5 Misconceptions About Volcanoes (That Can Really Ruin Your Day!)

What you don’t know about volcanoes can hurt you in the right (or rather, wrong) circumstances.

Let’s take a look a some common misperceptions about volcanoes, the actual facts involved, and the ruination to be avoided, if at all possible.

Misconception #1. Volcanoes are all alike.

Fact: This is very generally true of volcanism, but volcanoes? Not so much.

For example, Hawaii’s Kilauea and Mount Rainier in Washington State are very different.

One is a huge Hawaiian shield volcano known for its glowing red lava fountains and flows; the other is an explosive stratovolcano, frosted with glaciers, up in the Pacific Northwest.

All that they really have in common is being surface vents for hot stuff that comes up out of the planet.

What sets Kilauea and Rainier apart from one another is complex, of course, but comes down to things like:

The reasons why there is hot stuff in the first place. In our example, Kilauea is a hot-spot volcano; Rainier and other Cascade volcanoes are there in a subduction zone.
The chemistry and other properties of that hot stuff.
What happens to the hot stuff after it forms and right up through to the moment of eruption.

This all makes a volcano unpredictable as well as unique.

Ruination: There you are, a Hawaiian warrior on your way to fight other Big Island warriors, and your army’s path goes across Kilauea’s summit, where you hope to get a nice view of some runny red lava.

But instead, Kilauea explodes! All that’s left of your fine army is its footprints.

Or there you are, a Native American collecting firewood in a deep Pacific Northwest valley near the sacred mountain Tahoma, which is hidden right now by the steep walls of your valley.

The ground begins to shake. A loud roar coming from farther up in the valley, mixed in with the sound of toppling timber, breaks the wilderness quiet. A crowd of panicked animals breaks out of the nearby forest, and then here comes a speeding wall of mud, boulders, trees, ice chunks, and water — Tahoma’s flank has collapsed!

If that doesn’t get you because you have agilely scampered up the valley’s side slope, then the resulting lateral blast from Tahoma’s uncapped hydrothermal system probably will.

Routine behavior as well as surprising action sequences are all part of the unique history behind every volcano, including Kilauea and Tahoma/Rainier.

Volcanology is the art and science of piecing each fire mountain’s story together as a chapter and adding it to the overall book about volcanism (which is and always will be a work in progress).

The rest of us should stay alert when on or near any volcano, because we don’t know what might be coming next in its plot line.

Misconception #2. We know our local landmark — it isn’t that dangerous.

Fact: Volcanoes operate on geologic, not human, time scales and can go centuries or millennia in between eruptions. They also change styles in unexpected ways (see Misconception #1).

Mount Vesuvius, in Italy, is a good example. It has cycles of eruptions, and it happened to hit the “off” button late in the BC era, just before Romans appeared and moved into the neighborhood.

Quiet and forested, it was a very scenic mountain and made a nice backdrop for the new port of Pompeii, seven miles away. Wealthy people built vacation homes on its slopes, with a good view of what’s now called Naples Bay. Trendy towns like Herculaneum and Oplontis sprang up at the mountain’s feet.

This all took place over eight hundred years.

Ruination: We know the end of that story!

What we might not be aware of is how fast it happened.

There were earthquakes, but nobody associated them with Vesuvius.

Then, one afternoon, some steamy white clouds appeared on the mountain’s summit. Soon a convection column was rising 10 to 19 miles up into the sky and spreading out into an ashy umbrella cloud. This continued all afternoon and into the evening and only got worse after 8 p.m. and into the next morning.

Twenty-four hours after the initial white clouds, the villas with a view were gone, Herculaneum and Oplontis were gone, and the now dead city of Pompeii was being thoroughly buried by ashfall that continued as the eruption wound down over the next several days.

No one would have believed you if you had predicted this at breakfast yesterday morning.

The good news is that we’re better prepared now.

We humans invented and organized volcanology as a science over the last hundred and fifty years or so.

Experts have come up with many ways to monitor dangerous volcanoes like Vesuvius (for instance, discovering that it has cycles, though the current cycle point remains uncertain).

The problem is that science and volcano monitoring cost money, which means that only active, obviously hazardous volcanoes are selected for study.

How many “sleeping Vesuviuses” are out there is anyone’s guess — but it’s not impossible that your local volcanic landmark might be one of them.

Check with your local experts, and if they do express concerns, listen to them and follow their advice.

Misconception #3. I’ll be okay in the city.

Fact: This is easy to believe, given the many connections that modern cities have with the outside world and the high priority they would get in an emergency, but truth is, some cities with a volcano contingency plan, like Naples (Italian), focus on getting people out as quickly and safely as possible.

And in others, like Tokyo, residents are urged, in certain curcumstances, to shelter in place when the local volcano goes off (Mount Fuji, in Tokyo’s case) and hope for the best.

The urban hazard is real enough for IAVCEI to have a Cities on Volcanoes program!

Ruination: If you’re lucky, they closely monitor that active volcano near the city you are in for work, while on vacation, or just in transit. If not, everybody will be winging it, which is not the best way to deal with such a crisis.

In any case, once the alert level is raised and an evacuation is called, there could be local panic.

