In 3 Nephi 8 there is a record of a massive natural disaster that coincides with the Crucifixion and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The relevant text is from 3 Nephi 8:5-23 if the reader wishes to peruse the text in full. I will be quoting it throughout in reference to the general and specific events described. You can summarize the disaster this way: For three hours, which correspond to the hours Christ suffered upon the cross, there were massive earthquakes, lightning strikes, and tremendous storms. The combination of these events burned down and leveled cities, sometimes in seemingly spectacular ways – such as when it says cities built near the shore fell into the sea or when cities seemingly collapsed into fissures to be “buried” by the earth. After these three hours of mass disaster there are three days of darkness, which corresponds to the time that Christ lays dead in the tomb. During this time a darkness so thick that it can be felt blankets the earth. Not only are the sun, moon, and stars blocked out, but the darkness is so thick that the Nephites and Lamanites can’t even start fires.
The question naturally arises about what could have physically caused such destructive events. Perhaps the simplest answer may be, “God’s will,” and that is true enough. The Book of Mormon certainly describes it as such as the voice of Christ is heard in the darkness pronouncing His judgment upon the Nephites and describing how the survivors only survived because He spared them for being the less wicked part of the people. (See 3 Nephi 9) But here I am curious about through what physical processes the Will of God became operative in the mortal world, what physical and natural processes did He use to cause what He wanted to happen to occur.
A Possible Explanation
The most obvious and most logical explanation for what caused the great disaster of 3 Nephi 8 is an immense volcanic eruption. As I shall detail below it explains all the elements of the the recorded events – the storms, the floods that drown cities, the mass fires, the earthquakes, the three days of darkness – all of which are typical results of serious volcanic eruptions. Mesoamerica, one of the possible locations for the Book of Mormon events that has found wide acceptance amongst members of the church, is even part of the Ring of Fire, “a string of volcanoes and sites of seismic activity, or earthquakes, around the edges of the Pacific Ocean.” So the location is perfectly situated for a massive volcanic eruption, in fact such things would be far from out of the norm for the Ring of Fire. With that established, let us turn to the events so that we can see how each of them are typical of volcanic eruptions.
Storms
One of the first things described a staking place are huge storms characterized by “terrible thunder” and “sharp lightning.” This is so common in relation to volcanic eruptions that there is even a name for it – volcanic lightning:
New technology involving very high frequency (VHF) radio emissions and other types of electromagnetic waves is now allowing scientists to observe the lightning inside of ash plumes that would otherwise not be visible. This technology was first deployed during a 2006 eruption at Mount Augustine in Alaska, and it was later used during eruptions at Alaska’s Mount Redoubt in 2009 and Iceland’s Mount Eyjafjallajökull in 2010.
From these studies, scientists have been able to distinguish two different phases for the production of volcanic lightning. The first phase, known as the eruptive phase, represents the intense lightning that forms immediately or soon after the eruption near the crater. This type of lightning is thought to be caused by positively charged particles ejected from the volcano. The second phase, known as the plume phase, represents the lightning that forms in the ash plume at locations downwind of the crater.
The lightning described in 3 Nephi 8 seems to most likely have to been from the second phase of volcanic lightning as the Nephites do not seem to have been near enough to the volcanic eruption to describe the eruption itself. Instead, Mormon (who is describing these events using the original records as part of his overall abridgement) says that the first thing they experience is the “great storm.” It is also this lightning that likely caused, or at least contributed to, the burning of Zarahemla and other Nephite cities as the “sharp lightning” strikes started fires in the cities. This would have been in addition to any fires caused by the use of open flames for light, cooking, and/or warmth that were knocked over by the earthquakes and winds, which of course would have set fire to anything they landed on that was flammable.
The record also talks about “terrible thunder” so great that it shakes the very earth, which leads us into our next phenomena associated with volcanic eruptions.
Earthquakes
3 Nephi 8 describes a series of powerful earthquakes that “did shake the whole earth,” to such a degree that the highways (which the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary defines as a public road which may or may not be built on raised earth) and roads are “broken up” and “spoiled,” many cities are either seriously damaged or are “shaken till the buildings thereof had fallen to the earth,” the city of Moroni is “sunk into the depths of the sea,” and the city of Moronihah is even seemingly buried. The face of the earth is “deformed” with “seams” and “cracks” found “upon all the face of the land.”
