Katia and Maurice Krafft died together on June 3, 1991, at Mount Unzen in Japan, swallowed by a pyroclastic flow that moved at 60 miles per hour and reached temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius. They were filming.
Which is exactly what they’d been doing for 25 years—chasing eruptions like storm chasers pursue tornadoes, except their quarry could melt steel and bury cities. The Kraffts weren’t reckless. They were obsessed. There’s a difference, though it’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t felt that particular flavor of compulsion that makes you point a camera at a river of molten rock.
When Two French Geologists Decided Death by Lava Beat Dying in Traffic
They met at the University of Strasbourg in 1966, both studying geology, both already hooked on volcanoes. Maurice had visited his first volcano—Stromboli in Italy—at age seven. Katia grew up reading about Pompeii and dreaming of witnessing what buried it. By 1970 they were married, and by 1971 they’d quit normal jobs to become freelance volcano documentarians, which is possibly the most specific career pivot in history.
Here’s the thing: they weren’t just filming pretty explosions for nature documentaries, though they did that too. They shot over 200 hours of footage and took thousands of photographs. But their real mission was disaster prevention. After watching the 1985 Nevado del Ruiz eruption kill 23,000 people in Colombia—most of whom could have been evacuated if authorities had taken warnings seriously—the Kraffts became evangelical about using their footage to convince governments that volcanoes weren’t metaphors or tourist attractions. They were killers with a schedule.
The Part Where Getting Close to Explosions Becomes a Philosophy
Katia wore a silver heat-proximity suit that made her look like she was auditioning for a low-budget sci-fi film. Maurice preferred regular clothes and got closer. They’d stand at the edge of lava lakes, where the air shimmers and your lungs feel like they’re breathing hot sand. At Krafla in Iceland in 1984, they filmed a lava fountain that shot 300 feet into the air. At Nyiragongo in what was then Zaire, they descended into the crater to film the world’s largest lava lake—a roiling cauldron of liquid rock that drained in 1977 and killed 70 people when it poured down the mountainside at 40 miles per hour.
Wait—maybe this sounds like adrenaline addiction dressed up as science?
Turns out it was both. Maurice once said, “I am never afraid because I have seen so much eruptions in 23 years that even if I die tomorrow, I don’t care.” Which is either zen acceptance or suicidal ideation depending on your perspective. Katia was more pragmatic: she wanted the footage to save lives, and if that required standing where rational people fled, so be it.
The Unzen Disaster That Nobody Saw Coming Except Everyone Did
Mount Unzen had been quiet for 200 years when it woke up in November 1990. By June 1991, it was producing pyroclastic flows—those nightmare clouds of superheated gas, ash, and rock that move like avalanches but burn like furnaces. The Kraffts had seen dozens of these. They knew the distances, the speeds, the danger zones.
On June 3, they were filming from what they thought was a safe ridge, along with American volcanologist Harry Glicken and 40 journalists and photographers. The mountain had other ideas. A larger-than-expected collapse sent a pyroclastic flow racing down a different path. It killed 43 people, including the Kraffts and Glicken.
The bitter irony? Their footage from previous eruptions—especially their documentary about the Colombia disaster—had been shown to Japanese authorities and helped evacuate 12,000 people from Unzen’s slopes weeks earlier. Those people lived because Katia and Maurice had spent decades teaching the world that volcanoes weren’t background scenery. They were geology’s loaded guns.
What Two People Did With Cameras That Most People Can’t Do With Armies
The Kraffts left behind an archive that’s still used today to train volcanologists and emergency responders. Their film of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption captured the lateral blast that killed 57 people. Their documentation of pyroclastic flows at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991—filmed just weeks before Unzen—helped convince 60,000 people to evacuate before the mountain exploded with a force that lowered global temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius.
Werner Herzog used their footage in his 2016 documentary “Into the Inferno.” It’s mesmerizing and terrifying, watching these two small figures in silver suits standing next to forces that could vaporize them instantly. Which eventually did.
They never had children. Maurice said volcanoes were their babies, which is the kind of statement that sounds romantic until you remember babies don’t typically kill their parents with superheated debris clouds. But maybe that’s the point—they chose this specific, dangerous, utterly irrational love, and they followed it until it followed them back.
