What happens when someone falls into the lava of a volcano?

Posted by: Sonika Negi 

January 13/2022 19:49 PM IST

According to Geology

The lava coming out is over 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,170 degrees Celsius). “It’s much hotter than anything you’d get in your stove at home,”. Though it’s not exactly liquid: you would be sitting on its surface, if you fall over. To start with, we should get the language down. Magma is a liquid stone underneath the world’s surface.

Did you know that a volcano is a conduit that communicates between an internal and an external tectonic plate? The internal tectonic plate reaches a very high temperature becoming what we know as magna, which then emerges through the surface and explodes. Volcanic eruptions are a slow and silent process, so it can take years for an event of this magnitude to occur.

A recent example of a volcanic eruption is the Kilauea volcano, located on the main Hawaiian island. It is a type of volcano with recurring eruptions that can last millions of years. Thanks to the successive shield eruptions of volcanos, the Hawaiian Islands were formed, and the biggest Hawaiian island continues to expand.

Here you have some fun facts about volcanos:

1. The world’s largest volcano at 13,000 feet above sea level is Mauna Loa and it’s located in Hawaii.
2. Volcanic eruptions can send ash up to 30 kilometers into the air.
3. The internal temperature of a volcano can reach 1000ºC but the lava can reach up to 1200ºC when it reaches the surface
4. There are approximately 10 to 20 volcanic eruptions per day on Earth.
5. There are approximately 1,500 active volcanos on Earth, and most are found at the bottom of the ocean.
6. Italy is the European country with the most active volcanos, it has 14 in total.
7. The only rock in the world that can float in water is a volcanic stone, known as a pumice stone.
8. Large volcanic eruptions can reflect solar radiation and lower the Earth’s temperature by several degrees.
9. There is an area in the Pacific Ocean known as the Ring of Fire because most of the planet’s volcanoes are concentrated there.
10. The soil in the areas near volcanoes is very rich and fertile, for this reason, there are people who build their houses next to volcanoes.

Lava is magma that is come over the surface, ordinarily through volcanic ejection. In case you fall into a well of lava, it’s magma that is your concern.

The majority of us most likely consider lava in the feeling of lava streams, however, you could likewise fall into a lava lake, which is lava that pools in a vent, cavity, or a downturn on particular kinds of the fountain of liquid magma.

For our motivations here, magma and lava are both awful news.

Mafic (ferromagnesian, dark-coloured) lavas such as basalt characteristically form flows known by the Hawaiian names pahoehoe and aa (or a’a). Pahoehoe lava flows are characterized by smooth, gently undulating, or broadly hummocky surfaces. The liquid lava flowing beneath a thin, still-plastic crust drags and wrinkles it into tapestry-like folds and rolls resembling twisted rope. Pahoehoe lava flows are fed almost wholly internally by streams of liquid lava flowing beneath a solidified or partly solidified surface. Typically, the margin of a pahoehoe flow advances by protruding one small toe or lobe after another.

The extreme heat would probably burn your lungs and cause your organs to fail. “The water in the body would probably boil to steam, all while the lava is melting the body from the outside in,” Damby says. (No worries, though, the volcanic gases would probably knock you unconscious.

Some people have fallen into the lava. Some of them came out unscathed, others not. Unlike what people think, if someone falls into the lava they don't sink because the density is very large.

Some people have fallen into the lava. Some of them came out unscathed, others not. Unlike what people think, if someone falls into the lava they don't sink because the density is very large. In contrast to pahoehoe, the surface of aa lava is exceedingly rough, covered with a layer of partly loose, very irregular fragments commonly called clinkers. Aa lava flows are fed principally by rivers of liquid lava flowing in open channels. Typically, such a feeding river forms a narrow band that is 8 to 15 metres (25 to 50 feet) wide along the centre line of the flow, with broad fields of less actively moving clinker on each side of it. At the front of the flow, clinkers from the top roll down and are overridden by the pasty centre layer, like a tread on an advancing bulldozer.

