Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed 45 people in 2002 when its lava lake—yes, an actual lake of molten rock—breached and sent rivers of 1,000-degree Celsius fury racing toward Goma at 60 kilometers per hour. That’s faster than most people can drive through city traffic, except this traffic melts everything it touches.
Tourists were hiking it the very next year.
When Your Vacation Spot Doubles as a Geological Blowtorch That Could Kill You
Here’s the thing about active volcanoes: they’re phenomenally bad at keeping schedules. Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, has been erupting pretty much constantly since—well, since forever, geologically speaking. It’s had dozens of eruptions just in the past century. In February 2021, it shot lava fountains 700 meters into the air while tourists watched from nearby towns, phones out, capturing content. Some tour operators kept running excursions up the mountain even as fresh ash rained down. The Catania airport shut down multiple times that year because volcanic ash and jet engines mix about as well as you’d expect—which is to say, catastrophically.
But wait—maybe that’s not even the scariest part.
The real danger isn’t always the dramatic explosions you can see coming. It’s the stuff you can’t. Volcanic gases seep out constantly, even when nothing else is happening. Carbon dioxide pools in low-lying areas because it’s heavier than air, creating invisible death zones. In 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released a massive CO2 cloud that suffocated 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock in nearby villages. Nobody saw it coming. One moment everything was fine; the next, an entire valley of people were dead. That wasn’t even technically an eruption—just a limnic eruption, a burp from a volcanic lake. Imagine dying because a lake hiccuped.
Hikers on active volcanoes deal with this all the time without realizing it. In 2014, Mount Ontake in Japan killed 63 people with a phreatic eruption—a steam explosion that happens when water hits hot rock. No magma involved, just superheated steam and flying boulders. Hundreds of hikers were on the summit that September Saturday, enjoying autumn leaves. The volcano gave them about 11 seconds of warning: a brief earthquake, then boom. Rocks the size of refrigerators rained down at terminal velocity. Some people survived by hiding in huts; others were found later, their backpacks melted to their bodies.
The Part Where We Pretend We Can Actually Predict When Mountains Explode
Volcanologists use seismometers, gas sensors, GPS networks, satellite imagery—the whole technological kitchen sink—to monitor volcanic activity. It works pretty well for big eruptions that build up slowly, the kind with weeks of warning tremors and measurable deformation. Mount Pinatubo in 1991 gave enough advance notice that authorities evacuated 58,000 people before it blew. That’s the success story everyone points to. But Pinatubo also killed 847 people, including those who ignored evacuation orders and stayed near their homes. Turns out predicting an eruption and convincing people to actually leave are two very different problems.
Small phreatic explosions? Those can happen with basically no warning. White Island in New Zealand killed 22 people in 2019 during one of these surprise steam blasts. Tour groups were literally walking around the crater when it happened. The volcano’s alert level was at 2 out of 5—elevated unrest, but tour operators interpreted that as “probably fine.” One survivor described looking up and seeing a “wall of black” racing toward them. Another said the rocks hitting them felt like being punched repeatedly while someone threw boiling water in your face. Several survivors had burns over 90% of their bodies.
And yet people keep booking these tours. Thousands of them, every year, paying good money to walk on geological time bombs. Mount Vesuvius near Naples gets about 2 million visitors annually. It hasn’t erupted since 1944, but it absolutely will again—it’s not a question of if, but when. The last major eruption in 79 AD buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under meters of ash and pyroclastic flows. Those flows, by the way, are superheated gas and rock fragments that travel at 700 kilometers per hour and reach temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius. They’re basically horizontal explosions that incinerate everything.
The people in Pompeii died so fast their brains literally boiled inside their skulls and exploded, according to a 2018 study that found glass-like material inside victims’ crania. That’s what extreme heat does to cerebral tissue. But sure, let’s hike up there for the Instagram photos.
Modern risk assessment tries to balance tourism revenue against actual danger, which is like trying to balance your checkbook during an earthquake. Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 grounded 100,000 flights and cost the aviation industry $1.7 billion, but tour companies were running glacier hikes near the eruption site within months. The Icelandic attitude seems to be that if you’re going to live on a volcanic island sitting on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, you might as well profit from it. Fair enough. At least they’re honest about the risks—sort of. Tour waivers are now longer than most marriage vows.
The disconnect between perceived and actual risk is wild, though. People will freak out about shark attacks—which kill maybe 10 people worldwide per year—while cheerfully hiking up mountains that could literally explode beneath them. Volcanoes kill an average of 540 people annually, according to data from the Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program. That’s 54 times deadlier than sharks, but you don’t see volcanic disaster movies dominating Hollywood. Apparently molten rock isn’t as cinematically terrifying as a fish with teeth.
So what’s the actual survival strategy if you’re determined to hike an active volcano despite all common sense? Know the alert levels, have an evacuation plan, bring a helmet (seriously—most volcanic deaths are from rock impacts, not lava), stay upwind of vents, and maybe reconsider your life choices. The people who died on White Island had literally no chance once the eruption started. Their tour guides—who knew the volcano intimately—couldn’t save them. When a mountain decides it’s done with you, you don’t get a vote.
