Near the crater
Some people have a strange idea of fun.
Rescuers in Indonesia are searching for a Brazilian tourist who fell while hiking near the crater of Mount Rinjani, an active volcano.
Like that. Why would people want to hike near the crater of an active volcano?
Brazilian media and the woman’s family have identified her as 26-year-old Juliana Marins, who was hiking with a group when she disappeared around 06:30 local time on Saturday (23:30 GMT Friday).
Brazilian authorities said she fell from “a cliff that surrounds the trail next to the volcano’s crater”. Search and rescue attempts have so far been unsuccessful due to the extreme terrain and foggy weather, according to Indonesian authorities.
I don’t know, I guess I’m just a wimp, but I don’t see the appeal of daring extreme terrain to push you off it.
On Monday rescuers were able to locate Ms Marins again, who appeared to have had fallen even further, but had to stop work because of “climate conditions”, according to the family.
Which seems like a good reason not to hike there in the first place, doesn’t it?
In interviews with Brazilian TV network Globo, two members in Ms Marins’s group described the hike as difficult. One said the climb was “really hard” and “it was so cold, it was really, really tough”.
Another said at the time of the accident Ms Marins was at the back of the group hiking with their guide. “It was really early, before sunrise, in bad visibility conditions with just a simple lantern to light up the terrain which was difficult and slippery,” he said.
It was dark, cold, slippery, difficult.
So…go somewhere not quite so risky?
And it’s not just your own “personal” risk, but doing this sort of thing risks the lives of all those who try to find you, rescue you, or recover your body.
Well, there’s this
He Married a Sociopath: Me
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/style/modern-love-he-married-a-sociopath-me.html
More broadly, risk-taking is a behavior; like any behavior, it is driven–mediated–managed–by some mechanism in the brain; plausibly some kind of feedback loop; like any feedback loop it will have a set point, and that set point can vary between individuals. Variations in risk tolerance are easily and commonly observed among humans.
What’s more, you can make a plausibility argument for a non-zero risk tolerance.
Populations grow until they are limited by something–usually the food supply. That keeps the population at subsistence level. A risk-averse individual may be able to survive at subsistence level, but they won’t be able to reproduce, because reproduction requires a surplus: you have to be able to support both yourself and your offspring until they are self-sufficient.
To reproduce, you have to somehow get above subsistence level. One way to do that is to take risks. If the risk pays off, you get the surplus that you need to reproduce. If the risk goes bad, you’re probably dead, but from an evolutionary standpoint that is no worse than surviving without issue. So there is selective pressure for risk-tolerance.
This is true. We cannot live a non-zero risk life. Getting out of bed entails a risk, albeit a small one. Staying in bed has its own risks. We knowingly engage in risky behavior – driving, eating poorly, not exercising enough, smoking (for those who do), drinking (for those who do) – just everyday living.
That being said, I don’t think your argument applies very well to the case at hand, since hiking near an active volcano has not been demonstrated to help improve reproduction. Yes, there may be something in our brain that pushes us to riskier behavior; it may be genetic and it may not. It might have environmental aspects, such as the need for attention one is not getting. But the risk of hiking at the crater of a volcano is a risk to reproduction, not an advantage, and therefore would at best be an indication of a helpful trait exaggerated to the highest degree, to where it is no longer helpful but harmful.
That may have been your point, but if it was, it wasn’t clear.
Among the interesting content of this book is a chapter suggesting that the same problematic psychology was (at least at the time of the incident described therein) prevalent among professional vulcanologists.
Just wondering how recklessness figures into the equation, or our old favorite stupidity. Awareness levels vary, self awareness, situational awareness, risk assessment, headuptheassness, that sort of thing.
We aren’t just informed by possibly faulty risk assessment, but also by intra-tribal trust. This was a group being led by a guide. The guide’s risk assessment would have been adjusted by the need to earn a living; the tourists’ risk assessment would have been modified by being in a group, and trusting both them and the guide.
Minor quibble: in geology-speak, a volcano is active if it is currently erupting or has the potential to erupt in the future… at any point. By convention, any volcano that has erupted at all in the Holocene, i.e. at any point within the last ~11,000 years, is considered active, even if it has been dormant for millennia. According to wiki, this one’s last eruptive activity was in 2016, so, active in the geology sense but not currently experiencing eruptive or pre-eruptive behaviour.