Pahoehoe and aa flows from the same erupting vent are usually identical in chemical composition. In fact, it is common for a flow that leaves the vent as pahoehoe to change to aa as it progresses downslope. The greater the viscosity and the greater the stirring of the liquid (as by rapid flow down a steep slope), the greater the tendency for the material to change from pahoehoe to aa. The reverse change rarely occurs.

Lavas of andesitic or intermediate composition commonly form a somewhat different type of flow, known as a block lava flow. These resemble aa in having tops consisting largely of loose rubble, but the fragments are more regular in shape, most of them polygons with fairly smooth sides. Flows of more siliceous lava tend to be even more fragmental than block flows.

Thin basaltic lava flows generally contain many holes, or vesicles, left by bubbles of gas frozen into the congealing liquid. Thick flows, which remain hot for long periods, may lose most of their gas before the lava congeals, and the resulting rock may be dense with few vesicles.

Kilauea volcano

Kilauea volcano

Basaltic lava erupting from the Pu'u 'O'o spatter and cinder cone on Kilauea volcano, Hawaii, January 31, 1984.

J.D. Griggs/U.S. Geological Survey

Pyroclastic flows, which are low-viscosity, fluidized mixtures of hot but solid volcanic fragments and hot gas, are often described in newspaper accounts as lava flows. This causes much confusion. Molten lava flows are relatively high-viscosity liquids, and most of them advance slowly (a few metres per minute to less than a metre per day). Pyroclastic flows move more like a dense, low-viscosity gas pouring down a slope and even move upslope if they have enough momentum; their downslope velocities often exceed 100 km (60 miles) per hour.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.

BY The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica | View Edit History

volcanism, also spelled vulcanism, any of various processes and phenomena associated with the surficial discharge of molten rock, pyroclastic fragments, or hot water and steam, including volcanoes, geysers, and fumaroles. Although volcanism is best known on Earth, there is evidence that it has been important in the development of the other terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, and Mars—as well as some natural satellites such as Earth’s Moon and Jupiter’s moon Io.

Soufrière Hills, Montserrat

Soufrière Hills, Montserrat

Volcano in the Soufrière Hills of Montserrat, erupting on January 23, 2010.

© Wayne Fenton—AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

volcanism and plate tectonics

volcanism and plate tectonics

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Key People: Alexander von Humboldt Leopold, Baron von Buch George Julius Poulett Scrope Nikolay Aleksandrovich Kozyrev

Related Topics: volcano magma intraplate volcanism subglacial volcanism plume

On Earth, volcanism occurs in several distinct geologic settings. Most of these are associated with the boundaries of the enormous rigid plates that make up the lithosphere—the crust and upper mantle. The majority of active terrestrial volcanoes (roughly 80 percent) and related phenomena occur where two tectonic plates converge and one overrides the other, forcing it down into the mantle to be reabsorbed. Long curved chains of islands known as island arcs form at such subduction zones. Volcanoes of the explosive type make up many of the islands of a single arc or the inner row of islands of a double arc. All such islands that border the Pacific basin are built up from the seafloor, usually by the extrusion of basaltic and andesitic magmas.

Grinnell Glacier shrinkage

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A second major site of active volcanism is along the axis of the oceanic ridge system, where the plates move apart on both sides of the ridge and magma wells up from the mantle, creating new ocean floor along the trailing edges of both plates. Virtually all of this volcanic activity occurs underwater. In a few places the oceanic ridges are sufficiently elevated above the deep seafloor that they emerge from the ocean, and subaerial volcanism occurs. Iceland is the best-known example. The magmas that are erupted along the oceanic ridges are basaltic in composition.

A relatively small number of volcanoes occur within plates far from their margins. Some, as exemplified by the volcanic islands of Hawaii that lie in the interior of the Pacific Plate, are thought to occur because of plate movement over a “hot spot” from which magmas can penetrate to the surface. These magmas characteristically generate a chain of progressively older volcanoes that mark the direction of past motion of the plate over a particular hot spot. The active volcanoes of the East African Rift Valley also occur within a plate (the African Plate), but they appear to result from a different mechanism—possibly the beginning of a new region of plates moving apart.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by John P. Rafferty.