Flight cancellations are likely if there is ash in the air. Roads and transit stations will be crowded, and let’s face it; most cities are not designed for speedy mass evacuation.

Too, any older building stock — including historic monuments and architectural treasures — might not hold up to volcanic earthquakes or (worst case) heavy ashfall. So, in addition to clogged routes, building collapses could force detours or even shut down transport completely.

Speaking of ash, it short-circuits power lines, makes highways and railroads very slippery, and clogs water mains and sewers. These problems will continue on after the eruption stops.

It’s true that cities will be high-priority rescue sites in case of eruption, but did you know that emergency planners have to factor in “dark tourism”?

People flock to eruptions anyway, and they will be drawn to the drama of a city struggling under the volcano.

Individually, they mean well but their numbers do add up.

Rescue transportation out of and aid shipments into the eruption zone will be delayed by such crowds.

That’s something to expect if you’re in a hard-hit city. If instead you’re fortunate enough to be on the outside looking in, you should rethink any ideas about going there to experience it.

Help everyone caught up in the emergency by staying away and following it via live coverage. Who knows? The life you save might be your own!

Misconception #4. There are no volcanoes in ___.

There’s one sneaking up behind you right now!

Fact: Okay, probably not but there are active volcanoes in places that seem unlikely to many of us.

For example, no one expects to see lava dripping over the rim of Arizona’s Grand Canyon and damming the Colorado River, but experts say that it has happened before and might happen again (though chances of it are low).

There are also active volcanoes in what we sometimes assume are nonvolcanic areas, like Saudi Arabia, Germany, and France. Since we have already mentioned cities, let’s also include Mexico City and Auckland, which are among those urban areas built on active volcanic fields.

Ruination: Lavafalls in the Grand Canyon would be nothing but spectacular! However, that’s a remote natural park, not close enough to mess with the daily lives of people and our stuff.

Remember how lava came up in the streets of Leilani Gardens and a few other neighborhoods on the island of Hawaii in 2018 when Kilauea shifted its lava resources closer to populated areas?

It was bad.

Now imagine that happening to you somewhere that you had no idea was volcanic. “Disorienting” and “scary” aren’t strong enough words to describe the shock you might feel, particularly if the eruption was explosive — as they tend to be in Germany — rather than Hawaiian style.

The good news is that scientists and emergency planners are aware of these volcanic areas and monitor them carefully.

If you live or spend much time in the world’s little-known volcanic areas — say, Bend, Oregon, or Socorro, New Mexico — you probably are aware of the situation.

Otherwise, you can protect yourself from disorienting, scary shocks by reading up a little bit on the areas you will be visiting or traveling through and their natural hazards.

In the US, for example, state and federal geological surveys are useful resources for reliable facts on any local volcanism.

5. Major eruptions don’t happen in the ocean.

Fact: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai said “YES, THEY DO!” when it punched the sky on January 15, 2022 — and that wasn’t the exception that proves the rule.

The more experts look, the more volcanoes they find in the deep blue sea. For instance, the search for Flight MH370 revealed volcanoes in the Indian Ocean.

Spurred by Hunga Tonga’s mighty blast, researchers have since stepped up their efforts to find active submarine volcanoes.

Not all of these are in the Pacific or Indian oceans.

Ruination: Let’s assume your nemesis is one of the few known underwater trouble makers, with the improbable name of Kick-‘Em-Jenny.

There you are in a boat, crossing the sparkling Caribbean Sea one sunny May day on a journey south to the island of Grenada.

Around noon, you notice that it’s unusually hot, and the heat keeps building.

The sea is perfectly smooth, but suddenly your boat drops three to four feet down into the sea and big waves start coming at you from all directions.

The sun turns red, then darker red, and finally disappears altogether at quarter of three in the afternoon!

Now it’s so dark that, even with ship lights on, you can’t see more than a few feet around you. Then lightning flashes, without thunder. There’s no wind at all but the sudden glare reveals a churning sea in every direction.

At this point, some crew members freak out and start running around screaming that end times have come.

This actually happened (including the screaming) to a Danish ship on May 7, 1902, according to Ernest Zebrowski, Jr., in his book The Last Days of St Pierre!

The ship and crew survived their passage over an erupting Kick ’em Jenny, which wasn’t recognized as a volcano until 1939. Luckily for them, its summit vent wasn’t as close to the surface as it is today.

Another way that this or some other submarine volcano could ruin your day would be for it to go all Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HTHH).

Now this purely speculative — that 2022 Tongan eruption was unusual in many ways and experts are still investigating it.

Nevertheless, if it happened once, it can happen again somewhere.

As this research team (jargon alert) points out:

Further, the threat of submarine explosive eruptions and subsequent tsunami is not limited to the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. The vent of Kick’em Jenny Volcano in the Lesser Antilles is located only ∼150 m b.s.l. and the volcano has had numerous explosive eruptions since 1939, presenting significant hazards to Caribbean Island nations, the Americas, and countries around the Atlantic Rim (Harbitz et al., 2012; Day, 2015). This newest eruption of HTHH highlights the need to better understand mafic-to-intermediate stratocones at inter-oceanic arcs worldwide as, under the right conditions, they may produce cataclysmic, caldera-forming eruptions with global impact.

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