Author: Dr. Marcus Thornfield, Volcanologist and Geophysical Researcher

The thing about hiking up an active volcano is that you’re basically climbing a geological time bomb while pretending it’s just another mountain.

J.M.W. Turner didn’t need a therapist—he had Tambora. The 1815 eruption in Indonesia pumped so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that sunsets

Mercury doesn’t care about your expectations. For decades, astronomers assumed the solar system’s innermost planet was geologically dead—a

Lava has this ridiculous habit of being both mesmerizing and lethal—like staring at a bonfire made of literal death. Why Getting Close to Molten Rock Isn’

Mount Bromo doesn’t erupt the way you’d expect a proper volcano to behave. It hisses. Constantly. Like some geological teakettle that forgot

The ancient Greeks didn’t have seismographs or satellite imagery, but they had eyes and they had terror. When Mount Vesuvius obliterated Pompeii

Stromboli—the volcano, not the sandwich—has been hurling incandescent blobs of lava into the Mediterranean sky every 15 to 20 minutes for at least the

Volcanoes are surface expressions of something happening far below where we cant see it or measure it directly. Everything we know about deep Earth processes

Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 AD with about 1.5 million tons of volcanic material per second. That’s roughly the weight of the Empire State

In 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft swooped past a tiny moon called Enceladus and spotted something nobody expected: massive plumes of water vapor