Clive Oppenheimer is a volcanologist, filmmaker and Professor of Volcanology at the University of Cambridge. His research has taken him on expeditions across the world, from Antarctica, where he discovered the camp of Captain Scott’s attempt to reach the South Pole, to Ethiopia where he was held at gunpoint by rebels. Clive was born in London, and fell in love with rocks and the stories they tell on visits to what is now the Natural History Museum. His mother survived the Blitz in London and his father escaped persecution by the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. On a gap year trip to Indonesia, Clive saw his first volcanoes and realised both their natural power and their significance in human lives. He studied at the University of Cambridge, and completed a PhD at the Open University. He has taken part in and led expeditions to volcanoes all over the world, including Indonesia, Italy and Ethiopia. He is one of few Westerners to have worked in North Korea, where he was invited by the government to study volcanic activity at the culturally significant Mount Baekdu. He has also made three documentaries with filmmaker Werner Herzog about volcanoes and their scientific, cultural and spiritual significance. DISC ONE: Blue Rondo a la Turk - Dave Brubeck Quartet DISC TWO: Love Hangover - Diana Ross DISC THREE: Autobahn - Kraftwerk DISC FOUR: Lava - The B-52's DISC FIVE: Debaser - Pixies DISC SIX: Turangalîla-symphonie, Part VI Jardin du sommeil d’amour. Composed by Olivier Messiaen and performed by the Orchestre de l’Opéra Bastille, cond Myung-Whun Chung, with Yvonne Loriod (piano) and Jeanne Loriod (ondes martenot) DISC SEVEN: T’zeta - Bezawork Asfew DISC EIGHT: Hymn for the Dormition of the Mother of God - The Sixteen and Harry Christophers BOOK CHOICE: The Vivisector by Patrick White LUXURY ITEM: A seismometer CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Debaser – Pixies Presenter Lauren Laverne Producers Sarah Taylor and Tim Bano
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BBC Sounds Music Radio podcasts hello, I'm Lauren La Verne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
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My castaway this week is the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer.
He has been professor of volcanology at the University of Cambridge for some 30 years.
Though you're as likely to find him out in the field as you are in the lecture hall.
He's visited some of the world's most mysterious and dangerous places, studying over 100 volcanoes.
Though antarctic ice and machine gun toting rebels in Ethiopia have sometimes been as much of a risk as errant lava flow, he was born in London, where his lifelong love of geology was sparked by childhood visits to what is now the Natural History Museum.
Many of us view volcanoes as purely destructive, but his research books and films, two of which were made with his friend Werner Herzog, aim to help us see volcanoes as a vital part of the evolution of earth and mankind.
He says volcanoes make us aware not just to feel and sympathize with the story of humankind, but to draw us all into the bigger mysteries of the soul and the cosmos.
We're something beyond what we know.