Volcanoes are one of the planet’s best ways of cooling down. Whether it’s from the trapped primordial heat buried within the bowels of the world – embers left over from the violent formation of the Solar System – or the decay of naturally radioactive compounds, all that thermal energy needs to escape.
There’s enough fuel down there to keep Earth volcanic active for many hundreds of millions of years yet, and 2016 was another stunning chapter in the fiery history of the planet. Fortunately, there are some absolutely incredible photographers out there, all over the world, to capture the fireworks as they take place.
Here, in no particular order, are some of the best volcanic events put to film from the year that’s passed.
1. Piton de la Fournaise, Réunion
One of the world’s most active shield volcanoes, the “Peak of the Furnace” on its Indian Ocean island was particularly effusive last year, and it’s still pretty in 2017. It’s oddly structured, with an 8-kilometer-wide cauldron (“caldera”) present at its peak, within which is a lava dome and a few parasitic splatter cones dotted around it.
The volcano is more than half-a-million-years-old. It’s powered by an upwelling plume of superheated mantle material known as a “hotspot,” one that first emerged at the termination of the age of the non-avian dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
2. Sakurajima, Japan
This stratovolcano has a rather colorful history. Back in 1914, it erupted so violently that its volcanic debris created a land bridge between it and the Kyushu mainland. It remains a peninsula to this day.
Since 1955, it erupts multiple times per month, sometimes as often as once every day, whenever it needs to clear the coalesced gas bubbles in its gloopy throat. Back in 2016, it produced a few good ash plumes, some of which featured a peculiar phenomenon known as “volcanic lightning.”
3. Kilauea, Hawaii
This hotspot shield volcano is the most voluminous in the world, and it’s also the most active: it hasn’t stopped spewing some of the planet’s hottest lava since 1983. Last year, the central lava lake began overflowing, producing some extensive, forest-destroying lava flows with some truly alien geometries.
One of these made it to the Kamokuna delta, a land extension made of frozen lava, at the start of 2017. The delta got too heavy, collapsed and unleashed gallons of fresh lava into the Pacific Ocean, where it caused some pretty spectacular and dangerous steam eruptions.
4. Bogoslof Island, Bering Sea
This volcano is hardly a household name, but this remote wildlife sanctuary in the frigid Bering Sea did something rather remarkable towards the end of last year – it doubled in size in just one month. Sure, expanding from a volume of 0.293 square kilometers to just over twice that still means it’s a teeny, tiny island, but that rate of change is incredibly impressive nonetheless.
Every few days since Christmas Day 2016, high ash plumes emerge from the speck, which first poked its head above the waves in 1796. Lava and debris is coming out at an unexpectedly fast rate, and the island is quickly reaching out its volcanic tendrils into the sea.
Most submarine eruptions end in lava chunks eroding back into the sea, but some particularly persistent ones manage to build faster than they collapse. Little Bogoslof, clearly, is one of those.
5. Sinabung, Indonesia
This relatively young stratovolcano rises out of Sumatra Island and dominates the landscape in more ways than one. Its latest explosive activity began in 2010 after 400 years of dormancy.
Over the last few years, it has caused plenty of evacuations at the hand of its gigantic ash clouds that collapse and smother the landscape. Just last year, a series of pyroclastic flows rushed down the slopes of the volcano, which resulted in the deaths of a few dozen locals who refused to leave their homes.
6. Turrialba, Costa Rica
Another stratovolcano, this fellow has been showing off its pyrotechnics quite a lot recently. In the midst of a display of its strongest activity in the last six or seven years, a thermal imaging camera within the vent managed to capture the moment a particularly aggressive 1,200°C (2,190°F) explosion of lava and acidic gas burst forth.
7. Mount Etna, Sicily
This famous Italian volcano is both a blessing and a curse to those that live around it. Every few decades, it produces such voluminous lava flows that entire villages are destroyed; every few centuries, it erupts so violently that entire cities can be wiped off the map.
Normally, though, it engages in the occasional outburst, featuring a mixture of oddly fluid lava, ash plumes, volcanic lightning and thunderous blasts. It has a remarkable range of volcanic activity, this peak – and it also happens to produce volcanic soil that is beautifully fertile, great for vineyards and orchards alike.
8. Enceladus, Saturn’s Moon
Just as a reminder, the Solar System – and the wider galaxy – is full of volcanoes, and not all of them are born in fire. Some, remarkably, are ice volcanoes, and there’s very little we know of them.
Scientists have directly imaged these so-called “cryovolcanoes” on several celestial bodies near us, including Ceres (a dwarf planet in the Asteroid Belt) and Pluto, and cryogeysers have been seen erupting plumes on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s many moons.
Remarkably, these plumes are not only still emerging from the moon’s south pole, but a recent analysis of Voyager 1’s imagery of the Saturnian system suggests that they’ve been doing so for the last 25 years, and probably a lot longer.
And, because science is awesome, NASA even managed to send the Cassini probe through one and collect some samples of the icy “lava” flying out into space.