Meh, I would trust my own judgement before I trusted some guide. Maybe that’s just my inner antiauthoritarian talking, but trusting one’s own senses has a lot going for it.
Holms, that’s why the only volcanic crater I ever went close to was one that last erupted 60,000 years ago. Most people wouldn’t even realize, just wandering on to it, that it was a volcano.
I still exercised caution, though there has not even been hints of activity. Since it rained while we were in the crater, and we had to come out quickly because it was an actual storm, not just rain, it was good we were cautious.
Active volcanoes are not good sites for tourism.
I would expect a volcano with no sign of eruption in years would be about as dangerous as any other steep mountainside.
https://calgaryherald.com/news/live-updates-search-continues-for-victims-of-bow-glacier-falls-rockslide
iknklast@3
Genetics doesn’t (usually) control behavior at that level. Genetics gives you an overall disposition to avoid or tolerate risk. That disposition then influences individual behaviors. Some of those behaviors might make babies. Some might get you killed. Natural selection pushes the distribution of the trait in the population towards the break-even point where the two effects balance.
There pretty much have to be people dying in high-risk activities: if there weren’t then the distribution of risk tolerance in the population would shift up until there was.
I obviously don’t recommend taking stupid chances, but I can see the appeal. I visited Iceland in the spring of 2023 specifically to see the Fagradalsfjall volcano erupt. In my case it wasn’t about riskseeking. I simply find volcanoes endlessly facinating. Of course by the time I got there the eruption had decided to take a brake, so I never got to see it. To rub it in about a month later the volcano was erupting again, and someone in my company was there (the bastard!). Anyway, as I understand it, this was a fall accident and had nothing in particular to do with the volcano itself (which is not to suggest that volcanoes are safe!). Mind you, I am attracted to high altitudes as well. I recently fulfilled an old dream of standing on top of Kjeragbolten, a boulder stuck in a gorge 3000 ft. above the Lysefjord in South-Western Norway. In my defense there are no known cases of people dying from falling off the boulder, but the experience is really something!
Steven, trust me, as a biologist, I understand genetics and evolution. I love the Just So Stories. I hate to see them combined, as they so often are.
I have mixed feelings about this story and the discussion. There are a whole bunch of places I would not go, or would only go with significant research and planning. That’s because I’m fortunate to have had a lot of exposure and training about certain types of risk environments and activities in my life. Most of us aren’t trained or experienced in risk assessment though. If you’re told it’s safe, especially a tourist activity, for most people that’s good enough in their minds. There’s also just a bunch of risk that people are not exposed to by and large these days, so they never learn how to assess it, or even think of it.
I live in a country of spectacular beauty. That beauty exists because pretty much every part of the landscape holds significant risks. Volcanism, seismic activity, ice and rock falls, flooding, tsunami and just the weather. It’s all there to grab you when you least expect it, or even when you do. It also means that it you go walking/hiking on any inclined ground you’ll probably be exposed to slippery and unstable ground at some point.
We have volcanoes that I have very limited desire to be within 100km of because there not predictable, even covered in sensors. Then again, our largest city is built in the midst of an active volcanic field that has erupted within historical memory of the local iwi (human footprints have been found between ash layers). Luckily (?) they’re volcanoes that would likely only destroy a suburb or two although the general disruption and health risk would be horrendous.
Getting back to this poor woman. If she even recognised she was at at risk, it might not have been until the moment she slipped. Even if she did realise she was out of her depth, human nature and the choices available to her would have made anything but pressing on very difficult. She might even have been at more risk turning back alone.
I’m not in favour of trying to avoid all risk, but I do think as a society we’ve become very unskilled about risk assessment and preparation, and don’t hold those running experiences to a high enough standard. ironically, one of the main reasons people are unprepared for risks now is that a couple of generations of us have been raised with no significant daily exposure to any risk. nothing teaches like (surviving an) experience.
I didn’t mean to blame the woman who fell, but the whole idea of taking non-mountaineers on a climb as difficult as this one sounds. The “really early, before sunrise, in bad visibility conditions with just a simple lantern to light up the terrain which was difficult and slippery” bit.
