Crater Lake sits in the caldera left when Mount Mazama's eruption about 7,700 years ago destroyed the mountain. In 1870 a Kansas schoolboy named William Gladstone Steel read about it in the newspaper wrapped around his lunch.

In 1886 he had three boats hauled in for Clarence Dutton's USGS survey. They took 168 soundings with a lead weight on piano wire, and the deepest came out at 1,996 ft, a number that stood until 1958. Theodore Roosevelt signed the park into law on 22 May 1902, 17 years after Steel first saw it.

The lidar shows the steep caldera wall down the left side and Wizard Island's cone and summit crater left of centre.

1. Crater Lake caldera wall and Wizard Island, Oregon
2. Air photo of the same area, September 2022

Numbered pins on picture 1:
Pin 1: The steep caldera wall
Pin 2: Wizard Island's summit crater
Pin 3: The flat lake surface

Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), public domain.
Imagery: USGS The National Map (NAIP Imagery service), 2022, Public domain.

I’m the developer of Mayon Volcano, an educational visualization of Mayon in Bicol, Philippines. This short recording shows part of the version 2.0 experience, The Living Mountain. Recording: actual app footage prepared in October 2026, created by Maha Strategies.

The surface terrain is built from NASA SRTM elevation data and Esri satellite imagery. Historical scenes cover 1814, 1968, 1984 and 2018, but the lava and eruption effects are reconstructions, not measured footprints or exact replays.

The underground views are conceptual models. Journey Inside and Follow a Crystal introduce evidence used to interpret volcanic systems, while evidence panels distinguish observations, inferences, illustrations and unresolved questions. The guided expeditions explore magma, volcanic evidence and the slow geological carbon cycle. Their interactive experiments are qualitative learning illustrations.

The Cagsawa Ruins marker, model and story viewpoint now share a corrected location in Busay, Daraga, thanks to u/Gin_Tagaubos pointing out the earlier error. The tower model remains approximate.

You can explore here: https://mayonrajan.com/

Core exploration, existing learning tools and the first two stops of each expedition are free. The optional Living Mountain Expedition Pack unlocks the three complete routes with one permanent purchase. Store launch pricing is US$6.99 in the US and ₱249 in the Philippines; local prices can vary. There’s no subscription.

I’d appreciate suggestions on which evidence or uncertainties deserve clearer explanation when presenting a volcano’s interior. This is an educational visualization, not a live monitoring or forecasting tool.

Source of the pictures here and here

Left a piece of my soul there. Gotta get back.

Don’t know if this is the right place to post but as the title says, I am really confused as to what these things are that were flying over Mount Etna earlier this evening. I checked for any flight traffic and there was none, and even if there was, it wouldn’t look like this?? Etna is also currently not having any ash emissions or lava, and again, it wouldn’t look like this🤨 I love watching Etna on the webcams and I actually live here to study geology and volcanoes, her included, but I’ve just never seen this before. Would love some insight if anyone knows!

Hi all. I've been building a small dashboard that pulls the public data on Kīlauea's summit fountaining episodes into one place:

**https://fountain.fly.dev\*\*

It is a personal project and **not** a USGS product or forecast. For anything hazard-related, please follow HVO.

**Thank you to the people who make this data public**

None of this exists without the work of the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory: the tiltmeters and seismometers, the daily updates, the episode table and the tilt data releases. Earthquakes come from the USGS ComCat catalog, HVO's seismic waveforms are distributed by the NSF-supported EarthScope data center, and the thermal detections are from NASA FIRMS. I'm just rearranging what these agencies collect and share freely. Any mistakes are mine, not theirs.

**What's on it**

- Summit tilt (UWD), from the USGS data release where it exists and from HVO's public tilt plots for recent weeks

- Seismic tremor near the caldera, computed from the public waveforms

- Earthquakes, HVO notices, and the episode table (54 fountaining episodes since Dec 23, 2024)

- Satellite thermal detections and summit weather, for context

Each chart shows which source supplied each stretch of data, and real gaps are shown as gaps instead of being filled in.

**The experimental part**

There is also a simple statistical model estimating the probability that a fountaining episode starts in the next 12 hours, from time since the last episode, how much the summit has re-inflated, the tilt rate, tremor, summit earthquakes, and whether HVO's latest update mentions precursory activity. It is refitted monthly, and every probability on the chart comes from a model that had only seen earlier data. On completed cycles from July 2025 to August 2026 it did reasonably well for something this simple.

**Why you should be skeptical of it right now**

This is a strange period, well outside anything the model learned from:

- It has been about 46 days since episode 54 ended. The longest earlier pause was about 30 days.

- In mid-September new vents opened and erupted lava flows without fountaining.

- Around Oct 1–2 there was an intrusion, and summit tilt stepped up by roughly 65 microradians. Tilt is now far above the level at any previous onset.

The model handled this badly. Through the back half of September it sat above 50% for weeks and no fountaining episode came. It now reads around 4%, mostly because the October refit learned from being wrong, not because it understands what the volcano is doing. The dashboard carries a caution box saying the same. Please treat the number as a curiosity, not a forecast; the data panels are the more useful part at the moment.

**Feedback and support**

I'm sure there are mistakes and things I've misunderstood, so corrections and ideas are very welcome.

The site is free and will stay that way. Running the server does cost money, so if you find it useful there is a Ko-fi button at the top of the page.

The Wandan mud volcano in southern Taiwan had a minor eruption starting around 3am today at vents near the mud volcano temple.

It last erupted in July 2026 and has had numerous small eruptions in the last few years.

Video courtesy of my friend 張寶惠, the temple caretaker.

See also: The summary of the paywalled study as it was published in the journal Science

Taken 10/8/26 on my flight from SeaTac to Chicago. Thought it was neat.

Mount St. Helens is an active stratovolcano located in Washington state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

Obviously, this has certainly happened throughout history, but is there a more famous or well-documented case?

It was recorded at 6:06 pm Local Time and was Taal's first eruption in over 3 months!

The Chamber Previously, it was destroyed by lava bombs from the powerful eruption of September 5th. Now, a new one has been placed in the same location, but with a different view.

It was formed about 500 years ago by a lava flow from the Kilauea volcano. With the effects of erosion, this arch was gradually formed, which was visited daily; however, However, at the beginning of this month, the Collapse arc 🥀

One off the south east, another off the north west of the volcano

Popocatépetl is one of the most active volcanoes in North America and the second tallest. It has been permanently erupting since 2001🌋And it occasionally creates Strombolian eruptions with fragments of lava being ejected out of the crater, as in the image.

Flew over yesterday.