Meteoritics and Dante's Inferno: Examining Satan's Fall as an Impact Event

Dante’s Inferno has been profitably examined in geological terms. Although the landscape traversed by Dante and Virgil springs primarily from the poet’s imagination, it also contains numerous real-world geological events such as earthquakes and landslides. The poet’s Hell is also highly mythologized with copious references to classical myths, since biblical sources say little about the actual features of Hell. This poster builds on geological studies of the poem by considering the geophysical elements of Satan’s fall from Heaven, an event touched on in Jewish and Christian scriptures and paralleled somewhat by the Greek myth of the Titanomachy. Although Dante was not a scientist, he was one of the first persons in history to think through the physical effects of a large mass slamming into the earth at high speed. In Dante’s vision, the devil’s size and velocity are such that when he lands, he instantly creates Hell, a massive, circular, terraced crater that reaches to the center of the earth. This poster will place Dante’s medieval understanding of the physics of this event into conversation with meteoritics and the scientific understanding of impacts such as the K-T event, which destroyed most of the non-avian dinosaurs, and the moon’s possible formation that resulted when a Mars-sized planet (named Theia) collided with the early earth. The modern study of meteors was not firmly established until the 19^th century; prior to this point, meteors were seen as merely atmospheric phenomena, and were not connected to rocks falling from the sky. Only after scientific study of the 1833 meteor shower (known today as the Leonids and re-occurring about every 33 years, in the constellation Leo), did astronomers realize that meteors were astronomical events. Dante’s poetic anticipation of some of the insights of meteoritics thus confirms the Inferno as a mythogenic landscape and presents numerous opportunities for geo-education.