BJ Deming

Nyiragongo: The World’s Most Dangerous Active Volcano

Given the crisis in the Congo, this Sunday Morning Volcano is coming early — it’s the last chapter rewrite for the Decade Volcano eBook and is also freely available at Patreon.

Kettle-shaped Nyiragongo volcano dominates the background of this image by Alexei Shevelev via Wikimedia, GFDL, showing one end of a paved runway, surrounded by green grass, at Goma Airport in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

That day, Nyiragongo was adorably puffing a train of little white clouds out into the blue sky, but this volcano also has violent moods.

Its lava nearly reached the airport in 1977 and 2021, covered parts of it in 2002, went under the airport in 2021, and rampaged through Goma, capital of North Kivu province, in 2002.

Lethal lava

That “kettle” is fractured, and sometimes those cracks or new ones open up. The mile-high lava lake up there — source of Nyiragongo’s vapor clouds — then drains out all over the neighborhood.

As if that weren’t enough, the lava’s chemistry makes it very runny.

Not only can it reach Goma, it also flows very quickly down Nyiragongo’s steep slopes, as fast as 40 mph (60 kph), and it has caught both humans and animals during eruptions. (Baxter et al.; Komorowski et al.; Tedesco et al.)

There is one more magmatic menace here, lurking out of sight.

An explosive lake

Molten rock below Nyiragongo’s crater occasionally leaks through fissured bedrock and sometimes moves under nearby Lake Kivu, which is one of the Albertine Rift’s Great Lakes.

While no unusual cataclysm has happened at beautiful Kivu during historical times, some experts suggest that volcanic heat or even lava coming up through the lake bed might trigger an explosion — not a steam blast as water and magma make contact (though that would happen, too) but a major gas explosion, since there’s a field of methane and carbon dioxide down there large enough to mine. (Schmid et al.; Smittarello et al.)

Gases — mainly carbon dioxide — from the region’s volcanic centers have been bubbling into huge Lake Kivu for a long, long time. An inversion layer has formed in the deep lake, trapping those gases plus the methane produced by the various aquatic critters, plants, and microbes down there.

Kivu might even explode without a volcanic eruption, as some smaller African lakes have done in other volcanic areas, blanketing the area with deadly carbon dioxide and explosive methane.

Calling Nyiragongo “the world’s most dangerous active volcano” is by no means an overstatement.

With nine million human neighbors in peacetime, and many more when refugees pour into the Goma area to escape war zones or social troubles like genocide, the potential exists here for truly biblical amounts of destruction and mayhem.

Recognizing this, many experts and organizations, locally and internationally, have tried to reduce volcanic risk down through the years.

There have been some successes, but at Nyiragongo more than at any other Decade Volcano, the human tragedy can be stronger than science.

Life here is difficult in so many ways.

What is Nyiragongo?

Nyiragongo is an 11,400-foot-tall stratovolcano that has formed over some unusually hot mantle material in the Albertine, or western, arm of the East African Rift. (Biggs et al.; Ebinger and Furman; GVP; Wikipedia)

This is the lower western part of the rift system — young, with a necklace of beautiful lakes — not the upper eastern part, which we’re more familiar with through nature shows and articles.

That upper rift area is nearing end stage now, with its well-developed and wildlife-filled rift valleys, intense volcanism, desolate Danakil Depression, and seafloor spreading in the Afar region as a mantle plume or plumes successfully rip the continent apart. (Biggs et al.; Ebinger and Furman; Oppenheimer; Wikipedia)

Down here, rifting has only just begun. The giant crack in Africa is still in segments, with each of its roughly 60-mile-long basins containing a Great Lake, including, south to north, lakes Malawi, Tanganyika, Kivu (unusual in having some “fizz” to it), Edward, and Albert. (Enormous Lake Victoria is nearby, but that one does its own geological thing and drains into the Nile.) (Biggs et al.; Komorowski et al.; Schmid et al.)

There isn’t much volcanism yet in this relatively new section of the Rift (Corti et al.; Ebinger and Furman), except for Nyiragongo, just north of Lake Kivu, and associates: seven other major volcanoes that run from Uganda to Rwanda and into the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (which was known as Zaire at one point in the twentieth century). (Ebinger and Furman; Kavotha et al.; Kervyn et al.; Komorowski et al.)

