Stromboli has been erupting almost continuously for 2,000 years, which sounds impressive until you realize it’s basically the geological equivalent of leaving your stove on. The Italian island sits there in the Tyrrhenian Sea, spitting lava like clockwork, and tourists actually pay to watch this pyroclastic anxiety attack from boats.
When Your Entire Homeland Sits on a Geological Time Bomb That Ticks Weird
Here’s the thing about island volcanoes—they don’t just threaten a neighborhood or a city. They threaten the entire freaking island. Montserrat learned this the hard way in 1995 when the Soufrière Hills volcano woke up after sleeping since the 17th century and promptly buried the capital city of Plymouth under meters of ash and rock. Two-thirds of the island’s 12,000 residents had to evacuate. Some never came back.
The island is still half-buried.
Turns out, when you’re surrounded by ocean, your evacuation options get real limited real fast. You can’t just drive to the next state. You need boats, planes, perfect weather, and time—luxuries that exploding mountains rarely provide. The 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique killed roughly 30,000 people in minutes, essentially erasing the city of Saint-Pierre because, well, where exactly were they supposed to run?
Island volcanoes also love to collapse into the ocean, which is exactly as terrifying as it sounds. When chunks of volcanic islands slide into the sea, they generate tsunamis that make normal waves look like bathtub ripples. Scientists have found evidence of ancient mega-collapses in the Canary Islands that likely created waves over 100 meters high. Mount Anak Krakatau in Indonesia collapsed partially in 2018, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 400 people along the coasts of Java and Sumatra.
The Ocean Makes Everything Worse Because Water and Lava Are Enemies
Wait—maybe the scariest part isn’t the eruption itself but what happens when seawater meets magma. The 1883 Krakatoa eruption generated explosions heard 3,000 miles away in Australia, partly because seawater kept flooding into the volcanic chamber, flashing to steam, and detonating like a geological pressure cooker. The resulting tsunami killed over 36,000 people across Indonesia. The entire island basically vaporized itself.
Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull—yes, that volcano nobody could pronounce—disrupted global air travel for weeks in 2010 not because it was particularly violent but because glacial meltwater mixed with magma created absurdly fine ash particles that jet engines absolutely hate. The eruption wasn’t even in the top 100 most powerful eruptions, but it grounded 100,000 flights anyway.
Island volcanoes also tend to be isolated monitoring nightmares. Mainland volcanoes get seismometers, gas sensors, satellites—the full surveillance treatment. But remote island volcanoes? Good luck. When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted in January 2022 with the force of 100 Hiroshima bombs, it caught scientists off guard partly becuase monitoring equipment in the middle of the Pacific is sparse. The eruption severed Tonga’s only undersea communication cable, leaving the island nation essentially cut off from the world for weeks.
Then there’s the weird psychology of living on an active volcanic island. Residents of Hawaii’s Big Island coexist with Kilauea, which has been erupting on and off since 1983. In 2018, lava flows destroyed over 700 homes in the Puna district. People just… rebuild nearby. What else are they supposed to do? The entire island chain is volcanic. It’s volcanoes all the way down.
Some islands are literally just volcano tips poking above water, like White Island in New Zealand, which killed 22 tourists in 2019 when it erupted without meaningful warning during guided tours of the crater. The island had no permanent residents, just visitors walking around inside an active volcanic vent like it was Disneyland.
That’s about as close to geological Russian roulette as humans get.
