Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes

  • Simon Lamb
Princeton University Press: 2004. 336 pp. $29.95, £19.95 0691115966 | ISBN: 0-691-11596-6
Credit: CHRISTIAN DARKIN

Devil in the Mountain is the fascinating story of geologist Simon Lamb's quest to understand how the high Andes formed. It includes a wealth of real-life, even harrowing, anecdotes of fieldwork, mixed with colourful descriptions of Bolivian culture. This engrossing and well-written book focuses on deciphering how the modern Andes, and high mountains in general, took shape on the surface of the Earth. Lamb parses the Andean story for us, piece by piece, as he came to understand the process. The reader travels with him by Toyota Land Cruiser through the Bolivian Andes as he sorts through the clues to their growth. We share with him his experiences in New Zealand and Scotland, his opportune conversations with fellow scientists, and a host of other disparate threads that became the building blocks of his understanding of how high mountains are formed.

The story unfolds in the central Andes, the highest and widest part of the Andean chain that runs the length of western South America. Here the great volcanic peaks of the Western Cordillera and the tectonically folded and faulted ranges of the high Eastern Cordillera are split from one another by one of the world's greatest plateaux, the altiplano, situated an imposing 4,000 metres above sea level. Lamb staked out his territory in 1989 in the Eastern Cordillera of Bolivia, and he and his students embarked on a protracted study to understand what drove the Andes to such great heights.

Lamb begins by explaining how he came to study the Andes in the first place, and the origins of the book's title — a reference to the evil underground spirits that Bolivian miners believe decide the fate of each mine, and which they appease with a statue and offerings at the mine entrance. Then we divert to northern Scotland where Lamb introduces the enigma not just of mountain building but of Earth's evolution itself, starting with the early scientific breakthroughs that revealed deep geologic time and thence along the tortuous path of scientific ideas to the dawn of plate tectonics. The narrative of Lamb's own journey of discovery is inextricably linked to plate tectonics, which lies at the heart of all understanding of the Andes.

Lamb's writing is engaging and clear, making for a thoroughly accessible book. He is at his best showing how geologists decipher the clues hidden in outcrops and the landscape. Even when he tackles esoteric areas of geophysics and dynamical modelling far from his own field of expertise, Lamb exhibits an enviable facility for simplifying complex and, in some cases, quite controversial ideas. He has keen insight into Bolivian geology and a sympathetic eye for local culture. His description of his first visit to La Paz was eerily reminiscent of my own experience some 20 years earlier — from the out-of-breath climb to the seismic Observatorio San Calixto and the indispensable meeting with its director, Father Cabré, to the struggles over drafting a formal agreement, or convenio, with the Bolivian Geological Survey.

Amid all the hazards and exhilaration of fieldwork in a distant land, Lamb succeeds in capturing Bolivia: the pervasive smell of diesel fumes mixed with an aroma of urine in the streets of La Paz; the “thirty-six signatures, several from the same official” required to get equipment through customs; the endless efforts to keep dilapidated vehicles running on atrocious roads at high altitude; the bewildering networks of rutted tracks in the altiplano that go nowhere; the omnipresent military checkpoints; and the almost unbelievably hard life of the average Bolivian miner or campesino.

As a popular account of Andean formation, Devil in the Mountain makes compelling reading. Lamb has done a masterful job in piecing together the Andean puzzle in a way that seems to make perfect sense. Nonetheless, from a strictly scientific point of view, his highly personalized take on the origins of the Andes contains numerous controversial ideas, and the scientific community remains split on many key questions. Lamb reveals throughout a strong Oxbridge-centrism (he is, after all, an Oxford lecturer with a PhD from Cambridge) that dominates many of the ‘big picture’ sections in the later chapters. Moreover, the same big picture that makes sense in one part of the Andes may not do so in another. To his credit, he is well aware of the unfortunate way in which research into the Andes has been compartmentalized over the years, and has worked harder than most to escape the provincial thinking that comes with it.

Only occasionally does he stumble outright, for example when he seemed unaware in 1995 that seismic and gravity studies had shown 25 years previously that a deep root beneath the Andes compensated for the high elevations. Overall, however, these few reservations seem to be relatively minor grains of salt to swallow. Despite many personal quibbles of my own, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which in the end is a fair and plausible account of how high mountains are born and how they die — and even, perhaps, how they affect the life of the planet.