CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 Vicious Volcanoes 4 CHAPTER 2 What Lies Beneath 8 CHAPTER 3 Burning Ring of Fire 14 CHAPTER 4 Eyewitness to Eruptions 20 CHAPTER 5 Volcanic Impacts 28 CHAPTER 6 Living with Volcanoes 36 GLOSSARY 46 FOR MORE INFORMATION 47 INDEX 48
CHAPTER 1 VICIOUS VOLCANOES Volcanoes are openings in Earth’s surface Most of the time these openings are closed shut and barely noticeable Then suddenly they can open and shoot out torrents of volcanic ash gases and viciously hot liquid rock Eruptions like these can be violent and spectacular to witness However they can also be devastating causing the tragic loss of many lives and huge amounts of damage and destruction for miles Underground Drama Ingredients for Disaster The drama of a volcano starts deep underground There our planet is in motion and different parts of the rock it is made from push against each other Enormous forces and high temperatures build up from this pushing They cause hot liquid rock under high pressure to move around beneath the surface The easiest places for it to escape the pressure are at the slightest gaps in the outer rocky skin of the Earth It is at these places that volcanoes erupt The bubbling rock called lava that bursts out from within Earth can spill down the sides of a volcano like burning hot syrup or it can shoot into the air like a cork exploding from a bottle of soda The clouds of gas and ash that billow out of a volcano and spread through the air can be hot dense and poisonous Thick lava moves fairly slowly allowing people to escape its path On steep slopes thinner lava can move more quickly making it harder to get away 4
Deadly Explosions The name volcano comes from Roman times when people named a volcanic island Vulcan after their god of fire Soon all volcanoes became known by this name Many volcanoes are indeed characterized by a fiery glow and intense heat as red-hot lava pours out of them burning anything in their paths to cinders They may also spray large chunks of rock splintered from the earth in the explosion into the air These can rain down like deadly missiles A volcano in Russia spews out incredibly hot lava during a nighttime eruption DEADLY DATA The worst volcano ever recorded was Mount Tambora Indonesia in 1815 The lava and superheated gas flows killed many people More people died in the following year because ash clouds blocked the sun and destroyed crops causing famine In total the eruption killed almost 100,000 people 5
