I Love Lava! Inside the World's Largest Lava Lake
Another Icelandic volcano had Europe wetting itself, but the real beast bubbles in Congo's Mount Nyiragongo, and a mob of scientific loons in silver suits went right to its rim.
Look at you, sitting behind your desk at work, endlessly clicking refresh on your favourite social networking site, tweeting your every waking thought and minor emotional shift, brainlessly looking out of bus windows, lolling around toplessly in parks folding cold meats into your lover’s mouth – have you completely forgotten that Mother Nature is a total bitch in a rampant mood, entirely capable of stomping around obliterating everything in her wake, including you? You need to wake up and grab life by the scruff of the neck, man. You’re drifting.
A stark reminder of the planet’s natural destructive firepower can be found shrieking away in a deep chasm within Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 282 million cubic feet of molten lava bubbles all year around, emitting pungent gas clouds so revolting that they can immediately blind or even kill a man – it’s the largest lava lake on the planet. According to reports, the volcano which accommodates this fiery phenomenon has erupted 34 times since 1882, and when it last went off in 2002, it claimed 47 lives from carbon dioxide asphyxiation, and left 120,000 people in the nearby city of Goma homeless. These magnificent pictures find a mob of scientific loons daring to raise a finger to boring everyday conventions like ‘being careful’ and ‘having a nice day’ by venturing to the very rim of the beast, getting up close and personal with the red hot breakers crashing in front of them like Satan’s surf – an adventure which no one had previously survived.
The trip of almost certain death required months of training, with the daredevils required to wear nothing more than a few enormously expensive protective silver space suits and some top-of-the-range gas masks to shield themselves from the molten pond. The good news is they all survived, in spite of the fact that that molten lava operates between temperatures of 700 and 1200°C – known in the science trade as “really bloody hot”.
From the June 2011 issue of FHM India.
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