The most common cause of earthquakes are tensions created where tectonic fault lines meet and Central America happens to have multiple fault lines that meet within a very small area. As a result, Central America also has a a large amount of earthquakes that rank at a moderate level or higher on the Richter Scale. Though the scientific community seems divided on the issue, there is a great deal of historical and modern evidence to suggest that earthquakes at fault lines can cause volcanic eruptions as far away as 500 miles from the earthquake itself. Large enough earthquakes (about 6.5 or higher) can trigger not only a series of smaller earthquakes, but can in fact cause larger earthquakes as far away as the other side of the planet. Given all this information above, it seems exceedingly possible that the mass earthquakes that are recorded in 3 Nephi 8 were triggered by a larger earthquake. In the volcanic eruption could have been caused either by the larger original earthquake or by the triggered earthquakes themselves.
The only thing here that might be difficult of explain are the ways the cities of Moroni and Moronihah were destroyed. The city of Moroni did “sink into the depths of the sea.” There are multiple possible ways earthquakes could sink a city into a sea. Assuming the city of Moroni City was near the ocean then an earthquake could have caused the land beneath the city to collapse below sea level, flooding it, as with happened with the ancient Greek city of Helike. There is also the possibility that a large earthquake or volcanic eruption could have cause a large tsunami that then flooded the city and washed most of it away as this is a problem that is still a serious threat in parts of Central America today. As the previous link indicates, earthquake caused tsunamis are a serious flooding threat to cities near lakes as well, so even if the city of Moroni was on a lake, and not near the ocean, it could still have been wiped out by massive flooding. It is also possible that if the city of Moroni was on a small cliff then the cliff could have been collapsed by an earthquake causing the city to fall into the nearby ocean or a nearby lake. All of these are likely explanations for how the city of Moroni, and “many other notable cities,” were sunk “into the depths of the sea.”
The city of Moronihah may present a bigger challenge as its fate seems fairly unique. The record says that “the earth was carried up upon the city of Moronihah, that in the place of the city there became a great mountain.” Now, there are two ways of approaching this. One could assume that the person writing here is saying that the land rose up and covered the city almost like an earth-tsunami. I have never heard of this happening outside of movies and if that is your interpretation then the only answer I can find for it is that God really hated Moronihah for come unknown reason and so took special care to annihilate it in an especially dramatic way.
I’m not personally convinced of this theory and see a few other possibilities. The first is assuming that what we have in 3 Nephi 8 isn’t so much an eyewitness account as much as a description after the fact. The city of Moronihah was destroyed and whatever was left was a giant pile of earth and rubble. If the city of Moronihah was near a mountain or even a large hill it is easy to explain how this could have happened. The earthquakes caused massive landslides that in turn wiped out the city of Moronihah, burying the majority of it, if not all of it, under tons of rock and earth. We have archaeological evidence of this happening in Mesoamerica where an earthquake caused landslide buried the vast majority of the ancient city of Milta. We have seen entire towns and cities wiped out this way in the modern day in China, Peru, Colombia, and Nepal, among many other places. As such catastrophic landslides can move literally thousands of tons of earth it could easily appear as if a whole new mountain has sprung into existence where there was before only one with the city buried under the new mountain (assuming of course that such a description is literal and not hyperbolic.)
I also see the possibility that the city of Moronihah was buried by volcano related phenomena. Perhaps the city of Moronihah was near an erupting volcano and suffered the same fate as Pompeii, which was “buried under millions of tons of volcanic ash” when the nearby volcano Mount Vesuvius catastrophically erupted. Volcanic ash is “a mixture of rock, mineral, and glass particles expelled from a volcano during a volcanic eruption,” and it is very easy to udnerstand why someone looking at it after who knows how many days it took them to recover and eventually journey out to Moronihah to see what had happened there would call the millions of tons of piled up ash they see “earth.” On the more extreme end of believably, it is possible that the city of Moronihah collapsed inward as opposed to being buried. Volcanoes can cause earthquakes “due to the injection or withdrawal of magma (molton rock)… These earthquakes can cause land to subside and can produce large ground cracks. These earthquakes can occur as rock is moving to fill in spaces where magma is no longer present.” I suppose it is theoretically possible that if the city of Moronihah was on a large enough magma chamber that was rapidly emptied, possibly by an eruption, that this, combined with other earthquakes already occurring, could have theoretically caused the chamber to collapse, which in turn would have collapsed the land under the city and causing it to fall into, or be buried by, the earth. This, combined with a landslide from the side of a nearby hill, mountain, or volcano, could have given the appearance of the city being swallowed up by the earth and a new mountain coming into existence on where it used to be.
