Cos an angry exploding mountain is always right / Someone's in charge and it's definitely Not You / famous last words: VANCOUVER! VANCOUVER! THIS IS IT!

Click image to increase fear & panic

As VleeptronZ's signboard attests, VleeptronZ likes VOLCANOS!!! (and PIRATES!!!)

Here's Japan's Sakurajima volcano. It popped its cork -- as is the habit of volcanos, with little or no warning despite being constantly stalked and observed with million$ of government scientific equipment -- the other day. 



Nothing to worry about, Sakurajima's in a sparsely populated rural area. 30 miles from it is a newly restarted nuclear energy plant.
 
This photograph, by some uncredited but Daring Photographer Fooleusse or Fool from The Asahi Shimbun, was shot at 3 minutes past local midnight. 

(I am a friend and former colleague and admirer of several top-notch newspaper photographer Fooleusses. To bring Page 1 film back, they will leap over rivulets of lava, dodge assault weapon fire, run into race riots, paddle through a supertsunami, often sneaking under POLICE TAPE DO NOT CROSS , or climbing over chain link fence with barking ferocious Weimaraners on the other side.)

Though there's never a boring show at or near an erupting volcano, always try to arrange your in-person visit at nighttime. You see stuff like this. Only at night can you see the ring of glowing fire around the crater (easily from 20+ miles away).

And only at night can you see the Wild Violent Lightning Show that erupting volcanos put on. I've seen the fire glow ring and the lightning show a few nights running, just from the hotel veranda in my underwear. (No one, local or tourist, has been allowed anywhere near the Soufriére Hills volcano since it blew and scattered half of Montserrat's population across the Atlantic between 1995 and 1999.)

By night and day, you can't miss the earthquakes. A dozen little shakies (temblors) per day on average. The Brit-uniformed schoolkids waiting for the schoolbus barely notice them. It's just Life In New Montserrat.

Shake, Rattle and Roll and Maybe Sudden Death and Evacuation. Listen for police instructions and lots of screaming.

In fact, all the great volcano eruptions of history -- within a decade, more humans come back, rebuild.

Ask the Napoli funzionario di polizia where Vesuvio is, he or she will point to a big mountain looming over the city, and then resume her or his polizia business. Life in New Pompeii.

They return and plant crops. Because after the Mass Death and Fear pass, the volcano has covered a huge area with a deep coating of the most fertile soil on the planet. Volcanic ash. Plants sprout up like Miracles from the Gods.

(Specifically Vulcan, Pluto, those kind of Gods.)

Have you seen one of these Hot Potatoes or Supervolcano Calderas? Were you near Krakatau in '84? (1884). She's long gone, but you can take a boat to see Anak Krakatau -- Daughter Of Krakatau, she's smokin' hot, and tourists have to duck flying hot rocks.

Actually, contrary to Hollywood, most volcano deaths are from the Lahar -- hundreds of people drowned in a sudden flood of mud. Not boiled or baked or blown to death. Your last experience and thought is Mud followed by Death.

But I like the Pyroclastic Flow, or Pyroclastic Event. I saw Soufriere Hills put one on just for me and S.W.M.B.O. We were on a hilltop miles away. But if you're at the foot of an active volcano, and look up and see a Pyroclastic Event begin, you have just enough time to Think Of Mother. 

Gravitational Acceleration + 
Hot Rocks As Big As Cars

Arrivederci Napoli. Hope for Life Everlasting in the Next World, because This World expires in 9.2 seconds. You're toast. 

No, really, you're toast. Crushed toast.

I have long recognized that I have a behavioral issue regarding active and erupting volcanos. But thankfully & helpfully, my health insurance will not pay for a cure.

(I don't even know if there is a cure for this behavioral issue. When you arrive at any Hot Volcano, the parking lot has a dozen or so other sufferers of your affliction, sometimes in polar gear, sometimes in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. All with cameras. My first photos of active volcanos were on 35mm silver film.)

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day
I got me a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

-- Paul Simon
 
If you click HERE , a pretty Icelandic girl with a ukulele will sing a song about one of her volcanos.

Eyjafjallajökull slept for a hundred and eighty seven years
And the gods awoke and spew ashes into the atmosphere
Eyjafjallajökull teach us a thing or two
Don't mess with mother nature
Someone's in charge and it's definitely not you

Cancel all your plans and cancel all your flights
Cos an angry exploding mountain is always right
It's always right
It's always right
It's always right

See All 500 Earth's Active Volcanos!

The one they call The Big Rock Candy Mountain, you got to safari and trek through wild animal and armed bandit territory for three days, then back again -- if you come back again. A vulcanologist professor woman has gone down into this unique fizzy crater maybe 20 times. (And brought her camera. And came back. And made a website about her behavioral issue.)

When we approached the mountains south of Reykjavik, I asked the taxi driver if there were was really a mountain Sneffels and a Skartaris volcano, and he got very excited and started pointing up at this and that mountain. 

I was within sight of the Entrance to the Center of the Earth. You can take a taxi and some spelunking gear on the Kalends of July ...

In Sneffels Joculis craterem quem delibat Umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, Audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. Quod feci, Arne Saknussemm.

Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jokul of Sneffels, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the earth. I did this, Arne Saknussemm.
 
VleeptronZ pledges to cover all Earth's violently erupting  VOLCANOS!!! As They Explode. Video at 11.