These are the famous Virunga Volcanoes, home to mountain gorillas and other rare wildlife, and so beautiful that the Congolese, Rwandans, and Ugandans all have set them aside as national parks (with the Congo’s Virunga Volcanoes National Park also designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site).

Visoke, located on the DR Congo/Rwanda border, briefly sputtered to life once in the late nineteenth century and once again in the mid-twentieth century, but the only permanently active Virunga Volcanoes are Nyiragongo, just west of Rwanda, and its close neighbor in the Congo, shield volcano Nyamulagira (also called Nyamuragira). (GVP; Komorowski et al.)

These two rocky stars of Virunga Volcanoes National Park are quite active, accounting for almost half of all eruptions in Africa. (Wikipedia)

This video starts with Nyamulagira and transitions to Nyiragongo, which at this time had a gorgeous lavafall in its crater, as well as the enormous lava lake.

Sometimes both volcanoes are active at the same time, but they reportedly have different magma sources and chemistry, as well as very different shapes.

Nyamulagira is hazardous but located in a remote region. (Tedesco)

Nyiragongo is too close to too many people.

Nyiragongo and the Decade Volcano program

The current Wikipedia article on Mount Nyiragongo says that experts made this a Decade Volcano because of its 1977 flank eruption.

I can’t document it in the reference given (see also Newhall, 1996 and 1999, at the end of this chapter), but that eruption certainly must have been a major reason behind the selection.

Although there was no way for volcanologists to be sure of this in the Nineties, the 1977 eruption was a sign that Nyiragongo is changing its style in response to tectonic forces in the surrounding Albertine Rift.

Confirmation of this worrisome fact would come in the form of similar eruptions in 2002 and 2021.

The 1977 eruption

As 1977 began, what was probably the world’s biggest lava lake had been roiling and fountaining away in Nyiragongo’s deep kettle-shaped summit crater for half a century or more. (Carn; Tedesco et al.)

Here is video of tourists sailing on Kivu and climbing Nyiragongo in 1976.

This lava lake was perched about a mile above the heads of close to 100,000 people who lived between the volcano and Lake Kivu, some ten miles away. They included 50,000 people in the city of Goma, on Kivu’s north shore, and 32,000 next door to Goma in the city of Gisenyi, Rwanda. (Durieux, 2002a; GVP; Komorowski et al.; Tedesco; Tedesco et al.; Zhujiworld)

Then Nyiragongo erupted outside its crater for the first time in recorded history. (Durieux, 2002)

Shortly after 10 a.m. on January 10, 1977, huge fissures opened in Nyiragongo’s south flank (along with some small cracks to the north), and the entire lava lake drained out — most of it surging towards Lake Kivu in less than an hour. (Barriére et al.; Durieux, 2002a; GVP)

It did not reach Kivu and, somehow, spared Goma and Gisenyi — lava stopped just a mile from Goma’s airport runway — but the eruption devastated villages, killing 75 people. (Brown et al.; Durieux, 2002a; GVP; Tedesco)

Hollywood drama has its place, but in real life, lava flows aren’t usually that deadly. Although people may lose all their belongings to the molten rock, they can easily get out of its way most of the time. (Baxter et al.)

Because of Nyiragongo’s unusually runny lava and those steep slopes, that death toll of 75 people was the highest for any single lava flow in history up to that point. (Twenty-five years later, lava flows long enough to invade Goma would claim over a hundred lives.) (Brown et al.; Durieux, 2002a; Meredith et al.)

This is not a world record that anyone wants to see set.

However, volcanologists in the late 1980s and early 1990s had even more reasons for concern about Nyiragongo and its human neighbors.

An explosive cone field

While the 1977 disaster was this volcano’s first recorded eruption outside the summit crater, it was not the first one ever.