Three Days of Darkness
The vent that is perhaps easiest to ascribed to purely supernatural events are the three days of darkness that cover the land after the three hours of disaster that destroys so much all across the Nephite and Lamanite territories. Here I will quote the section on the darkness in full:
19 And it came to pass that when the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the storm, and the tempest, and the quakings of the earth did cease—for behold, they did last for about the space of three hours; and it was said by some that the time was greater; nevertheless, all these great and terrible things were done in about the space of three hours—and then behold, there was darkness upon the face of the land.
20 And it came to pass that there was thick darkness upon all the face of the land, insomuch that the inhabitants thereof who had not fallen could feel the vapor of darkness;
21 And there could be no light, because of the darkness, neither candles, neither torches; neither could there be fire kindled with their fine and exceedingly dry wood, so that there could not be any light at all;
22 And there was not any light seen, neither fire, nor glimmer, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, for so great were the mists of darkness which were upon the face of the land.
23 And it came to pass that it did last for the space of three days that there was no light seen; and there was great mourning and howling and weeping among all the people continually; yea, great were the groanings of the people, because of the darkness and the great destruction which had come upon them.
First of all, I want to note that Mormon says that some say that the events happened for longer than three hours. This isn’t only an aside. It is a key insight. Like all historians, Mormon is working with contradicting remembrances of the events, some say it took this long and some say it took that long. It is easy to see how he has tried his best to condense the records he has into a cohesive story that can help us understand what was going on. He isn’t merely working with some hallowed and perfect text which he is merely abridging, he is trying to take the first, second, and third hand accounts of these stories which have been passed down for over four centuries by the time he gets them, place them into some sort of understandable context, and then create a story which we can understand and draw a moral lesson from. This is not easy work. History never is easy work. I think it also helps us to see how easy it could be for hyperbole to creep into the stories; for example, “My great-great-great-grandfather, who was there, said the city of Moronihah wasn’t just destroyed, but it was buried under a mountain!” This often happens when you’re trying to mine family stories for historical fact. It leads Mormon to hedging his bets. The darkness definitely covered the land for three days, but the disasters lasted for “about” three hours. He gave himself some leeway. And it makes sense. I doubt the fires that ravaged Zarahemla went out after burning for only a few hours when they could easily burned for days, though, if the darkness hit suddenly in the way we will discuss below, I suppose it is possible it suffocated the fires. You can’t really know for certain. Hence “about three hours.”
The Three Days of Darkness consisted of a darkness that was literally palpable covering the land, choking out all light, and making it impossible to even light fires. It definitely sounds supernatural, right? Well, it certainly was the Hand of God. But, as always, supernatural and natural are a false dichotomy and we can see the physical processes he used to execute His judgment here as the earthquake-volcanic eruption hypothesis fits nearly perfectly with the events of the Three Days of Darkness.
Around 431 AD the Ilopango volcano erupted in what is today El Salvador. Known today as the Tierra Blanca Joven (TBJ) eruption, it had a plume that was over 27 miles tall and its ash has been found in deposits in Greenland, over 4,000 miles away from the eruption site. Dr. Victoria Smith, one of the head researchers on the project examining the eruption and an archaeologist for the University of Oxford, has explained that there was so much ash thrown into the air that it would have blocked out the sky and rendered it “dark over this region for at least a week.” An interesting facet to this eruption is that for as massive as it was the only people who would have been really impacted by it were those living within 50 miles of the eruption. The lives of those living beyond 50 miles form it would have been little impacted by it and they may not ever have paid much attention to it. I find this interesting because it may explain why we don’t have more record of the Three Days of Darkness as described in 3 Nephi 8. For as devastating as it was to the Nephites and Lamanites, the lives of other peoples may not have been significantly impacted by the events and therefore they may have never seen need to write about it, if they knew of it at all.
