Volcanos

Volcano! By National Geographic

On March 10, 2011, I attended a campus wide experience that was showing a volcano documentary by Maurice and Katia Krafft. They were born and raised in France and would like to retire in Hawaii. They are writers, movie makers, and scientists. In 1988, they circled the globe 8 times to study the many volcanoes of the earth. They love to photograph the many shield volcanoes in Hawaii because they are constantly erupting. To them, their perfect paradise is described as a lava lake not a paradise with crystal clear waters and sunny skies. They were attracted to fire since Maurice was 8 and Katia was 14. They transformed their passion to a way of life.
Also in 1988, they had a trip to Africa and visited the volcano Longui. It was very steep and had flowing lava that was not red but black. It is rich in minerals and that’s what gives it the black color. What was strange was that the black lava became white within 24 hours and at night it was red. On their journey, they also visited a 200 meter high volcano in Indonesia called Nuee ardente. It explodes with an avalanche of gases and rocks and is considered extremely dangerous. New volcanoes rumble a lot causing earthquakes and landslides. The couple keeps reminders from journeys they have been on including a skull, an exploded tree trunk, and cassettes from former volcanologists who died 90 meters from an eruption.
They spoke about their notorious Indonesia trip where they took a boat into a volcanic lake where the gases were burning and the lake was full of sulfuric acid. They were criticized for taking an “unnecessary risk” by entering the lake. On March 25, Maurice’s’ birthday, they visited a volcano that was known to have no volcanic eruption, but on that day, Pelee gave him a present and volcanoes erupted on his birthday for 3 weeks. They describe volcanoes as a show, never the same, always wonderful.