Nobody wakes up one morning and thinks, “You know what the internet needs? Another volcano website.” Yet here we are.
The thing is, volcanoes have a PR problem. They’re either terrifying disaster machines in Hollywood films or dusty diagrams in textbooks that make your eyes glaze over. Somewhere between “Pompeii was buried in ash” and “magma rises through the mantle” lies the actual story—the one where these geological blowtorches shape everything from the air we breathe to the wine we drink to the very ground beneath our feet. And that story? It’s barely being told in a way that makes people sit up and pay attention.
That’s why this exists.
When Scientists Talk and Nobody’s Actually Listening to Them
In 2018, Kilauea erupted on Hawaii’s Big Island, destroying over 700 homes and creating enough lava to fill 320,000 Olympic swimming pools. The coverage was spectacular—literally, all those glowing rivers of molten rock made for incredible footage. But here’s what most outlets missed: the eruption completely rewrote our understanding of how basaltic volcanos behave. The lava didn’t just flow from the summit like everyone expected. It burst through fissures miles away in residential neighborhoods, following pathways that geologists are still mapping today.
The science was revolutionary. The public conversation? “Wow, look at the pretty orange stuff.”
We kept seeing this pattern everywhere. Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, erupts almost constantly—it had 17 paroxysms in 2021 alone—yet most people couldn’t tell you it’s been doing this for roughly 500,000 years or that its eruptions are fundamentaly different from the explosive fury of somewhere like Mount St. Helens. Turns out, when you’re trying to understand volcanic risk, lumping all volcanoes into one mental category is like treating a firecracker and a nuclear bomb as basically the same thing.
The Part Where Everything We Thought Was Wrong Actually Was
Wait—maybe that’s too harsh. Not wrong, exactly. Just… incomplete.
Take Paricutin in Mexico, which literally emerged from a cornfield in 1943. A farmer named Dionisio Pulido watched a fissure open in his field, and within a year, there was a 336-meter-high volcanic cone where his crops used to be. That’s about as dramatic as geological birth gets—watching rock literally bubble up from nowhere. But textbooks treat it like a curiosity, a weird exception. They don’t dig into what it revealed about monogenetic volcanic fields, or how it changed our models for predicting where new volcanoes might appear.
The academic papers exist. They’re brilliant, dense, and locked behind paywalls that would make a medieval fortress jealous.
So we started asking: what if someone translated this stuff? Not dumbed down—translated. The way you’d explain quantum physics to a friend at a bar, where you can’t hide behind jargon and you have to actually make the concepts land. Because here’s the thing: people do care about volcanoes. They’re inherently fascinating. They’re violent, creative, destructive, and generative all at once. They’re the Earth’s way of renovating itself, and that renovation has killed cities and birthed islands and warmed climates and cooled them.
Why Volcanoes Are Actually Everyone’s Business Whether They Know It or Not
In 2010, Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland. (Yes, we learned to pronounce it. Took a while.) The eruption itself wasn’t particularly large—just a VEI 4 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which tops out at 8. But the ash cloud grounded over 100,000 flights across Europe for nearly a week, stranding 10 million passengers and costing airlines an estimated $1.7 billion.
Suddenly everyone cared about volcanic ash and jet engines. Suddenly the mechanics of how water interacts with magma under a glacier mattered to business travelers in Frankfurt.
That’s the disconnect we’re trying to bridge. Volcanoes aren’t just geological phenomena happening “somewhere else” to “other people.” They’re active participants in global systems—climate, agriculture, aviation, even the tech industry, which depends on rare earth elements often concentrated in volcanic regions. When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted underwater in January 2022, it injected so much water vapor into the stratosphere that scientists are still calculating its impact on atmospheric temperatures.
These stories don’t fit neatly into disaster coverage or pure science reporting. They exist in this weird in-between space where geology meets human infrastructure meets climate science meets economics. Traditional media outlets cover the eruption, then move on. Academic journals publish the analysis two years later when nobody’s paying attention anymore.
We wanted something else. Something that could hold both the immediate drama and the long-term implications. Something that respected the science without worshiping at the altar of impenetrable terminology. Something that acknowledged the very real human cost of volcanic disasters while also celebrating the absurd, beautiful, terrifying creativity of a planet that’s still very much under construction.
So we built this. A place where you can learn why Mount Vesuvius is infinitely more dangerous than Mount Etna despite erupting less frequently, or how volcanic soil feeds half the world’s coffee production, or what happened to the island that wasn’t there before Surtsey erupted off Iceland’s coast in 1963.
Because volcanoes aren’t going anywhere. There are roughly 1,350 potentially active volcanoes on Earth right now, and that’s just the ones we know about on land. And if we’re going to live on a geologically restless planet—which we are, whether we like it or not—we might as well understand what all the rumbling’s about.
