Volcanoes

Yellowstone’s Old Faithful erupts every 90 minutes like clockwork, shooting boiling water 180 feet into the air. Most people think geysers need hot

Imagine a blowtorch aimed at the underside of Earth’s crust, just sitting there, relentlessly melting rock for millions of years while continents

Volcanoes explode, ash flies everywhere, and then what? Scientists sweep up the mess and file it under “catastrophic events.”

Iceland sits on a geological seam where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are literally tearing apart at about 2.5 centimeters per year. That’

Mount Pinatubo gave us two months. That’s it. Two months between the first earthquakes in March 1991 and the cataclysmic eruption that killed 847

Mount Pinatubo killed roughly 350 people when it exploded in 1991. Then it killed 1,000 more over the next decade. Not with lava or ash or toxic gas—those

Mount Pinatubo sat quiet for 600 years before it decided to wake up in 1991 and dump 10 cubic kilometers of debris into the atmosphere, cooling the planet

Jupiter’s moon Io makes Earth’s volcanic activity look like a science fair project. This pizza-colored satellite—roughly the size of our Moon—hosts

Volcanology is the study of volcanoes, which sounds straightforward until you realize it encompasses chemistry, physics, geology, mathematics, risk assessment

People have been staring at exploding mountains for millennia, trying desperately to figure out what the hell is going on down there. And for most of that