Far-Flung: Volcanic Furnaces with Ulla Lohmann

After a brief hiatus, we’re back with our series Far-Flung, where we speak to the preeminent landscape and wildlife photographers of our planet about the vistas that have charmed, and more usually, thrilled, their lenses.

Welcome to our hottest edition yet, where Eva Clifford speaks to German photojournalist Ulla Lohmann about her volcanic photography. Lohmann is an expedition photographer and documentary filmmaker. She ventures into places many of us would never dream of going.

As well as photographing 600 metres down inside an active volcano, Ulla has taken photos atop the highest active volcano on the planet: the Ojos del Salado in Chile – which is almost 7,000 metres high.

“I could first hear it. It’s very loud. Like boiling water but a hundred times louder and I could feel it because the earth is trembling; the more you go down into the centre of the Earth the more the ground is shaking. Then there was this lava lake spitting fountains twenty metres above our heads and I remember how hot it was, like dragon breath coming out the volcano and burning my face… It’s like hell – or how you’d imagine hell to be – but to me it’s like heaven because it’s the place I dreamt of being for so long.”

In 2015, Lohmann, who had spent the last decade exploring volcanoes around the world, fulfilled a lifelong dream: venturing inside an active volcano.

When she was eight years old, Ulla’s father took her to the Italian city of Pompeii, the site of one of the most famous volcanoes in the world. Hearing how in 79 CE, the eruption of Mt Vesuvius had showered the ancient city in volcanic ash, Ulla remembers being fascinated by the brute force of nature and she made it her quest to witness an active volcano with her own eyes.

After winning Germany’s prestigious scientific competition ‘Jugend forscht’, Ulla financed a trip around the world with the prize money and reported her adventures for a local magazine. Fortuitously, it was during this trip that she met a National Geographic crew while in the South Pacific and Ulla convinced them to let her tag along as a cook (she had no idea how to cook). During the three-week expedition to the Benbow crater on Vanuatu’s Ambrym island, Ulla fulfilled a childhood dream, but as stood on the smouldering brim of the active volcano, she knew she wouldn’t be satisfied until she ventured inside.  

Ulla was now fuelled by a new determination. She secured a grant to study Natural Resource Management and Photojournalism in Australia and then spent years studying volcanoes, learning to rock climb (through which she met her husband, who proposed to her inside an active volcano), and saving money for equipment. Ulla also studied Bislama, the local language from people in Vanuatu, because she says that was the key element to getting access to the volcano. 

In 2014, she finally made it halfway inside Benbow crater with her assistant Sebastian Hofmann and volcanologist Thomas Boyer – the first people to set foot this deep inside the volcano. But the trip was unsuccessful because as they abseiled down, it began to rain. Immediately they knew this was trouble because when rain falls through the volcanic gases, it becomes acid rain.

“We were 300 metres inside the volcano on tiny ropes 11mm in diameter,” says Ulla. “[When it rains inside the volcano] it’s like pouring battery acid on these ropes; it’s just not good at all so we were scared that the ropes would break.”

The group very nearly got trapped inside the volcano, with no way of getting back out again. In moments like that, I ask Ulla how she manages fear. “I stay very calm,” she says, emphasising the importance of not panicking. “Breathe, think and then act… Usually there is a solution.”

Although they abandoned the first mission, the team was successful when they returned a year later.

If abseiling into a volcano sounds difficult, add to that the amount of things that must be considered as you make your way down: first, you must anchor your ropes correctly as they can slip in the loose volcanic ash, sometimes causing rocks to fall; meanwhile you have to watch out for fumaroles (hot gases emanating from the volcano) which can melt ropes, and also you also have to make sure not to abseil too far down in one go as you might run out of rope. 

Ulla says the tricky part is not the descent, but getting out again. This is because she often carries a lot of gear – not just photographic gear, but scientific gear, as well as protective gear such as heat suits and gas masks as well as a little food and water. 

On their successful trip, the team spent three nights 200 meters inside the crater, sleeping on a ledge with nothing but tiny tents and gas masks to shield them from volcanic fumes and acid rain. After carefully inching their way farther into the volcano’s depths, they reached the bottom where they donned aluminized heat suits and gloves and stood on the rim of a lava lake the width of a football field. There, they watched as it spewed fountains of lava up to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit well above their heads.

While such an endeavour could be considered reckless by some, Ulla and her team had studied the volcano for years and were fully trained alpine climbers. “The type of volcano we went to is actually not that risky if you observe it a long period of time before going down. It’s a volcano with an open lava lake, so that means it’s constantly de-gassing,” explains Ulla. “Volcanoes are basically like a champagne bottle, so you shake it and the pressure builds up and once the pressure is very, very high, you open the cork and it just explodes… [With this type of volcano] it’s like a champagne bottle with the lid open, so there is no pressure building up. So these types of volcanoes are fairly safe to approach.”

Although Ulla will happily venture into the heart of an active volcano, she is terrified of travelling cities by herself at night. “I’ve never taken the subway at night in my home city. It’s one of the safest cities in Germany (Munich). People always laugh when I say I never took the subway or the train or whatever public transport at night… I’m not scared in nature because [it] is predictable. We’ve looked at the volcano for a long time now; we’ve observed it well. The conditions were stable and the elements were under control as much as they ever can be.” 

But of course there are the unforeseeable dangers, such as earthquakes. “[This is a danger that is] always very present in volcanic zones because they [are located on] tectonic faults where the tectonic plates meet…so at these zones earthquakes are abundant. When you encounter an earthquake inside the volcano, it’s not a very good place to be.”

“You also need to wear a gas mask because the gases can become quite dense, but the gas masks don’t protect from the most poisonous gas, carbon monoxide. At first, we didn’t know if there are carbon monoxide gases inside this volcano so we had a measuring device, because that’s a gas that will kill you instantly.”

In spite of all the risks and despite almost being killed, Ulla wouldn’t trade her experiences for anything. As well as feeling humbled, she feels grateful to have experienced the power of nature through photographing volcanoes. 

“The volcano is a place of creation and destruction at the same time because it can create life, but it can also destroy life very, very quickly. So photographing such a monumental thing of course changed me and made me much more patient,” says Ulla. 

“I don’t sweat the small stuff any more because it just doesn’t matter. What matters is that we make an impact, that we leave a footprint, that we try to change the Earth for the better and that we also try to convince others to contribute a small bit. So what I want to do with my photographs is to make people more aware of the environment, that they see how beautiful it is and how important it is to protect it.”

ullalohmann.com

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