Question: Are you worried that a volcano would errupt when you are climbing it?

David Pyle answered on 14 Mar 2011:

Mostly I work on volcanoes which are well behaved; or which are ‘dormant’. I would usually avoid working somewhere that was too risky. But I have been concerned a couple of times. Once, I was working on a volcano in northern Chile: Lascar. This is very remote, and not monitored. We were in a village 15 km away, and the volcano started to erupt in the middle of the night: there were some small tremors, which I didn’t feel but my friends did; and then we saw an ash cloud going up in front of the moon. Fortunately, it only lasted a few minutes – but we did wait a few days before climbing up to the summit, which is where we needed to go to make our measurements. Another time, I was working on a remote volcano in Tanzania. No scientists had been up for 30 years, and we didn’t know what to expect at the top – but we did know it was erupting. Because of the climate, we climbed at night, but when we reached near the top there was no visibility at all because of low clouds. We just had to wait for the cloud to lift – and we had a very nervous hour or two sitting in fog listening to the huge noise of explosions going on somewhere near us. In the end it was fine – just a small pond of lava in a deep crater, with lots of bursting gas bubbles. (There are some amazing pictures of this volcano, Oldoinyo Lengai, on the web – it has now been erupting steadily for nearly 30 years).