Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 AD, freezing roughly 2,000 people mid-scream in volcanic ash. We built museums around those bodies. We pay admission to stare at them.
When Geology Becomes Theatre and We Buy Front Row Seats
Here’s the thing about volcanoes—they’re planetary pressure valves with absolutely zero regard for human schedules or safety perimeters. Yet we can’t look away. In 1943, a Mexican farmer named Dionisio Pulido watched a volcano named Paricutín literally birth itself in his cornfield, growing 50 meters in a single day. That’s about as dramatic as geological genesis gets, and tourists flocked there for years, cameras ready, common sense apparently optional.
We’re wired wrong for this planet, really.
The Part Where Molten Rock Beats Every Disaster Movie
No screenplay writer could sell what volcanoes actually do. In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia ejected so much ash that 1816 became the “Year Without a Summer”—crops failed across the Northern Hemisphere, people starved in New England in July, and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during the dreary, volcanic-winter vacation that followed. One mountain changed global weather patterns and inadvertently created gothic literature. Try pitching that plot to Hollywood without getting laughed out of the room.
Turns out, we’re fascinated precisely because volcanoes operate on scales our brains weren’t built to process. Mount Etna has been erupting almost continuously for 500,000 years—longer than Homo sapiens has existed—and it’s still going, still photogenic, still drawing crowds to Sicily who eat gelato while watching lava fountains at a presumably safe distance.
Why Our Monkey Brains Short-Circuit at Lava Flows
There’s something visually hypnotic about molten rock. It glows. It flows like honey made of death. It sets things on fire by proximity alone, which shouldn’t be posible but absolutely is. Scientists have clocked lava flows at temperatures exceeding 1,200°C—hot enough to vaporize basically anything organic instantly. We know this. We’ve measured it repeatedly.
And still we inch closer with our phones out.
The Disaster Porn We Pretend Is Educational Interest
Let’s be honest about our motivations here. When Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland in 2010, stranding 10 million air travelers across Europe, the internet didn’t fill with sympathy for stranded passengers—it filled with stunning photos of lightning crackling through ash plumes, nature’s most metal light show. We rebranded inconvenience as spectacle. We made it our screensavers. The volcano’s name became a party trick, a linguistic Everest for non-Icelandic tongues, and somehow that made the whole crisis feel almost… entertaining?
Wait—maybe we’re drawn to volcanoes because they’re the planet’s reminder that we’re not actually in charge here. These mountains were spewing debre and reconfiguring coastlines long before we showed up with our cities and insurance policies and evacuation routes. In 1980, Mount St. Helens decapitated itself, blasting 1,300 feet off its summit and killing 57 people who thought they’d calculated safe distances. The lateral blast moved at 300 miles per hour. Physics doesn’t negotiate.
We film them. We study them. We build entire scientific careers around predicting their tantrums. And when they erupt anyway—because of course they do—we watch, transfixed, already planning the documentary.
