanoes have not only released lava and ash, but also destructive floods of lava-melted ice and snow known as jökulhlaups. Besides the volcanic hazards posed by accelerating rates of volcanic activity as ice thins and melts with the warming of the planet, most volcanoes release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases when they erupt, adding volcanic insult to fossil fuel injury.
The coming decades and centuries seem destined to be an exciting time for volcanologists and igneous petrologists. At least someone will be having a good time.
—
By all accounts, 2024 has been a great year for me.
My business has grown and evolved and expanded. I’ve gotten to work on fulfilling, engaging projects with people and organizations creating meaningful, impactful change.
I’ve read 691 books and counting (and yes, I am counting).
I’ve gotten to do quite lot of domestic travel—Moab, New Orleans, Alaska, North Carolina, San Luis Obispo, southern Oregon, Anaheim, Arkansas, D.C.
With the help of a new ADHD diagnosis and subsequent pharmaceutical treatment, I’m actually keeping up with housework instead of just drowning in guilt about how long it’s been since I vacuumed up the cat litter.
The critter-watching has been phenomenal—orcas, bottlenose dolphins, humpback and minke whales, otters, a mink, elephant seals, alligators, well over 200 bird species, and a Black bear that looked directly into my eyes through the open window of my car, nodded her head to me, and trundled quietly back off into the woods. (I don’t really believe in manifesting, but I asked the universe for a bear this year and by goddess, I got that got damn bear.)
My new therapist, Esther, is the badass Jewish lesbian therapist of my dreams. She does absolutely phenomenal work and has helped me more than almost any of the therapists I have had before. She even has two cats, Sammy and Teddy, who frequently join our sessions (and don’t even charge extra for their invaluable contribution in a shockingly selfless move for cats).
I’ve grown connections with a network of mentors who have generously shared their wisdom and expertise and experience with me.
My nephews are adorable. I’ve grown closer to my brother and sister-in-law (shout-out to Ellen over at I’ve Been Thinking About).
Jacob and I are financially stable. (In this economy? Actually, yes. Budgeting + budgeting + generational privilege + aforementioned business success + budgeting. I freaking love YNAB and will enthusiastically tell anyone who does or does not ask. Please sponsor me.)
I’m… flossing??? Regularly??? (?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!)
My community of friends and chosen family has grown stronger and closer. My partner Jacob and I are coming up on nine incredible years together. The years of loneliness I experienced in my teens and twenties have truly become a distant memory.
In so many ways, I’ve arrived at the life I always dreamed I could live. I’ve arrived over a path paved with work, sweat (Zoom sweat), anxiety, sleeplessness, uncertainty, and yes, definitely, privilege. And it is a privilege, a huge privilege, to get to inhabit this space. 2024 has been the first year of my life where I have felt like the life I’m living is by and large aligned with my heart and my values.
But to be fully open and honest, despite it all, I have struggled this year.
My neurotransmitters have been playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes for nearly as long as I can remember. I’ve experienced intermittent periods of intense depressive episodes as far back as third grade, although I didn’t officially receive my major depressive disorder diagnosis until 2013. Sometimes, I’m better. Sometimes, I’m worse. Sometimes, well, I’m significantly worse, and 2024 has been peppered with some rather significantly worse times.
I’ve numbed in and out of derealization. I’ve been hollowed into a howling wind tunnel haunted by the voices of my intrusive thoughts. I’ve ping-ponged between not sleeping at all and not being able to do anything but sleep. Chips started appearing in my teeth after I began grinding them in my sleep. Days, then weeks, then months dragged by where I would eke out one or two hours of functionality a day before I’d fall back into the shapeless shadows.
The dissonance between what is really quite an objectively good life and the emotional reality of slugging facedown through the stinking mud of the valley of the shadow of death has been… perplexing, to put it mildly. Maddening, to put it frankly, especially compared to my friend whose mom died from cancer this year, or the news reminding me that over 43,000 Palestinians have died from the ongoing genocide in Gaza. What gives me the right to feel this shitty when comparatively I am swimming in the sauce2?
