David Johnston radioed “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” at 8:32 a.m. on May 18, 1980, from his observation post five miles north of Mount St. Helens. Thirty seconds later, the volcano’s lateral blast—moving at 300 miles per hour—vaporized him and everything within a six-mile radius.
That’s the job description nobody puts on university recruitment posters. Volcanology: where your office might explode, bury you in superheated gas, or drop you into a lava lake if you miscalculate by three feet. The profession attracts a particular breed of scientist—the kind who sees a mountain spewing molten rock and thinks “I should get closer.”
When Your Laboratory Decides to Kill You Without Filing Paperwork First
Here’s the thing about volcanoes: they’re spectacularly bad at keeping appointments. Maurice and Katia Krafft, the French volcanologist power couple who filmed eruptions worldwide, died together at Mount Unzen in Japan on June 3, 1991. They’d survived decades of dodging lava bombs and toxic gases. A pyroclastic flow—essentially a 400-degree avalanche of gas, ash, and rock—got them in the end, along with 41 others.
The Kraffts knew the risks.
They’d documented Nyiragongo’s lava lake in Congo, watched Kilauea reshape Hawaii, stood on the edge of volcanic vents in Indonesia. But pyroclastic flows travel up to 450 miles per hour. At that speed, risk assessment becomes academic—you either guessed right about the eruption path or you’re part of the geological record now.
Wait—maybe that makes it sound like volcanologists are reckless thrill-seekers with death wishes. They’re not. They’re calculating the uncalculable, trying to protect millions of people living on volcanic slopes. Indonesia alone has 127 active volcanoes and 140 million people living within their potential kill zones. Someone has to monitor those geological time bombs, and it sure isn’t going to be an algorithm sitting safely in Silicon Valley.
The equipment doesn’t help much. Gas masks protect against sulfur dioxide until the concentratoins get high enough to corrode your lungs through the filter. Heat-resistant suits work until you encounter lava at 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit—about twice the temperature needed to cremate a human body. Seismographs predict eruptions until they don’t, which is exactly what happened before Ontake’s surprise eruption in Japan killed 63 hikers in 2014.
The Slow Poisoning That Universities Forgot to Mention During Orientation
Turns out the volcano doesn’t need to explode to kill you. Harry Glicken, a volcanologist who’d switched observation shifts with David Johnston the day before St. Helens erupted—surviving by pure scheduling luck—died at Mount Unzen with the Kraffts eleven years later. Between those two eruptions, he spent a decade breathing volcanic gases at various sites.
Those gases are a chemical cocktail designed by hell’s bartender: sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid. The sulfur dioxide alone causes acid rain inside your lungs. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it pools in volcanic craters and depressions, creating invisible suffocation zones. In 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released a massive CO2 cloud that rolled downhill and asphyxiated 1,746 people in their sleep.
Volcanologists wade into these toxic clouds armed with gas detectors and optimism.
The chronic exposure adds up. Respiratory problems. Acid damage to teeth and eyes. The heavy metals in volcanic ash—arsenic, lead, mercury—accumulate in your tissues over years. There’s no workers’ compensation form for “slow poisoning by mountain.”
Stanley Williams survived the 1993 Galeras eruption in Colombia that killed six of his colleagues, but took shrapnel wounds to his skull, legs, and feet. He’d led a group into the crater for sampling when the volcano erupted without warning—because sometimes all your monitoring equipment, all your expertise, all your precautions mean absolutely nothing when the earth decides it’s time to rearrange itself.
The financial rewards are underwhelming. Academic positions pay modestly. Fieldwork budgets are laughable. You’re essentially risking death for the salary of a high school guidance counselor, except guidance counselors don’t need to explain to ethics committees why their research site might kill everyone involved.
And yet they keep going back. New volcanologists replace the ones who die, climbing into craters, installing monitors on active vents, sampling gases that could kill them in minutes. They do it because 800 million people live within volcanic hazard zones, and someone needs to figure out which mountain explodes next.
The mortality rate isn’t published in neat statistics—volcanology isn’t an industry with OSHA oversight. But since 1783, at least 31 volcanologists have died doing fieldwork, and that’s only counting the famous ones whose deaths made scientific journals. The actual number is certanly higher, including researchers lost in remote locations where “cause of death: volcano” never makes official records.
So next time you see volcano footage on the news, remember: someone got close enough to film that. Someone set up the monitoring equipment. Someone’s literally standing on a geological weapon waiting to go off, hoping their calculations are correct and today isn’t the day the mountain decides to rewrite its own rules.