I didn’t think you were particularly blaming the woman. Ideally I do think we all need to take more responsibility for our own risk management, but I’m probably screaming into the void at this point given that we’ve largely lost the knack for that. I agree that certain activities, and especially in less regulated countries are needlesly risky. There are a lot of famous mountain climbs I can think of that fall into this exact category (dark, poor lighting, slippery, treacherous footing). In my younger days when I was doing a lot of mountain hiking I wouldn’t jhave blinked. Now I’m older, less fit, less steady on my feet, slower reactions – I’d think pretty hard about it and ask lots of questions first.
Even here in NZ there has been a lot of criticism of adventure tourism. White Island is a perfect example – tourists caught in a phreatic eruption – they should never have been allowed near the place IMO. There have been deaths skydiving, kayaking, jet boating, helicopter site seeing on glaciers. that’s before you get to the tourists who die hiking in our mountains – which happens every year due to falls, drowning, or exposure, especially when doing it solo. NZ has a reasonably regulated industry with a mix of general H&S regulation and often specific regulators for activities involving boats or aircraft for example.
This is turning into a bit of a book, sorry, but When I was a kid and you went into the back country there were usually no signs, barriers or exclusion zones. Now you can’t even get close to some of the places I went as a kid due to chest high barriers and the tracks have been upgraded to wide smooth paths, in one case even asphalted (Punakaiki blow holes). By contrast, in 2015 I was in Iceland. A slippery path above a cliff leading to a waterfall had a short length of rope along the beginning accompanied by a sign that said ‘slippery, take path at your own risk, there is no one to rescue you.’ Message received.
Don’t be sorry, it’s interesting.
*pause to look up White Island*
Holy shit.
Yeah!
Norway is often accused of having a “nanny state”, but when it comes to moving around outdoors, you’re pretty much free to do as you please. In return you are expected to put in a minimum of effort to know what you are doing, and, to be fair, most people do. But there are also horror stories about people showing up for hikes to places like Trolltunga in shorts and flip-flops. I suspect some people are thinking “If it’s legal (especially in Norway!), it must be safe”. Not quite.
Don’t get me started Bjarte. In our mountains it can be a gorgeous day, and snowing or torrential rain that wasn’t forecast two hours later. Plus accidents happen, you turn an ankle or whatever. My wife and I always take a small pack with water, snacks, and a light first aid kit, plus extra clothing in case the worst happens (which it has the odd time). We look at the young ones walking past us in a t-shirt and shorts or yoga gear, sometimes sandals, no extra gear, no water on a multi-hour hike. We figure someone’s wrong and so far we believe it’s not us. Hell, last time we walked up to Lake Tasman there were some Indian women wearing (high-heeled) shoes and clothes and makeup nicer and more expensive than my wife would have worn to a high-end restaurant. She was particularly miffed that they weren’t even sweating!
No WATER??? Are they insane? I take a water bottle with me at all times.
I like this bit of the discussion because I think of Norway and NZ as twins.
I had that exact experience (the torrential rain version) at the top of Kjerag less than a month ago, except that it wasn’t two hours, more like ten minutes.
Re risk taking: Ego is a factor.
Common objections to instituting safety measures or changing how they handle a chemical:
We’ve been handling it this way for years and haven’t had problems. Things have been going fine, no problems, without [safety procedure].
Another common attitude is that people think that they won’t have a mishap* with a chemical because they are careful. They assume they are very careful, certainly more careful, and a better chemist, than those who did have mishaps.
And those who claim they don’t need eye protection because they’ll use their arm or hand to shield their eyes. As if they could raise them quick enough to block the splatter or the broken glass from the reaction vessel flying out of the fume hood at them. Nevermind that broken glass is very sharp and can easily cut human flesh. Even through some types of glove, like the disposable nitrile gloves that are widely used.
*spill, exposure, fire, etc.
I’ve seen multiple incidences of people coming very very close to losing weeks worth of work because they didn’t take some time to follow some safety procedures. Even simple ones that would have taken 10-15 minutes. Them: But it takes time. This would be with a reaction that will take two days, or more, to get from reaction setup to pure compound.
I’ve also noticed that some people just don’t care if their actions increase or create risks for others.
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