Nyiragongo is surrounded by miles of scoria cones and other landscape features formed by geologically recent explosive volcanism (some of it probably from magma entering waterlogged ground near Lake Kivu and causing steam-related, i.e., “phreatic” blasts like these at a Costa Rican volcano. (Capaccioni et al.; Durieux, 2002a; Komorowski et al.; Tedesco; Tedesco et al.)

This explosive volcanic field around Nyiragongo extends into the city of Goma, but it has been quiet throughout historical times (which is why H. sapiens unwittingly settled down here in the first place).

With Nyiragongo’s change of behavior in 1977, geoscientists wondered if the field might wake up, too.

It was a possibility because most cones here line up with the local fissure system that parallels the Albertine Rift. New fractures in this system hosted the 1977 eruption. (Durieux, 2002a; Platz et al.; Santo et al.; Tedesco; Tedesco et al.)

Why shouldn’t they also reignite the field of volcanic cones?

Experts urgently needed to know how likely this was because the worst-case scenario for such an eruption is terrible — lava flows (and steam explosions) occurring without warning inside Goma, where now almost 700,000 people live.

Luckily, the cone field has been quiet thus far, but uncertainty about its eruption potential remains to this day.

A third hazard came to light during the 1980s.

Lake Kivu gas field

The post-eruption rebirth of Nyiragongo’s lava lake in 1982 wasn’t an issue.

After returning, five years after the flank fissure floods, that new lava lake in the summit crater went quiet for most of the next twelve years. (GVP; Platz et al.)

The mid-1980s wake-up call instead came from volcano-related disasters elsewhere in Africa.

Two ordinary lakes exploded, that is, their dissolved load of carbon dioxide, which had percolated into the water from nearby volcanic systems, suddenly came out of solution when the lake’s internal layered structure shifted for limnological reasons.

When this happened — with a strange, wet-sounding boom or burp, according to survivors — each lake suddenly foamed up, for the same reasons that champagne explodes out of a shaken bottle, and each lake released a heavy cloud of carbon dioxide that ran along the ground, suffocating 34 people at Lake Manoun in 1984 and more than 1,700 people at nearby Lake Nyos in 1986.

It only took a few minutes.

Manoun and Nyos are tiny compared to Lake Kivu, which contains 250 cubic kilometers of carbon dioxide and 55 cubic kilometers of methane. (Baxter et al.; Schmid et al.)

At 55 miles long, 30 miles wide, and up to almost 1,600 feet deep, “fizzy” Lake Kivu has plenty of storage capacity left. (Schmid et al.)

Yet there is so much dissolved gas down there right now that, if the entire lake “erupts” (i.e., overturns) — as it has done at least once before, according to the geological record (Balagizi et al.; Komorowski et al.) — Kivu could produce a carbon dioxide cloud more than 300 feet thick, plus whatever flammability methane might add in around the edges. (Baxter et al.; Schmid et al.; Wikipedia)

Yes — “biblical.”

But let’s keep Nyiragongo’s other, more probable hazards in mind, too: runny lava; that explosive cone field; and the volcano’s frequent activity.

In 1990, Tuttle et al. covered all the reasons for making Nyiragongo a Decade Volcano when they wrote (emphasis added):

“The variety of volcano-related hazards which threaten the inhabitants in the Lake Kivu area (lava flows, explosive phreatic eruptions, and volcanic heating and overturn of deep lake waters) make a basic monitoring system essential . . . To save lives in the event of a dangerous eruption, all residents must know what is expected of them if a warning is sounded: which way to run, how far, and how long to stay away. This will require a massive public education effort.”

Authorities and specialists in various fields did what they could.

Zaire established the Goma Volcano Observatory in 1986. (Nyirabihogo; Ruch and Tedesco), and Nyiragongo was listed as a Decade Volcano in 1991. (Wikipedia)

Then the human tragedy arrived and settled in.

In 1994, a million refugees from the Rwandan genocide were in the area. As well, Goma’s own population was soaring as North Kivu villagers moved into town to escape rural unrest.

This was the worst possible time for Nyiragongo’s lava lake to wake up, but it did and it also started to rise rapidly toward the crater rim. (Komorowski et al.)

Was Nyiragongo going to pour lava on these unfortunate people with another flank eruption?

No, as it turned out.