Even when I can convince myself to stop competing in the Suffering Olympics, for which there are no events and no medals because it does not exist, I’ve been stalked by the question of why my depression and intrusive thoughts have been wilding with such reckless abandon when I’ve finally gotten to where I wanted to be. Am I just fundamentally broken? Am I permanently screwed in the cerebrum?
Then I started thinking about the subglacial volcanoes. For millennia, they lay quiescent beneath the crushing pressure of kilometers of ice. But within the blink of a geologic eye, they were suddenly unbound, and out, out, out rushed the magmatic melt in great gushing gouts of ash and gas and fire, wreaking catastrophic levels of destruction. Sea levels rose. The ocean deoxygenated.
Basically, shit got fucked.
But then, eventually, slowly-slowly, one or two thousand years down the line, things calmed back down. Things stabilized. A new normal was reached.
I think this is what’s happening to me.
For all of my adult life, I’ve lived under the ice. College was a pressure cooker of forcing all my edges and angles and crookednesses into the rigid religious mold required to survive at the fundamentalist university I did not get a choice in attending. After graduating from that university’s grueling nursing program, I spent the next three years working in an understaffed and under-resourced ICU while simultaneously hard-scrabbling to carve out a coherent identity for myself after a childhood and adolescence characterized by religious authoritarianism. Then I flung myself head-first into another seven-and-a-half years of school, this time in the geosciences; the PhD of it all could provide a whole separate Substack’s worth of trauma-dumps. As that came to a close, I decided to start my own consulting business, because, like, that’s an easy thing to do, right? The ice bore down and down and down.
But now, my Earth is warming. The ice is melting. My crust is isostatically rebounding, dude. And it turns out, there’s a lot of shit built up down there. There’s a lot of mess. I’m realizing I have the proverbial 99 problems of legend (and religious trauma is not only one but at least 95 of them). And now that all the toxic religion and exploitative nursing jobs and chronic loneliness and academic agony have sublimated and evaporated, it’s all rising up to the surface. And like a rash of volcanic eruptions, it is blowing things up.
Kablooie, kiddo.
But… I think that’s okay. After all, the fabled fertility of the Willamette Valley where I make my home is the direct result of geologic catastrophes, from millions of years of basaltic eruptions to the incomprehensibly destructive Missoula floods that repeatedly inundated the valley with hundreds of feet of spilled glacial lake water. I’m learning, or at least learning to learn, how to dance with self-compassion, how to separate productivity from self-worth, how to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves without requiring it to crawl on hands and bloody knees through the desert towards repentance.
I know there’s something on the other side of this vast igneous province, this sea of flood basalts, these ice-freed volcanic traps. I don’t know what it is yet. But on the better days, I can see it winking in the distance, far-off flashes of glowing green.
I take another step. I take another.
Poetry is becoming one of my healing practices. The following explores my experience growing up in a high-control religion.
“The Spiral”
They screwed the spiral into my skull before I had even turned two. They said, “Trust me– this hurts me more than it hurts you.” They spaded the spiral into my spring-soft skull– oh, fuck, the flensing of my flimsy hull, the terrored twisting on the spinning spit– into my skull they screwed the spiral, parents, yes, and all their preachers, teachers, patriarchs, and prophets, all those consecrated keepers of the covenant corkscrew, scripture-sharpened, hemoglobin hewn. They said, “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” but could they not smell the spiral suppurating in my sallowed skull, a special spoilage all my own? They twisted the spiral into my skull. They spiraled the twist into my skull. They said, “This is because we love you, this is us teaching you to obey God”– God, that serrated spiraling sadistic steel screw. And the years spiraled, and spiraled, and slowly, the razored screw grew innervated and germinated. They said (something like), “Screw up a child in the way she should go and in her old age she will twist herself upon the spit.” (Was that in God’s Bible?) They twist no more the spiral now for now it twists itself, self-spinning on its spindle. I twist the spiral into my skull, I spiral the twist into my skull, shove that screw of ragged jagged edges into me, into me, into me.
Heh.
I don’t know what this metaphor is, please don’t ask me.
You write like the forces of nature you write about. Loved this. Hang in there with the meds and the poetry and keep doing this good work cos it means something.
Love every line.