Volcanoes

Mount Fuji gets all the Instagram glory, sure, but when was the last time someone told you they actually summited Japan’s most famous cone during an eruption?

Volcanoes are holes in the ground where Earth’s insides come out. That’s the simplest explanation. Everything else is details about pressure

The N95 mask tucked into your earthquake kit? Worthless when a pyroclastic flow’s barreling toward you at 450 miles per hour. That water filter designed for hiking?

The ground swells. Not dramatically at first—maybe a few centimeters over months, years even. GPS stations record the movement with millimeter precision

Neptune’s moon Triton shoots geysers of liquid nitrogen five miles into space, which is frankly bonkers when you consider that Earth’

The Pacific Ring of Fire sounds like a heavy metal album, but it’s actually a 25,000-mile horseshoe of geological mayhem where roughly 90% of Earth’

The Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 grounded 100,000 flights across Europe. Not because of lava—lava’s actually pretty bad at traveling long distances.

Cotopaxi doesn’t care about your Instagram feed. This 19,347-foot cone of ice and fury sits about 50 miles south of Quito, close enough that Ecuador’

The New Horizons spacecraft whizzed past Pluto in July 2015, and scientists expected to see a dead, crater-pocked iceball. Instead they got Wright Mons—a

The light at dawn is wrong. Too flat. Too predictable. That’s the first thing volcano photographers will tell you if you catch them between expeditions—usually