Nyiragongo held off until peace was in the air and other improvements were giving people a little hope for the first time in almost a decade.

But before that peace came —

Human tragedies

With Japanese financial help in 1995, the Goma Volcano Observatory moved into an old building that sat atop one of the scoria cones in town. Here, international researchers — including but not limited to a Belgian scientific consortium whose interest in the area goes back to colonial times — and Zairean technicians monitored Nyiragongo with a seismic telemetry network. (Britannica; GVP; Pease; Smets et al.)

Unfortunately, Zaire was rapidly falling apart around them. In the mid to late 1990s, a massive civil war grew out of the Rwandan genocide, with Goma as a major hotspot. This soon developed into what Wikipedia calls ‘Africa’s first ‘world war.’ There was a second war, too.

While many countries were involved, much of the fighting was done in Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo (the country’s name from 1998 on).

All that Newhall could report for this Decade Volcano in his 1999 program summary was:

Seismic, tilt, EDM [electronic distance measuring], and thermal monitoring were increased in 1994, when the lava lake began to rise and threaten refugees from nearby Rwanda. Beginning in October 1996, escalating civil strife destroyed all stations and halted monitoring.

As bad as things got, though, the Congolese world did not end and good will was never completely extinguished in this troubled land.

By 2001, ceasefires and peace initiatives were underway. (Wikipedia)

Nyiragongo erupts, 2002 and 2021

As the region’s security and sociopolitical situation improved a bit, monitoring resumed at Nyiragongo (Carn), but Goma Volcano Observatory (GVO) staff did not have an easy time of it.

There wasn’t much of a remote monitoring network left, thanks to looters. (GVP; Kavotha et al.; Smets et al.)

Volcanologists needed data, but field trips were rare because of funding problems and the presence of many armed partisan groups on and around Nyiragongo.

GVO workers, and occasionally, international volcanology teams, went up there when they could.

Sometimes they were shot (Neiman, 2021a), although their casualty rate wasn’t nearly as high as that of the Virunga park rangers to whom Balagizi et al. dedicated their paper out of gratitude for the rangers’ protection and assistance in the field.

In the early 2000s, some applause for GVO’s staff would have helped tremendously — or even a paycheck! (Clarke) — but local officials or residents rarely knew about or acknowledged the Goma Volcano Observatory’s existence. (Ruch and Tedesco)

Most of the 400,000 people living in Goma at the turn of this century were not prepared for volcanic trouble. They knew war, corruption, violence and other crimes on a daily basis but had no personal experience or recollection of Nyiragongo’s 1977 eruption. (Clarke; Pouclet and Bram; Ruch and Tedesco; Tedesco et al.)

Few took the volcano’s hazards seriously, or GVO’s warnings of a seismic activity uptick in December 2001. (Ruch and Tedesco)

Authorities should have known better, but it isn’t clear that there was effective Congolese authority in and around Goma at this time. Neither were there any official contingency plans locally or through the United Nations peacekeeping mission. (Clarke; Ruch and Tedesco)

Then, on the morning of January 17, 2002 — twenty-five years, one week, and almost to the hour after its last eruption, and with just two working instruments on the mountain (Clarke) — Nyiragongo opened up again.

2002: Eruption and rifting

Here is some news footage of the lava flows.

This eruption was basically a repeat of 1977, with widening and extension of the old fissures (up to 11 miles long, compared to a maximum length of 6 miles in 1977), as well as some new fissures and lava outbreaks near Goma that not only divided the city into thirds like a big pie but also entered Lake Kivu and built a small lava delta on its north shore. (Allard et al.; Carn; GVP; Komorowski et al.)

The resulting human catastrophe, summarized here (Sections 3 and 4), is beyond the scope of this eBook.

Suffice to say that about a third of Goma International’s runway was destroyed (hindering quick access to the disaster zone by outside relief agencies and security forces), along with more than ten percent of the city, including its main business/commercial center. An estimated 120,000 people lost their homes. (Allard et al.; GVP; Komorowski et al.; Tedesco et al.)

