Paricutin Volcano in Mexico

On the afternoon of February 20, 1943, Dionisio Pulido, a farmer in the Mexican state of Michoacán, was readying his fields for spring sowing when the ground nearby opened in a fissure about 150 fee long. "I then felt a thunder," he recalled later, "the trees trembled, and is was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised it self 2 or 21/2 meters high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust–gray, like ashes–began to rise, with a hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulphur. I then became greatly frightened and tried to help unyoke one of the ox teams."

Virtually under the farmer's feet, a volcano was being born. Pulido and the handful of other witnesses fled. By the next morning, when he returned, the cone had grown to a height of 30 feet and was "hurling out rocks with great violence." During the day, the come grew another 120 feet. That night, incandescent bombs blew more than 1,000 feet up into the darkness, and a slaglike mass of lava rolled over Pulido's cornfields.

The scientific world was almost as stunned as the hapless farmer himself by the volcano's sudden appearance. Around the world, volcanic eruptions are commonplace, but the birth of an entirely new volcano, marked by the arrival at the earth's surface of a distinct vent from the magma chamber, is genuinely rare. In North America, only two new volcanoes have appeared in historic times. One of them was western Mexico's Jorullo, born in 1759 some 50 miles southeast of Dionisio Pulido's property. The second, born about 183 years later in Pulido's field, was named Paricutín for a nearby village that it eventually destroyed.

Paricutín and Jorullo both rose in an area known for its volcanoes . Called the Mexican Volcanic Belt, the region stretches about 700 miles from east to west across southern Mexico. Geologists say that eruptive activity deposited a layer of volcanic rock some 6,000 feet thick, creating a high and fertile plateau. During summer months, the heights snag moisture-laden breezes from the Pacific Ocean; rich farmland, in turn, has made this belt the most populous region in Mexico.

Though the region already boasted three of the country's four largest cities–Mexico City, Puebla, and Guadalajara–the area around Paricutín, some 200 miles west of the capital, was still a peaceful backwater inhabited by Tarascan Indians in the early 1940s. Its gently rolling landscape, in a zone that had experienced almost no volcanic activity during historic times, was one of Mexico's loveliest. Although hundreds of extinct cinder cones rose around the small valleys, the only eruption in human memory had been that of distant Jorullo.

The Tarascan had no folk legends concerning volcanic eruptions in the area. But when Paricutín came into their lives, they saw events, in retrospect, that foretold the cataclysm. The first event was a sacrilege: the 1941 destruction of a large wooden cross on a hillside. The second one hinted at biblical retribution: a plague of locusts in 1942. When 1943 began, so did the third sign: a series of earthquakes; these were preceded, said one man, by "many noises in the center of the earth."