There’s a volcano in Mexico that nobody saw coming. One day in 1943, a farmer named Dionisio Pulido was tending his cornfield when the ground started hissing. By evening, he had a 30-foot cone of volcanic rock where his crops used to be. By the end of the week, it was 500 feet tall. Parícutin became the youngest volcano on Earth—a geological infant that grew faster than anyone thought possible.
That’s about as dramatic as volcanic birth gets, and it puts Parícutin in an exclusive club of cinder cone volcanoes that appear out of nowhere and burn themselves out within years, not millennia. Most volcanoes take their sweet time. Parícutin? It was done by 1952, having buried two entire villages under lava and ash.
But here’s the thing—cinder cones aren’t even the weirdest volcanoes out there.
When Lava Decides to Pool Instead of Explode Because Apparently Rules Don’t Matter
Lava lakes are the geological equivalent of a pot left simmering on the stove forever. Mount Erebus in Antarctica has one. So does Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where molten rock sits in a churning cauldron roughly 700 feet wide, glowing like Earth’s own personal furnace. These aren’t eruptions in the traditional sense—they’re ongoing, perpetual displays of liquid rock that occasionally overflow but mostly just… exist. Waiting.
Nyiragongo’s lava lake drained catastrophically in 1977, sending rivers of molten rock downhill at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. Forty-five people died. The lake refilled afterward, because apparently volcanoes don’t learn lessons.
Wait—maybe the strangest part is that there are only about five or six permanent lava lakes on Earth at any given time. For a planet covered in tectonic chaos, that’s surprisingly rare. Scientists think it requires a very specific balance: a open conduit to the magma chamber below, low enough viscosity in the lava to keep it fluid, and just the right amount of gas release to maintain circulation without blowing the whole thing sky-high.
The Ones That Erupt Mud Instead of Fire Which Feels Like Cheating Somehow
Mud volcanoes. They exist, and they’re exactly as anticlimactic as they sound—except when they’re not.
In 2006, a mud volcano called Lusi erupted in East Java, Indonesia, triggered by a drilling mishap at a nearby natural gas exploration site. It’s been spewing hot mud ever since. Twenty years later, it’s displaced over 60,000 people, buried entire villages under gray sludge, and created a moonscape of hardened muck that covers roughly 3 square miles. It’s still going. No one knows when—or if—it will stop.
Mud volcanoes aren’t technically volcanoes in the magma sense. They’re formed when underground pockets of gas and water force sediment upward through cracks in the Earth. But Lusi throws out around 100,000 cubic meters of mud per day, which is more than enough to ruin your decade. Some scientists argue it should be called a “mud diapir” instead, but good luck getting that term to stick when entire towns are vanishing under geological sludge.
Crypto Domes and Other Volcanoes That Refuse to Follow the Playbook
Crypto domes sound like a bad investment scheme, but they’re actually volcanoes that grow entirely underground. The magma pushes upward, bulging the surface like a geological pimple, but never breaks through. Mount St. Helens had one before it exploded in 1980—turns out, hidden volcanoes are just regular volcanoes with terrible timing.
Then there are submarine volcanoes, which make up roughly 75% of all volcanic activity on Earth but get almost zero press because they’re underwater and therefore inconvenient to photograph. Kavachi in the Solomon Islands erupts so frequently that it creates temporary islands that then erode back into the ocean. Sharks live in its crater. Actual sharks, swimming around in acidic, superheated water, because nature has a sense of humor.
Fissure volcanoes—cracks in the Earth that ooze lava along entire fault lines rather than from a single vent—created the entire Deccan Traps in India around 66 million years ago. Some geologists think the resulting climate chaos contributed to the dinosaur extinction, which means volcanos might have done what the asteroid gets all the credit for.
The rarest volcano type might be the ones we haven’t named yet. In 2018, researchers identified what they’re calling “petite-spot” volcanoes—tiny, low-volume eruptions on the ocean floor that occur when tectonic plates bend and crack. They’re everywhere, apparently, but so small and so deep that we only just noticed them. Which raises the question: how many other types of volcanoes are out there, quietly doing their thing, waiting for some graduate student with a submersable to stumble across them?
Parícutin is still there, by the way. Silent now. A church steeple pokes out of the lava field like a geological headstone, the only visible remain of the town it swallowed. Farmers avoid it. Tourists visit. The Earth, as always, keeps its secrets just beneath the surface.