Brown et al. put the death toll from lava at 127; this figure probably includes those caught in an explosion, per Allard et al., at a Goma gas depot that was surrounded by fast-moving lava. Meredith et al. count 47 deaths by lava and 60 to 100 in the gas depot explosion.

Almost 500 people were injured during the eruption. (Tedesco et al.)

While fourteen villages were also affected (GVP), 2002 was the first time — in history (Allard et al.) or since Mount Etna’s trashing of medieval Catania in 1669 (Komorowski et al.) — that a lava eruption had inflicted major damage on a big city, forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate. (Carn; GVP; Komorowski et al.; Ruch and Tedesco; Tedesco et al.)

Despite the concern that Tuttle et al. expressed in 1990, refugees in 2002 did not know “which way to run, how far, or how long to stay.”

Chaos and terror ruled. (Ruch and Tedesco)

Instinctively, despite the region’s ongoing ethnic tensions, political instability, and fighting, most people fled to Gisenyi and the Rwandan hills nearby.

Just twelve hours later — before the lava in Goma had cooled! — they began returning to their city after feeling unwelcome in Rwanda, although no organized humanitarian aid was up and running in Goma yet to provide them with the basic necessities of life. (Allard et al.; GVP; Ruch and Tedesco)

The worst news in geological terms was lava flowing into Kivu.

Would it destabilize the huge lake? (Allard et al.)

Emergency studies were done and, fortunately, the results were reassuring.

Lava had sunk into the lake to a depth of only about 260 feet — nowhere near the gas field, which starts at around 660 feet below the surface. (GVP)

This relatively small intrusion hadn’t even been able to seriously affect the Great Lake’s upper water stability (with only a 0.1° C warmup just nine miles from the lava delta). (Schmid et al.)

While these studies brought very good news, they didn’t explain what Lake Kivu actually did in 2002.

The rift widens

Immediately after the eruption and for about a month afterward, water levels rose on all Kivu shores — as much as 2-1/2 feet at Goma Harbor! (Allard et al.; GVP; Tedesco et al.)

Yet no heavy rain had fallen and there was no flooding anywhere else.

Experts also noted two land-based peculiarities:

1. The 2002 ground fissures were way too large and too numerous for the volume of lava erupted. (Tedesco et al.) Something else besides volcanism was going on here.
2. Earthquakes got worse after the 2002 eruption instead of before it (typically, as we saw in the 2010 section of the Mount Merapi chapter, volcanic seismicity happens beforehand, while magma is breaking its way up to the surface). This intense post-eruption shaking at Nyiragongo brought down some buildings in Goma and Gisenyi. (GVP; Tedesco et al.)

Geoscientists soon realized why all this was happening (although it might not have occurred to us laypeople): Lava, while a contributor, wasn’t the main culprit behind those gaping fissures in Nyiragongo; Albertine Rift tectonics broke them open in 1977 and then broadened them in 2002. (Komorowski et al.; Platz et al.; Pouclet and Bram; Smittarello et al.; Tedesco et al.)

And Lake Kivu’s water level hadn’t actually risen even an inch — the ground under Goma Harbor sank 2-1/2 feet!

As any continental rift widens, its two sides move apart and the ground in between subsides (drops down), producing a rift valley.

That’s an oversimplification, of course — such effects are intricate in the real world, especially in tectonically complex Africa — but you get the general idea.

Because it’s a geological process, rifting can be slow, in human terms.

Hundreds of millennia must pass before we’ll see wildebeest herds (or their equivalent) migrating over the Kivu savanna, pursued by charismatic cats or cat-like predators.

But that’s the general direction Nature is heading for in the Albertine Rift.

Sometimes rifting happens quickly. Friction along a fault might weaken, allowing movement; the regional stress field might change; Cthuthulu might come up for a visit — that and all sorts of highly technical geophysics are at work as a continent breaks up.

It’s possible that one of those “speedy” moments happened when extension of the Albertine Rift cracked Nyiragongo’s walls in the late 1970s and then widened those cracks and opened a few more in 2002.

The presence of a big, gassy lake of molten rock, pushing against summit crater walls in 1977 and again in 2002, was a factor, but rift movements probably triggered both eruptions. (Allard et al.; Komorowski et al.; Pouclet and Bram; Tedesco et al.)