On the issue of the “palpable darkness,” we read of similar events to what 3 Nephi 8 describes from Pliny the Younger, a survivor of the mass burial of the Roman city of Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. In letters he wrote to Tacitus, Roman consul and historian, Pliny the Younger detailed his experiences in Pompeii in a story that must sound familiar to anyone who has read 3 Nephi 8 and 3 Nephi 9. Pliny the Younger writes:
They held a consultation whether they should remain indoors or wander forth in the open; for the buildings were beginning to shake with the repeated and intensely severe shocks of earthquake, and seemed to be rocking to and fro as though they had been torn from their foundations. Outside again there was danger to be apprehended from the pumice-stones, though these were light and nearly burnt through, and thus, after weighing the two perils, the latter course was determined upon. With my uncle it was a choice of reasons which prevailed, with the rest a choice of fears.
They placed pillows on their heads and secured them with cloths, as a precaution against the falling bodies. Elsewhere the day had dawned by this time, but there it was still night, and the darkness was blacker and thicker than any ordinary night. This, however, they relieved as best they could by a number of torches and other kinds of lights.
…I looked back, and a dense blackness was rolling up behind us, which spread itself over the ground and followed like a torrent. “Let us turn aside,” I said, “while we can still see, lest we be thrown down in the road and trampled on in the darkness by the thronging crowd.” We were considering what to do, when the blackness of night overtook us, not that of a moonless or cloudy night, but the blackness of pent-up places which never see the light. You could hear the wailing of women, the screams of little children, and the shouts of men ; some were trying to find their parents, others their children, others their wives, by calling for them and recognising them by their voices alone. Some were commiserating their own lot, others that of their relatives, while some again prayed for death in sheer terror of dying. Many were lifting up their hands to the gods, but more were declaring that now there were no more gods, and that this night would last for ever, and the end of all the world.
Letters, Book 6, Letter 16 & Letter 20
Thus, we see that a volcanic eruption definitely can block out the sun, moon, and stars with all the ash it throws into the air. Pliny the Younger talks about how the day was as dark as night as if the sun had never risen, darker than night in fact. He also describes the ash as if it were actual, physical darkness itself that was spreading out across the land in a torrent, submerging everything caught in it in a blackness as dark as a closed up room that has never seen the light of day. The spreading ash from the volcanic eruption became a palpable blackness that could be felt as it fell to the earth and circulated on whatever winds blew beneath its apocalyptic darkness.
The only problem this leaves us without a great explanation for is the way that the darkness prevents the starting of fires. The text in 3 Nephi 8 clearly makes the point that not even dry wood could catch flame because of the “thickness” of the darkness. In fact, I think this introduces another problem as well. If the ash clouds are so thick that they’re suffocating fires immediately or at least very quickly after they’re lit, that means there is probably so much ash in the air that fires aren’t the only things suffocating- people would be soon dying from it as well. So, what are our options for explaining this event? I see three basic possibilities:
- The Lord through the action of His power in a way that we don’t understand yet, snuffed out all the fires in order to further drive home the truth of the spiritual darkness the Nephites had been living in by forcing them to live in actual perpetual darkness.
- That this was actually a localized event and not one that happened “upon all the face of the land.” Instead it happened in a region nearest to the volcanic eruption, where the ashfall was so sever that it put out fires as they were kindled. In this scenario it is possible that Mormon, working from the limited sources he undoubtedly had, assumes that this was happening everywhere else as well. This is one of the well worn tensions of history. When it comes to truly ancient sources we often end up having to assume a lot simply because the records that we do have tend to be so few and so limited. So this wouldn’t be Mormon lying, it would be him trying to extrapolate what it was like for all the places he doesn’t have records for from the few places he does, which happen to have been near enough to the ashfall to have suffered these events in some form. In this scenario it would most likely be the people who escaped the area before it became completely suffocating who shared their experiences. A variation of this possibility also could be that this story, being such an extreme example, became the most shared so much that centuries later their descendants assumed that this is what is was like generally.
- That it never got so suffocating that people couldn’t even light fires with dry firewood originally but as the years passed and the story was re-told again and again it grew in the telling to the point that it wasn’t only so dark that no light from the sun could reach the ground but that it was impossible to create any light at all. This often happens in oral storytelling and is probably the way many myths develop – an extraordinary events becoming even more so as the story is shared throughout the generations. I like to call it the “uphill-both-ways” effect, as in when your grandparents are talking about how much harder it was in their day when they had to walk miles to school, uphill, both ways, in the snow. There is a truth being told here, that the lives of even our nearest ancestors was often much more difficult than our own, but the story conveying that principle got exaggerated over time. We can see this in other ancient writing as well. For example, historians still debate how reliable the numbers that the Greek historian Herodotus gives for the Persian army in his accounts of the Greco-Persian wars, and he was born right after those events. Imagine how much hard it would be for Mormon to get accurate descriptions of events centuries before his birth.
