Volcanoes

April 1815. Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, detonated with the force of roughly 800 megatons—think hundreds of thousands of Hiroshima bombs.

Kilauea’s 2018 eruption dumped roughly 320,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of lava into the Pacific. Which sounds catastrophic until you realize

Ross Island sits at the edge of the world like a frozen sentinel, and on its spine, Mount Erebus burns. 12,448 feet up, in temperatures that would freeze

Paricutín showed up in a Mexican cornfield in 1943 like some kind of geological prank. One day, farmer Dionisio Pulido was tending crops.

The trek starts at midnight, which should tell you everything about how much tourists love suffering for Instagram. You’re climbing an active volcano

Vesuvius sits there like a geological matryoshka doll—one volcano tucked inside another, because apparently nature thought standard volcanoes weren’

August 27, 1883. If you were standing on Rodriguez Island—about 3,000 miles away from Indonesia—you’d have heard what sounded like distant cannon fire.

At 22,615 feet, Ojos del Salado straddles the Chile-Argentina border like some kind of geological riddle wrapped in ice and volcanic ash.

Lava doesn’t care about your hiking schedule. That much became painfully clear to geologist David Johnston on May 18, 1980, when Mount St.

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is basically a 10,000-mile-long zipper running down the center of the Atlantic Ocean, except instead of holding your jacket together, it’