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Volcanoes

Active volcanoes and the ground older ones left behind, and the ways people and wildlife live with them.

The volcano places include craters people live in and the shapes that older eruptions left behind. On Aogashima, an island administered by Tokyo, a village sits inside a double caldera. In Cabo Verde, Chã das Caldeiras was rebuilt on the lava that buried it. Kīlauea, on the Island of Hawaiʻi, grew a lake in its crater and then boiled it off in ninety minutes. Older volcanoes leave other forms: Crater Lake in Oregon fills the hollow left by the collapse of Mount Mazama about 7,700 years ago, and ships enter Deception Island's flooded centre through a narrow channel called Neptune's Bellows. On an island in the Azores, vines grow inside walls of black basalt.

A clean volcanic cone rising above green upland pasture and dark juniper scrub in clear light.

Photograph: Navin75 · Pico Mountain (50683152268) · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped

Places in this collection

  • Entry № 003

    Aogashima

    Around 170 people living inside an active double caldera, cooking with volcanic steam, on an island the ferry often cannot reach.

  • Entry № 022

    Fernandina

    The youngest Galápagos island: no introduced species recorded, an active volcano, the biggest marine iguanas — and a tortoise that hid for 113 years.

  • Entry № 029

    Pico

    Portugal's highest mountain in the mid-Atlantic, with UNESCO vineyards walled in black lava and whales off the old whaling coast.

  • Entry № 051

    Cirque de Mafate

    Around eight hundred people live inside a collapsed volcano with no road — everything they own arrived on a back or under a helicopter.

  • Entry № 054

    Chã das Caldeiras

    A village farming inside an active crater, rebuilt on the lava that buried it in 2014 though the state said not to.

  • Entry № 063

    Tongariro

    Three sacred volcanoes given to the Crown in 1887 to stop them being sold — and the first cultural landscape ever inscribed on the World Heritage List.

  • Entry № 075

    Deception Island

    The best harbour in the South Shetlands is the flooded crater of an active volcano. Ships sail in through a gap in the cliffs, and the beach steams.

  • Entry № 097

    Mount Fuji

    The summit of Japan's national symbol is shrine land: the state took it after the Meiji Restoration, the Supreme Court ruled for the shrine in 1974, and it was handed back in 2004. The prefectural border across the top was never drawn.

  • Entry № 118

    Kīlauea

    After its summit collapsed in 2018, Kīlauea's crater filled with groundwater. The lake grew for seventeen months, until lava broke in one December night in 2020 and boiled it off in about ninety minutes.

  • Entry № 126

    Mount Bromo

    An active volcano standing in a plain of grey volcanic sand inside an older crater in East Java. The sand sea has been a nature reserve since 1919, and the Tenggerese carry offerings to the crater every year.

  • Entry № 146

    Crater Lake

    A lake in the collapsed top of a volcano, with no river in or out: rain and snow keep it full. It is the deepest in the United States, and until the end of 2028 nobody can walk down to it.

  • Entry № 163

    Pico Cão Grande

    A needle of grey volcanic rock standing about 370 m straight up out of the rainforest of São Tomé: the hardened core of a volcano that has worn away. Nobody stood on top of it until 1991.

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Notes on sources. This Collection groups existing Field Guide entries; each entry carries its own sources. Written and fact-checked by SockMonkey.com. Last reviewed 29 September 2026.

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