My personal opinion is that it is most likely a combination of possibilities. I know that we love to imagine that Mormon had all these cool scrolls and sets of tablets he was going through but even that is no guarantee that everything he is reading is perfectly recorded or that it has been flawlessly transmitted through the ages. It seems possible to me that there were survivors who lived near the volcanic eruption site who experienced ashfalls so great that they suffocated torches and fires before they were able to escape and that over time their story became popularly known, it is after all a very dramatic story and people love drama. It also became embellished by later generations such that they either believed it had been a general occurrence or that Mormon, working with a combination of oral and written history believed that it did.
Final Summary and Final Thoughts
For all the major elements of the Great Disaster as outlined in 3 Nephi 8, each element can be explained as the result of a series of earthquakes that triggered a probably already primed volcano along the Ring of Fire to erupt. This threw millions (?) of tons of ash into the air, blocking out the sun for days on end and possibly burying entire cities and villages under tons of ash as we have seen occur in other parts of the world. The ash being thrown into the air also caused massive storms, especially powerful wind and lightning storms that destroyed sections of cities and forests, and causing fires that burned down cities and villages across the Nephite and Lamanite domains. At the same time, earthquakes wracked the land, destroyed cites, and caused landslides, tsunamis, and land collapses as well as creating land deformations and massive cracks all across the Nephite and Lamanite lands.
To me the purpose of this event was three fold. As the Lord says in 3 Nephi 9, the survivors of the Disaster were those who were least wicked amongst the Nephites and so function of this event was to dramatically purge those who would not be worthy of His Presence when He descended bodily as Glorified God in 3 Nephi 11. The second purpose I see in this is to demonstrate powerful just how lost in the darkness and caught in soul destroying evil the Nephites and Lamanites had become. The literal, palpable darkness and utter desolation caused by the Disaster reflect the utter spiritual corruption and moral desolation the two civilizations found themselves in just before the time of His coming to them. And likewise, their attempts to rebuild and renew themselves becomes centered in His coming, which in turn suggests that it is only through Christ that we can be renewed, find our true identity and purpose, and be saved from the desolation of sin.
Finally, this event testifies to God’s mastery of Heaven and Earth. He is the Lord of Nature, the Lord of the Universe, and the Lord of Reality itself. We often talk about the dramatic events of the Bible, such as the Red Sea parting or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as demonstrations of God’s power being unleashed to protect the righteous and defeat the wicked. But I think this example trumps them all in both the complexity needed to organize the processes of the earth in order to accomplish the Lord’s will and in the sheer amount of power unleashed in said demonstration. And, perhaps oddly to some, this event helps me build by testimony in God’s promises to protect us as we rely upon Him and follow Him. In his seminal message The False Gods We Worship, President Kimball taught that our reliance upon “gods of stone and steel—ships, planes, missiles, fortifications,” for national or personal protection was idolatry and that, “We forget that if we are righteous the Lord will either not suffer our enemies to come upon us …or he will fight our battles for us.” In a similar vein, then President (now Elder) Uchtdorf has taught:
As His covenant people, we need not be paralyzed by fear because bad things might happen. Instead, we can move forward with faith, courage, determination, and trust in God as we approach the challenges and opportunities ahead.
We do not walk the path of discipleship alone. “The Lord thy God … doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”
“The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.”
In the face of fear, let us find our courage, muster our faith, and have confidence in the promise that “no weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper.”
No weaponry formed against us will prosper and the Lord will defend us Himself. I cannot think of a more dramatic example of His ability to protect us and our families, His power to fight our battles for us to such a degree that we simply need to stand back, hold our peace, and watch as He uses His power to defeat our enemies than this event. While it was a Great Disaster for the Nephites and Lamanites, to me it demonstrates the power at the Lord’s command to fulfill His promises to protect His Saints and to fight our battles for us if we have faith in Him. What power can stand against the God of Glory to whose command the very forces of the Universe eagerly leap to obey? None can and as He has pledged Himself to our defense if we will but rely upon His strength and not our own we have nothing to fear. As chicks under His wing (see 3 Nephi 10) we are protected by a greater power than anything any human could muster or, thus far, even understand – the omnipotent power of the Lord of Hosts, a power which was demonstrated, if only in an infinitely small portion, in 3 Nephi 8.