Question: I wanna know how hot a volcano is! If you were just "strolling" along a volcano and just happened to fall in, what would happen to you, would you just burn really quickly and turn to dust? I'm just curious, apparently if you fell into one you'll just disappear! That would be so scary! I don't understand though, why would anyone get so close to a volcano anyway? I understand that it may give them some adreniline rush or something but c'mon! It must be pretty dangerous!

James Verdon answered on 26 Jun 2012:

Hi jess,
That really depends on the volcano. Most volcanoes do not have actual lava in for most of the time. It’s a common misconception that all volcanoes have lava. As an example, look at the picture of the Nisyros crater on my profile page – the bottom the the crater is completely solid, you can walk across it and do a survey, because the lava has cooled and gone solid.

There are only a couple of volcanoes that alway have liquid lava in them. Erta Ale in Ethiopia is the most famous. If you can, have a look at this link – there’s a video of some people throwing a bag of rubbish in to see what would happen if someone fell in:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4394130/Rubbish-dropped-in-volcano-to-find-what-would-happen-to-a-human.html

You can see that the rubbish is completely burned away – nothing is left. The temperature of the lava is about 1000 degrees C, so if you fell in you wouldn’t stand a chance!

But as I say, the majority of volcanoes do not have liquid lava in, so you can actually walk around on them.