Before, during, and for a month after the 2002 eruption, rift extension was intensively working in the basement, too, breaking through bedrock. Magma filled some of the resulting cracks, forming dikes that appeared to be at least 2 miles underground. (Biggs et al.; Smittarello et al.)

But were all of them that far down?

Starting in 2002, volcanologists looked at Nyiragongo’s extensive post-eruption network of fissures on its lower south flank; they analyzed lava samples and plotted earthquake epicenters (as well as possible, given the limited seismometer data).

The information hinted at a disturbing possibility: Nyiragongo’s eruption might well have come from two lava sources — the draining lava lake, of course, but perhaps also a deeper magma reservoir, connected to the surface by active dikes that fed those destructive and deadly lower flank fissure vents. (Tedesco et al.)

And there might be more of these fissures now hidden underneath Goma, dangerously close to Lake Kivu. (Tedesco et al.)

This needed to be looked into — fast.

In March 2002, a British-French scientific team made a number of high-priority recommendations on how to deal with this challenging volcano and reduce its risks (see Allard et al. for details).

Over the next two decades, steps were taken on these and other suggestions, but progress was difficult in the face of the region’s chronic political and security instability, armed insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and epidemics of cholera, measles, and Ebola virus. (Boudoire et al.)

Meanwhile, up at the volcano’s summit crater, instead of waiting five years to return, as it did after the 1977 eruption, a new lava lake was in place, roiling and fountaining away, in two to six months. (GVP; Smittarello et al.)

Here it is in 2005. Tourists were a valuable source of information on summit and crater conditions for GVO staff and other volcanologists.

Over the next 19 years, this lava lake would rise almost a thousand feet inside those kettle-shaped summit walls, made of rock that had been severely weakened in the 2002 eruption. (Barrière et al.; Burgi et al.; GVP; Wright and Flynn)

Then, on the evening of May 22, 2021, the walls broke. (Smittarello et al.)

2021: Eruption and other concerns

It caught everybody by surprise, including the Goma Volcano Observatory staff.

At the time, many blamed GVO for missing the eruption’s precursors, but now we know that there was no warning. (Boudoire et al.; Smittarello et al.)

One moment, the world’s biggest lava lake was churning away in that summit crater; the next moment, it was pouring through old fissures in the volcano’s south flank, as well as from at least two fissures lower down. (GVP; Smittarello et al.)

GVO personnel could only confirm the eruption the same way a million other people in harm’s way did — from the sudden red glow on the mountain, less than 40 minutes after GVO seismometers first showed an unusual signal from Nyiragongo. (Smittarello et al.)

One flow headed towards Gisenyi and the other one moved on Goma.

Lava didn’t reach Gisenyi, but it was in North Goma in a few hours, eventually stopping just a few hundred yards from Goma Airport. (Boudoire et al.)

It is difficult to confirm the death toll. Meredith et al. note a minimum of 31 fatalities (mostly in traffic accidents, per Wikipedia), while Smittarello et al. report about 220 dead or missing, more than 750 injured, and some 6,000 households made homeless.

Three current sources that I checked for this writing (February 2025) — the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program, the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and Syavulisembo et al. — go with the 31 figure.

In terms of property, the six-hour 2021 eruption, according to Smittarello et al., destroyed:

  • 8 schools
  • 3 health centers
  • A dozen churches
  • Several key infrastructure elements, electrical and telecom facilities
  • The largest water tank supplying North Goma, affecting almost 550,000 people. The rock formations here do not hold ground water. As I recall, the Virunga rangers eventually repaired the tank. Until then, Lake Kivu and rain were their only alternatives.

The May 2021 eruption only lasted six hours, but — just as in 2002 — intense earthquakes after the eruption lasted for about ten days. (Boudoire et al.; Smittarello et al.)

If anyone has reported apparent changes in Lake Kivu’s water level during/after those earthquakes, similar to what occurred in 2002, I haven’t found it yet.

