The Top 10 Reasons I Love Volcanoes (And You Should, Too)

If you are a frequent reader of the blog and/or follow my @eruptionsblog Twitter feed, you might have found that in a very Danish sort of way, I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. I feel like I've been spending a lot of text raining on people's parades when it comes to mongering about volcanism or criticizing the way volcanoes are covered in the media. Now, those are two goals of this blog - to dispel the rumors and wrong ideas that abound in the interwebs (and beyond), but really, it isn't much fun. Sure, I am satisfied when I've really nailed why the Daily Mail just set back volcanic understanding a decade, but that really isn't why I got started here. Eruptions got started because, well, I love volcanoes. It is what I do for a living - think, research and teach about volcanoes. So, to remind myself (and you) why I love volcanoes, I thought I'd post about it. So here goes. Erik's top 10 reasons why I love volcanoes: 10. They erupt molten rock. In a sense, this speaks for itself. What person of any age isn't impressed with taking something as seemingly permanent as rock and having it come out of the ground molten. Sometimes it comes out as lava flows, glowing orange (or black sometimes, like carbonatites) and sometimes there is just too much gas trapped in the lava, so it fragments into ash particles that get carried into the atmosphere. All of it starts of as molten rock formed sometimes as deep as the Earth's mantle. 9. They've captured the imagination of man since, well, forever. The oldest known depiction of a volcanic event made by humans is ~8,200 years old. How many things, short of downing that impressive mastodon, have captivated the minds of humans? Some of the earliest works of antiquity were about volcanoes, however stylized, and the some of the Gods even lived inside volcanoes. Some volcanoes are still considered sacred landscape, like Japan's Fuji (see below). Remember, the modern humans came out of a volcanically-active valley where evidence of their activity was captured in ash beds from these volcanoes - we've watched them erupt for millennia.