Magma under Goma and Lake Kivu

During and especially right after the 2021 eruption, observers noted with concern what Smittarello et al. must describe with scientific detachment in their paper (emphasis added) as:

“the gradual southward propagation of a shallow dike from the Nyiragongo edifice underlying below Goma airport on May 23-24, then Goma and Gisenyi city centers on May 25-26 and finally below the northern part of Lake Kivu on May 27.”

It was impossible to miss, either on satellite radar imagery or at ground level, where a line of fissures opened on either side of the dike — in the Goma and Gisenyi areas, respectively — and the 1,500-foot-wide ground in between these new fissures subsided a bit. (Boudoire et al.; Smitarello et al., 2022)

Then seismicity quieted down, just as it did when the 2002 rifting event was over.

The top of this new dike is less than 1,500 feet below the surface. No lava has erupted yet, but the Goma-side fissure system is hotter, while on the Gisenyi side, fissuring is more severe. (Boudoire et al.; Smitarello et al., 2022)

And now, just a little way under the Kivu lake bed is an excellent point source of heat, larger than the 2002 lava delta, though it might not contain much gas (thanks to volcanic degassing before the dike opened up).

Nyiragongo potentially could zoom from “least” to “Number One” on the UN’s sadly extensive list of crises. And, remotely possible, it might keep going all the way on to “biblical.”

Epilogue:

Lava returned to Nyiragongo’s summit crater in late September 2021, and another lava lake has formed. (GVP).

As of online news through February 26, 2025, Goma is in the hands of M23 partisans, who are currently advancing toward the Congo’s capital, Kinshasha. Rwandan troops reportedly have crossed the border, and the United Nations is trying to avert yet another regional war.

In and around Goma, the situation is bleak, according to OCHA’s Status Report #3 (French).

Nyiragongo’s lava lake presumably continues, although no fresh updates are available online from ground observers in the troubled area.

And the Albertine Rift undoubtedly continues to widen.

Stats

Location:

1.52° S, 29.25° E, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The GVP Volcano Number is 223030.

Nearby Population:

Per the Global Volcanism Program (GVP) website:

  • Within 5 km (3 miles): 2,416.
  • Within 10 km (6 miles): 31,145.
  • Within 30 km (19 miles): 1,006,436.
  • Within 100 km (62 miles): 9,087,529.

CURRENT STATUS:

Yellow, as of the last update in 2024.

Biggest recorded event:

The city of Goma is built on the huge Buyinga lava flow. This happened 700-800 years ago and covers an area of almost 300 square miles.

Monitoring:

The Goma Volcano Observatory. (French)

The Global Volcanism Program is reporting satellite observations of Nyamulagira’s ongoing eruption and probably will do the same if changes are noted at Nyiragongo.

Nyiragongo is in Toulouse VAAC’s area of responsibility.

Sources:

  • Allard, P.; Baxter, P.; Halbwachs, M.; and Komorowski, J. C. 2002. The January 2002 eruption of Nyiragongo volcano (Dem. Repub. Congo) and related hazards: observations and recommendations. Final Report of the French–British Team, Paris.
  • Balagizi, C. M.; Kies, A.; Kasereka, M. M.; Tedesco, D.; and others. 2018. Natural hazards in Goma and the surrounding villages, East African Rift System. Natural Hazards, 93(1): 31-66. In the image for our chapter, Virunga Park rangers contemplate Nyiragongo’s lava lake, while stars shine overhead. Balagizi et al. dedicated their paper to the many rangers who have given their lives defending the park.
  • Barrière, J.; d’Oreye, N.; Smets, B.; Oth, A.; Delhaye, L.; and others. 2022. Intra‐Crater Eruption Dynamics at Nyiragongo (DR Congo), 2002–2021. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 127(4): e2021JB023858.
  • Baxter, P.; Allard, P.; Halbwachs, M.; Komorowski, J.; and others. 2003. Human health and vulnerability in the Nyiragongo volcano eruption and humanitarian crisis at Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. Acta Vulcanologica, 14(1/2): 109.
  • Biggs, J.; Ayele, A.; Fischer, T. P.; Fontijn, K.; and others. 2021. Volcanic activity and hazard in the East African Rift Zone. Nature Communications, 12(1); 6881.
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